Canadian professors’ views on establishing open source endowed professorships

Abstract

To accelerate scientific progress by advancing the spread of open access and free and open source software and hardware in academia, this study surveyed university professors in Canada to determine their willingness accept open source (OS) endowed chair professorships. To obtain such an open source endowed chair, in addition to demonstrated excellence in their field, professor would need to agree to ensuring all of their writing is distributed via open access and releasing all of their intellectual contributions in the public domain or under OS licenses. Results of this study show 81.1% Canadian faculty respondents would be willing to accept the terms of an OS endowed professorship. Further, 34.4% of these faculty would require no additional compensation. Respondents that favor traditional rewards for endowed chairs were shown to greatly favor receiving funds that would help benefit research (28% for graduate assistants to reduce faculty load or 46.7% for a discretionary budget-the most common response). These results show that, in Canada, there is widespread shared sentiment in favor of knowledge sharing among academics and that open source endowed professorships would be an effective way to catalyze increased sharing for the benefit of research in general and Canadian academia in particular.