Caitlin Carter Joins ORFG as HELIOS Project Coordinator

The Open Research Funders Group is pleased to announce that Caitlin Carter has joined the organization as the inaugural Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) Project Coordinator. In her new role, Caitlin will operationalize HELIOS, an ambitious effort to align higher education practices and incentives with open research values.

The ORFG, a partnership of leading philanthropic organizations committed to the open sharing of research outputs, has served as the strategic and tactical lead for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science since its inception in 2019. The Roundtable brings together key stakeholders – including senior leadership at universities, federal agencies, philanthropies, international bodies, and other strategic organizations – to stimulate an environment in which the guidance and incentives researchers receive from their department chairs, university leadership, funders, professional societies, and others consistently point toward open. Under the co-chairmanship of the Presidents of Arizona State University, Benedict College, and Johns Hopkins University, the Roundtable is in the midst of establishing a higher education community of practice (HELIOS). HELIOS will serve several key purposes, including elevating open scholarship as a strategic priority among its participating institutions and identifying areas of shared interest and possible collaboration (e.g., infrastructure, training). Caitlin will coordinate the interests and activities of the more than 60 US colleges and universities that have already signed onto the HELIOS project. 

“Many of the institutions committed to HELIOS have long advocated for open scholarship practices such as open access, open data, and research reproducibility. The HELIOS community of practice represents an innovative way to build on this commitment, adding in crucial elements like proactive buy-in from campus leadership and a forum to identify best practices and collaborative strategies,” Carter says, commenting on the role college and university leaders have in changing research norms.   

Caitlin will coordinate HELIOS community engagement activities and communications, cultivate grassroots activities within the HELIOS cohort to improve understanding and adoption of open scholarship activities and incentives, and manage logistics for community building events. 

Caitlin has a deep commitment to open scholarship evidenced by her work as a Scholarly Communication Informationist at Johns Hopkins University and Medicine and librarian at Franklin and Marshall College. At Johns Hopkins University she worked closely with the Johns Hopkins Libraries and the Office of the President to socialize the university’s first Open Access Policy. She also co-led SPARC’s Journal Negotiation Community of Practice, contributing to reducing information asymmetry in the journal subscription landscape. She hopes her background in both formal and grassroots open access policy and advocacy can grow the HELIOS community of practice.