Over the past three years, we’ve seen the beginning of a culture change toward more open and transparent research practices. Major funders are mandating more access to scientific data. More and more researchers are finding the value of open science and are training the next generation to make their work more rigorous and open.
We at the Center for Open Science are proud of the work we have accomplished and of our role in the field. Our flagship product, the Open Science Framework, has matured into a robust scholarly commons that helps researchers coordinate complex projects, preserve the fruits of their scientific labors, and make all of their work more discoverable. Its evolution has required a lot of great work, and has already extended into OSF Preprints, OSF Institutions, OSF Meetings, and OSF Registries. In the future it will connect even more of the tools that researchers use every day.
But we do more than make the OSF, and we want to share this work and the lessons we’re learning. We’re working with a broad community to make outputs of the scientific process discoverable through the rapidly growing SHARE database. By working with a broad community of stakeholders, dozens of organizations and hundreds of journals have committed to promoting transparency and openness by signing on to the TOP Guidelines. We support badges that highlight and reward best practices in open science and are offering $1,000 prizes through the Preregistration Challenge for researchers to try out a new step in their workflow.
Everything that we’re doing supports our mission of improving the transparency and rigor of scientific research. Our team continues to grow (and we want it to grow some more!), so now’s the time to start a regular series of posts about what we’re up to. We hope that by regularly sharing these activities, we’ll be able to broaden the community engaged with us.
In the coming posts, we’ll be sharing lessons from the first year of the Preregistration Challenge. We’ll be highlighting the work of our statistical consulting team and sharing best practices in open, reproducible research. We will bring back insights from around the globe as we travel to conferences, workshops and development efforts.
If you’d like to hear about anything specific we’re working on, or if you want a venue to write a post as a guest author, let us know! Just email us (contact@cos.io).
