= TITLE: - 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 to 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.