Earth & Space
UC Santa Cruz awarded grant to promote and support open scholarship, engaged mentoring
UC Santa Cruz will launch a pioneering initiative to support and promote open science, open scholarship, and high-quality graduate student mentoring by developing guidelines to evaluate and recognize this important work.
The project includes workshops for faculty and graduate students on effective science communication. Pictured: Pepper St. Clair, a student in the Science Communication Program, documenting activities along the coast. Photo by Leah Baker
UC Santa Cruz will launch a pioneering initiative to support and promote open science, open scholarship, and high-quality graduate student mentoring by developing guidelines to evaluate and recognize this important work.
The two-year initiative is made possible by a $250,000 Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge grant from the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), which supports organizations in addressing systems-level challenges that are impeding the adoption of open science at scale. Open scholarship is an umbrella term that includes many forms of public-serving research, such as open science, that reaches and serves the public beyond the academy.
“Our faculty are exceptionally successful at advancing disciplinary knowledge and employing a huge range of innovative interdisciplinary approaches that serve the public.,” said Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Christina Ravelo. “We know how to recognize impactful disciplinary work; now our campus community needs to create additional guidelines to better align our merit and promotion process with our campus’ mission of public service.”
UC Santa Cruz is a global leader in open science with hallmark public scholarship conducted across all disciplinary divisions. A notable example is the release of the first publicly available human genome assembly in 2000. However, the campus’s existing faculty merit review system heavily favors traditional academic metrics like peer-reviewed publications and citations, often undervaluing these public-serving contributions. These traditional metrics also influence how graduate mentoring is reviewed and evaluated, and are often inadequate for assessing contributions to equity-centered mentoring in the context of public scholarship.
The project, “Promoting public impact through recognizing excellence in open science and graduate student mentoring in the merit and promotion process at University of California, Santa Cruz,” will deliver guidelines to evaluate open science and open scholarship in faculty merit review and promotion processes; professional development materials to build campus capacity in evaluating open scholarship; a framework for departments to use in developing department-specific guidelines for recognizing and rewarding excellence in equity-centered graduate mentoring, including for open scholarship; and five sets of department-level guidelines to evaluate and reward mentoring for open scholarship in merit review and promotion processes.
The project builds on campus work in 2023 that established guidelines for assessing community-engaged scholarship and leverages the strengths of exceptional faculty leadership in open scholarship, the nationally recognized Science Communication program, and the strengths of the Teaching and Learning Center and the Center for Reimagining Leadership.
To learn more and get involved, please register and attend the upcoming virtual Town Hall at 3 p.m. on Friday, April 17.
Ravelo is leading the project with Sikina Jinnah, professor of Environmental Studies and associate director of the Center for Reimagining Leadership; James Davis, professor of computer science and engineering, faculty director of Center for Research in Open Source Software; Kendra Dority, director for graduate student and postdoc professional development at the Teaching and Learning Center; Bryan Gaensler, dean of Physical and Biological Sciences, professor of astronomy and astrophysics; and Erika Check Hayden, professor and director of the Science Communication Program.
The initiative supports priorities outlined in Leading the Change: The UC Santa Cruz Strategic Plan, including centering public service and advancing graduate student success.