Charlottesville, VA — The Center for Open Science (COS) is pleased to announce it has received an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to begin creating a resource hub for education researchers in STEM.
The hub will offer four pillars of support for the education research community: a knowledge base, an easy-to-use discovery interface, grassroots community organizing, and catalyzing opportunities for methodological innovation in education research.
This award will enable extension of the nascent Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB) to support education research. The OSKB community is curating resources, training materials, and other tools to support research and instruction in the successful adoption of open and reproducible best practices. To date, the OSKB community team has compiled substantial resources around the what, why, and how of rigor and reproducibility in research that will provide the initial content for the knowledge portal.
The portal will rely on a centralized and efficient discovery process, made possible through COS’s interoperable open source infrastructure, OSF, which uses a public API to aggregate cross-platform outputs. Those navigating the platform can easily access a robust collection of education scholarship across registries, preprint servers, data repositories, and more.
In addition to a portal and the organization of resources through the OSKB, this grant will support grassroots efforts to change the research culture in education research toward greater openness, rigor, and reproducibility. NSF is providing support to catalyze and organize the research community to shift training, norms, incentives, and policies toward open scholarship. The community organizing aspect of the hub is intended to become a self-sustaining initiative driven by education researchers themselves, similar to the model of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Sciences (SIPS), a community-led group created to mobilize open scholarship advocates in psychology.
“Many education researchers are still scared of the concept of open science,” says Jessica Logan, Ph.D, Assistant Professor from the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. “Individual efforts have made some gains, but a sustained, organized, group effort like this has the potential to make a much larger impact on the policies and practices of the field.” Professor Logan is part of the growing education resource hub community.
“Recently, we’ve seen an awareness for more transparency and openness in psychology research and the benefits of such practices,” said Jill Adelson, research scientist at Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP) and hub community member. “Those ideas have begun to be implemented in education research in small pockets, but for sustainable, widespread change there needs to be a culture change that comes from a range of researchers in the field, not just one discipline or one journal. By joining forces in a community effort, we can move the needle further and faster.”
Those interested in participating in this network, sharing input, or collaborating in steering meetings during the project’s early phases, are encouraged to join the Education Research Hub Community Building List.
Finally, in addition to providing the education research community with a robust resource base, efficient infrastructure, and community engagement, the education resource hub will focus on catalyzing innovation in education research methodologies. Community members will stay informed of materials, outputs, and methods being used to improve rigor and reproducibility in education research.
“Many innovations in open science, such as in statistical software development, are being led by educational researchers. These innovations have the potential to speak to both the aims and values of those of us in education and to the unique challenges we have,” said Joshua Rosenberg, assistant professor of STEM Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and hub community member. “The STEM Education Hub is being created at just the right time to amplify this work and to spark new developments where it comes to open science in education.”
Further details regarding the scope and outcomes of the education resource hub may be found in the original project proposal.
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
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Twitter: @osframework
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