Reputation among academics
This article is about academic reputation: how an institution is regarded by other scholars, funders, ranking bodies and the wider academic world. It differs from the public image a school projects to applicants and local audiences, which is covered in the separate article on brand. Here the questions are narrower. Do open publishing choices affect how peers regard an institution? Do they affect rankings? And what do prestige systems actually reward?
The short answer is that the connections are real but indirect, and claims of strong effects should be treated with skepticism.
What reputation is built on
At research-focused institutions, reputation traditionally rests on research output, citations, the standing of journals where staff publish, the success of graduates, and the track record of senior scholars. For teaching-focused colleges, factors such as student experience, completion and local standing carry more weight. Reputations also lag: they reflect decades of history and change slowly.
Most open education activity, such as open textbooks or shared course materials, sits in the teaching side of an institution, where prestige systems have historically paid less attention than they do to research.
Open publishing choices
“Open publishing” covers several different decisions with different reputational consequences.
Open access research. Making articles and data freely available can raise their visibility and may increase readership and citation in some fields, though findings vary and are hard to separate from other factors such as journal quality. Discussions of open access journals and research data sharing form their own topics. Reputation effects can be positive, neutral or negative depending on which venues are used.
Open teaching materials. These are rarely counted in rankings. Peers might notice excellent work, but they might equally ignore it, or doubt it if it lacks peer review.
Open course offerings. Short public courses may increase awareness but do not usually influence formal reputation measures.
Institutional repositories. A well-run repository can make an institution’s output easier to find, which may help in indirect ways.
Rankings
University rankings combine different indicators, such as research output, citations, reputation surveys, staff and student numbers, and in some cases teaching and internationalization measures. The details differ between ranking systems and change over time, so any statement about what they reward should be checked against the current methodology of the specific system.
It is generally fair to say that:
- Rankings do not usually include a direct measure of open teaching.
- Open access to research may feed indirectly through visibility and citations.
- Reputation surveys in rankings reflect general impressions, which are slow to change.
- Rankings can be criticized for narrow measures, and some institutions and groups have raised concerns about relying on them.
An institution that opens its work purely to move up a ranking is likely to be disappointed. An institution that does so for other reasons may see small, indirect benefits.
Peer regard
Within academia, regard for open work depends on perceived quality and on field norms. In some disciplines, sharing preprints and data is expected. In others, openly licensed teaching materials may still be viewed as less serious than a conventional textbook, or as a service activity rather than scholarship.
Perceptions are shifting in places, in part because of funder policies and professional bodies encouraging open practices, but the pace differs by field and country. Peer-reviewed open resources, clearly attributed and well edited, tend to carry more weight than informal postings.
Prestige and risk
Prestige can cut both ways. Some staff fear that publishing in open venues, or spending time on open teaching, will count against them in promotion if committees favor traditional measures. That concern affects how willing institutions are to adopt open practices. An institution seeking academic standing may therefore be cautious, while a newer or teaching-focused one may see openness as a way to stand out.
Quality problems are the other risk. Publishing in venues that lack real review, or promoting poorly maintained materials, can reflect badly on an institution regardless of whether the work is open.
How to assess claims
When an organization says openness raised its reputation, useful questions are: what was measured, by whom, over what period, and compared with what? Did the ranking or survey change because of open work, or because of other developments such as research funding or merger? Single case reports are suggestive at best.
A measured conclusion
Open publishing choices are unlikely to move an institution’s academic reputation quickly or on their own. They may help at the margins, particularly through the visibility of research, and they can align a college with values its community cares about. The most dependable route to reputation is still the quality of the work, openly shared or not.