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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.

The authors present a new approach to show how interdisciplinary collaborations among a group of institutions can provide a unique opportunity for students to engage across the science-policy nexus using the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Through collaboration across seven higher education institutions in the United States and Australia, virtual student research teams worked together across disciplines such as economics, ecology, and other earth and social sciences to address research questions centered on sustainable development goals. The teams presented their findings in person to diplomats and delegates at the 2019 United Nations Conference of the Parties meeting in Madrid, which also had strong qualitative impacts on their perceptions of international science-policy interfaces.