Charlottesville, VA
The Center for Open Science is pleased to announce that in October 2018 it received a two-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to investigate indicators of trust and credibility of preprints. The grant supports the development of a survey to assess the research communities’ beliefs about what information would help them make credibility decisions about preprints. The grant will also support the development of a number of icons and indicators for preprint services, which will be informed from the survey results, to help users assess the credibility of individual preprints and increase the credibility of preprint services.
The grant aims to provide information to the community of preprint services as a whole. As such, COS has taken a very collaborative approach to the work. The initial credibility survey, launched at the end of February, was developed with input from members of many preprint services and related stakeholders such as ASAPBio, MetaArXiv, PeerJ, LISSA, Chemxiv, PaleorXiv, PLoS, and arXiv. This group and some collaborative scholarly societies, journals, and funders are aiding recruitment of researchers from a broad variety of scholarly disciplines, geographic locations, career stages, and views about preprints, to participate in the survey.
The survey is open through the end of June, and all those who are interested in taking the survey or helping share it can find the survey at: https://virginia.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3kFU2er17VY5uLP.
Anonymized data from the survey will be made openly available for secondary data analysis and as a resource to others in the community after the survey portion of the grant is completed. Results of the survey will also be used to inform the icons that are implemented. Development of the icons will be open source, allowing the code to be reused by other scholarly communication platforms. Icons, as well as integration with other tools to allow community engagement (e.g. integration of OSF Preprints with Hypothesis Annotation), will advance the identification of best practices about effective signals of trust in rapid scholarly communication.
About Center for Open Science
The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology and culture change organization founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. The OSF is a web application that provides a solution for the challenges facing researchers who want to pursue open science practices, including: a streamlined ability to manage their work; collaborate with others; discover and be discovered; preregister their studies; and make their code, materials, and data openly accessible. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.
Conclusions reached or positions taken by researchers or other grantees represent the views of the grantees themselves and not those of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation or its trustees, officers, or staff.
Contact for the Center for Open Science
Media: Claire Riss | claire@cos.io
Starting a Branded Preprint Service: Kevin Schroeder | kevin@cos.io
Twitter: @osframework