Goals, Strategies, and Tactics

Terminology

• A goal is something you want to accomplish
  • "Make research fairer, more reliable, and more efficient."
• A strategy is a long-term plan to achieve that
  • "Increase institutional and individual adoption of open science"
• A tactic is a specific action that fits into a larger strategic plan
  • "Give researchers credit in performance reviews for creating open-access data sets"
• Over time, people often confuse strategies with goals
  • Open science isn't the goal: fairness, reliability, and efficiency are
• Tactics may conflict with or contradict each other
  • Giving researchers credit for sharing data incentivizes salami slicing and the proliferation of useless data sets

Exercise

In order to discourage researchers from salami slicing their papers, your university has decreed that people can only submit one paper per year for consideration by the promotion committee.

1. Identify (at least) three ways in which this can go wrong.
2. Suggest countermeasures for each.

A Simple Conceptual Framework

• Borrego2014 looked at how to increase adoption of evidence-based teaching strategies in STEM
  • Prescribed (top-down) vs. emergent (bottom-up)
  • Environments and structures (the system) vs. individuals

Exercise

1. Which of these quadrants are you most comfortable working in?
2. How can you implement the tactics described in that quadrant?