TL;DR: HELIOS Open (the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship) is a US-only coalition of colleges and universities that commits senior campus leadership — presidents, provosts, or their designated high-level representatives — to advancing open scholarship as an institutional strategic priority, with a specific emphasis on reforming tenure, promotion, and hiring criteria so they no longer rely primarily on journal-prestige proxies. It launched in early 2022 with more than 60 founding US institutions, grew out of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship, and is managed by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)‘s home organization, the Open Research Funders Group. It is a close relative of, but not the same thing as, DORA and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) — see the comparison below.
What HELIOS Open actually is
HELIOS Open describes itself as “a cohort of colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship within and across their campuses.” Unlike a standards body that publishes technical specifications, HELIOS Open functions as a community of practice: member institutions make a leadership-level commitment, then work together through shared resources, working groups, and campus-to-campus knowledge exchange rather than through a single published standard everyone must implement identically.
The initiative is US-specific by design. Where DORA and CoARA operate as international coalitions open to institutions, funders, publishers, and individual researchers worldwide, HELIOS Open’s membership is limited to American colleges and universities, and its programming is built around US-specific structures — tenure and promotion (P&T) committees, provost’s offices, and the particular incentive landscape of US higher education (accreditation, US federal funder policy, the tenure system itself).
Origins and founding
HELIOS Open emerged from discussions convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine‘s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. A “dear colleague” letter circulated among research-university leaders in mid-2021 led to a fall 2021 virtual meeting with participants from dozens of institutions, and the initiative formally launched in early 2022 with the stated commitment of more than 60 American colleges and universities. Per HELIOS Open’s own site, the project has since grown; it describes itself in current materials as representing “the largest, most carefully coordinated effort to align higher education practices with open scholarship values” in the US, with participation reported at over 100 institutions in some of its published materials — treat any specific current count as a moving figure and check heliosopen.org/members directly rather than citing a fixed number from elsewhere.
HELIOS Open is administratively housed at and managed by the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG), the same organization that stewards DORA. It is supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
How HELIOS Open differs from DORA and CoARA
All three sit within the same research-assessment-reform movement — reducing reliance on journal-level metrics like Journal Impact Factor as a proxy for the quality of an individual researcher’s work — but they differ in scope, geography, and mechanism:
| Dimension | HELIOS Open | DORA | CoARA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geographic scope | United States only | Global, any signatory | Primarily Europe, expanding globally |
| Who joins | US colleges/universities only, via a designated presidential representative | Institutions, funders, publishers, and individual researchers worldwide | Institutional/organizational signatories only — universities, funders, academies, infrastructures |
| Core mechanism | Leadership commitment plus shared toolkits, model language, and peer working groups | A signed declaration committing to specific practices around metric use | A signed agreement with a shared 10-commitment framework and self-set implementation timelines |
| Primary lever | Tenure, promotion, and hiring criteria specifically | Any use of journal-based metrics in evaluation (hiring, tenure, funding) | Broad research assessment reform (hiring, evaluation, funding, institutional assessment) |
| Founded | 2022 | 2012 | 2022 |
In practice, many HELIOS Open member institutions are also DORA signatories, CoARA signatories, or both — the coalitions are complementary rather than competing. HELIOS Open’s distinctive contribution is its narrower, more operational focus on the specific document that governs faculty careers: the promotion and tenure (P&T) dossier and the criteria a committee applies to it. For a direct side-by-side on DORA and CoARA themselves, see CASRAI’s DORA vs CoARA comparison and the guide on how institutions are actually rewriting P&T criteria under those two frameworks.
Member commitments
Joining HELIOS Open is a leadership-level, not a departmental or individual-researcher, commitment. Per HELIOS Open’s own description, engagement has three core components:
- Elevating the development of open incentives and practices to a strategic institutional priority;
- Designating a high-level presidential representative (a provost, vice provost for research, or equivalent) to coordinate the work on campus; and
- Meeting regularly with that representative to review progress.
This structure is deliberate: reforming P&T criteria requires authority that sits with a provost’s office or president, not with a library or research-office working group alone, since P&T criteria are typically set at the school, college, or university level and enforced through faculty governance.
Activities and outputs
HELIOS Open’s published outputs, per its own site, include:
- An open scholarship toolkit — resources intended to help provosts, faculty senates, and P&T committees discuss, develop, and deploy open-scholarship incentive plans that are consistent with shared norms but adaptable to a given institution’s governance structure.
