Center for Open Science Awarded NSF Grant to Advance Open Source Ecosystems

Nov. 1, 2023

Charlottesville, VA - The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded funds for initiatives of the Center for Open Science (COS) to nurture the development of open-source ecosystems (OSEs) to drive pioneering innovations through its Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program.

COS built and maintains the Open Science Framework (OSF), a free, open-source project management and collaboration tool that supports researchers throughout the entire research lifecycle. The active involvement of research communities in co-developing OSF facilitates open science practices that are vital for ensuring the resilience and longevity of rigorous research.

“Enabling open science means providing support for the diverse research communities across the globe to make their research open, transparent, and reproducible in a manner that works best for the range of methodologies and disciplines they operate within. By co-developing OSF with research communities we can lower the barrier to entry and reduce the burden to increasing adoption of open scholarship,” said Nici Pfeiffer, COS’s Chief Product Officer. COS is deeply honored to announce this NSF support which will bolster OSF’s mission to facilitate collaboration among researchers, promote data and output sharing, and facilitate the discovery and reuse of research, further advancing the broader impacts of open science.

This NSF POSE award will catalyze community-driven development and growth of open scholarship practice through a distributed OSE around the OSF. This initiative will expand community-driven open scholarship by:

  • Supporting the alignment of OSF integrations and workflows to meet new policy requirements for making research results and underlying data publicly available.
  • Establishing a governance structure that guides the trajectory of the Open Scholarship OSE by catalyzing community development contributors to the ecosystem.
  • Providing open-source public goods infrastructure to enable sharing, discovery, and reuse of open research outputs.
  • Enabling diverse communities to participate in open scholarship by inviting them into the process, removing barriers to contributing, and supporting their ongoing participation.
  • Making the processes and workflows for sharing research easy and efficient by connecting new digital storage locations, tools, and other services, expanding the range of applications of and disciplines using the OSF.
  • Developing communication pathways for researchers to become part of the development process and to implement open scholarship practices while making the barriers to participation as low as possible.

COS looks forward to enabling community development of OSF with upcoming outreach to collaborators, offering grants for community development projects contributing new integrations to the OSF research lifecycle workflows, and inviting our community to join an annual hackathon event.

Visit NSF’s POSE program webpage to learn more.

The Open Scholarship Open-Source Ecosystem is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Award #2303690. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations contained within the Open Scholarship Open-Source Ecosystem are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of NSF.

###

About the Center for Open Science
Founded in 2013, COS is a nonprofit culture change organization 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, including the Open Science Framework (OSF). Learn more at cos.io.

Contact: Alexis Rice
alexis@cos.io or (434) 207-2971

Recent News