The Center for Open Science (COS) announces today the launch of the Coronavirus Outbreak Research Collection in response to the urgent and ongoing need for aggregated and discoverable COVID-19 related research, including SARS, SARS-CoV, MERS, and MERS-CoV.
Rapid knowledge sharing and open collaboration have been credited for accelerated discoveries in deciphering the virus and combating the crises inflicting formidable damage to public health, society, and economy. Yet concerted efforts among research repositories and open source infrastructure solutions providers are needed to further improve discoverability, reduce redundancy, and ensure reusability for years to come.
The Coronavirus Outbreak Research Collection repository is powered by OSF Collections and populated by projects of researchers using OSF to conduct and manage their COVID-19 related research. Once an OSF project or component is submitted to the collection, it receives a collection indicator on its project overview page that allows visitors to further discover related research via the collection.
The coronavirus collection is filterable by keywords and other metadata for quick browsing and identification of open materials, data, and code that may be relevant to the existing efforts of visitors.
Using OSF Collections, any funder, journal, society, or research group can build an archival or active repository of scholarship to improve sharing and discoverability for their communities in specific research interests, themes, or taxonomies.
“The pandemic highlights the key value of openness and transparency for accelerating research progress” said Brian Nosek, Executive Director of the Center for Open Science. “Everyone agrees that we need to address the causes and consequences of COVID-19 as rapidly as possible. And, it is self-evident that openness, transparency, and sharing are essential for meeting that goal. Imagine if we thought that all research was important enough to want to actually figure out the answers as rapidly as possible. Maybe a positive outcome of the pandemic is that we will have that collective realization, and open science will become the norm for all research.”
“OSF Collections, our newest product, was built to meet the need from communities to aggregate their research into one space,” said Nici Pfeiffer, Director of Product at the Center for Open Science. “The COVID-19 research community can further discovery, collaboration and reuse of pandemic research on OSF with the Coronavirus Outbreak Research Collection.”
Individuals or communities wishing to support discoverability and reusability of any taxonomy or topic-based research are encouraged to read more about the what, why, and how of OSF Collections, or visit the OSF help guides for step-by-step instructions on submitting work to a collection.
About the 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.
Contact for the Center for Open Science
Inquiries: Claire Riss claire@cos.io
Launch an OSF Collection: collections@cos.io
Web: cos.io/collections
Twitter: @osframework
