Charlottesville, VA — The Focused Ultrasound Foundation has taken a new step toward its mission to accelerate scientific discovery by launching a body of scholarship dedicated to open and transparent data, outputs, study materials, and more from the field of focused ultrasound research.
In 2017, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation announced the launch of the FocUs Archive preprints repository as part of the organization’s initiative to promote expedient communication, collaboration, and open discoverability of rigorous research among the focused ultrasound community. Now, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation and the Center for Open Science proudly announce the Focused Ultrasound Foundation Collection, an open research repository where clinicians and researchers can browse existing data and materials, build on findings, or contribute their own work to the growing collection of rigorous scholarship from the field.
Over the last several years, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation has implemented robust open policies and practices to shape transparent behaviors across focused ultrasound research — while providing the infrastructure to enable and facilitate such activity. Both the FocUs Archive and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation Collection offer rigorous workflows that support community researchers in their efforts to work transparently, comply with open policies, and align with the Focused Ultrasound Foundation’s mission to produce reproducible outputs.
“We are always looking for ways to improve research outputs in the focused ultrasound ecosystem, and we saw building out open science resources such as the FocUS Archive and Focused Ultrasound Collection as a great opportunity to do that. We think it is very beneficial to the field to have structures that increase the accessibility and visibility of research and are excited to be able to support the community in this way,” said Jessica Foley, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
The Focused Ultrasound Collection is built on the OSF Collections infrastructure, and offers researchers an easy-to-use discovery and submission interface. Visitors can quickly facet the collection by program area (Clinical, Preclinical, Technical, etc.) and identify projects as active or completed. Robust metadata fields ensure viewers find the data and outputs relevant to their searches.
“We believe that fostering more open and reproducible research is truly in the best interest of all parties in the focused ultrasound community and hope to see more and more researchers contributing to these repositories. Open science is a priority for us and I look forward to continuing to push for open practices in our immediate research community and beyond,” said Charlie Manning, Open Science Manager, Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
“Increasing the accessibility and reproducibility of focused ultrasound research are priorities for us, and we are grateful to the Center for Open Science for partnering with us to make these resources available to our community,” said Emily White, M.D., Chief Operating Officer, Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
“I have had the immense pleasure of working along with the Focused Ultrasound Foundation team over the past several years as they have developed and implemented open policies for their researchers to advance openness, transparency, and reproducibility as an embedded aspect of their workflow. FUS is a funder exemplar who puts their money where their mouth is, by providing the tools and open repositories for their researchers to easily comply with their open science policies,” said Nici Pfeiffer, Chief Product Officer, Center for Open Science.
By enacting open science policies and infrastructure, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation is increasing the transparency and reproducibility of research and the ability to leverage new insights that lead to timely, high-quality patient treatment and care.