- A Guide to Supporting Open Scholarship for University Presidents and Provosts — leadership-facing guidance on the institutional case for open scholarship and how senior administrators can act on it.
- Campus case studies documenting how specific member institutions have approached the work.
- Leadership testimonials on tenure, promotion, review, and hiring reform, intended to give provosts and presidents peer-to-peer evidence that this is achievable rather than purely aspirational.
- An Open Scholarship Map (in beta on HELIOS Open’s site) tracking member institutions and their open-scholarship activity.
This is consistent with HELIOS Open’s role as a coordinating and resourcing body rather than an accrediting or certifying one — it does not audit member institutions’ P&T language for compliance the way, for example, a funder mandate might audit grant compliance. Its outputs are designed to lower the switching cost for a provost’s office that wants to revise P&T criteria but lacks a template or precedent to work from.
Why tenure and promotion is the specific lever
The broader research-assessment-reform movement — DORA, CoARA, and related efforts — has long identified tenure and promotion review as the single highest-leverage point for changing researcher behavior. Faculty respond to what gets rewarded in P&T review far more reliably than to funder policy or journal editorial policy alone, because P&T decisions determine careers directly. If a P&T dossier still asks a candidate to list journal impact factors or implicitly rewards publication in high-prestige venues regardless of the work’s actual quality or openness, open-access publishing, data sharing, and other open-scholarship practices remain individually risky for untenured faculty to prioritize, no matter what funder or journal policy says. HELIOS Open exists specifically to close that gap in the US context by giving institutional leadership the mandate, peer cover, and practical resources to revise P&T language directly.
This connects to a related, though organizationally separate, US effort: the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, an initiative supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Aspen Institute that funds and tracks institutional experiments in exactly this space — rewriting appointment, tenure, and promotion criteria. The two efforts share a goal (P&T reform) but are administered separately; HELIOS Open is not the same initiative as MA3, though member institutions may participate in both.
How this fits the broader research-assessment reform landscape
HELIOS Open sits alongside a small number of other coordinated efforts pushing US and international research culture away from journal-prestige-based evaluation, including DORA’s own work with signatory institutions, CoARA’s 10-commitment framework for its member organizations, and country-specific initiatives like the Netherlands’ Recognition & Rewards Programme. For a research administrator or provost’s-office staff member evaluating which of these frameworks is relevant to a given institution, the practical distinction is usually: DORA and CoARA are the commitments an institution signs; HELIOS Open is the peer network and toolkit that helps a US institution figure out how to actually operationalize that commitment inside its own P&T process.
Frequently asked questions
Is HELIOS Open the same thing as DORA?
No. DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) is a global signed declaration against journal-metric misuse, founded in 2012 and open to individuals, publishers, funders, and institutions worldwide. HELIOS Open is a US-only coalition of colleges and universities, founded in 2022, focused specifically on tenure and promotion reform, and administratively housed within the same organization (the Open Research Funders Group) that stewards DORA. Many institutions are members of both.
Can non-US institutions join HELIOS Open?
HELIOS Open’s membership, per its own site, is composed of American colleges and universities. Non-US institutions seeking an equivalent commitment would typically look to CoARA (which has broader international, though still primarily European-anchored, membership) or a national initiative such as the Netherlands’ Recognition & Rewards Programme.
What does an institution actually have to do to join HELIOS Open?
Per HELIOS Open’s stated engagement model, a joining institution elevates open-scholarship incentives to a strategic priority, designates a high-level presidential representative to coordinate the work, and meets regularly to review progress against that commitment. It is a leadership-level pledge backed by shared resources, not a technical certification process.
Does HELIOS Open publish model tenure-and-promotion language institutions can adopt directly?
HELIOS Open provides toolkits, a leadership guide for presidents and provosts, and campus case studies intended to help an institution develop its own P&T language, rather than a single template meant to be adopted verbatim — P&T criteria are set through each institution’s own faculty governance process, so HELIOS Open’s resources are designed to inform that process rather than replace it.
This page reflects HELIOS Open’s own published description of its mission, membership model, and activities as of this writing (heliosopen.org). Because membership counts and specific programming change over time, verify current figures directly against heliosopen.org before citing a specific number.
