Program areas at Center for Open Science
Infrastructure: cos supports and maintains the osf (www.osf.io) to help researchers manage, archive, and share their research, privately or publicly. In 2018, cos continued to make significant progress in establishing the osf as a full-featured application framework. This included improvements to a number of core features including authentication, metadata, messaging, version control, access control, data basing, storage services, and a public api. The osf is now positioned as a free, public infrastructure for creating, connecting, and integrating countless services across the research lifecycle. Because of the osf's Open, modular design, we and others will be able to incorporate the back- end services to support any kind of front-end user interfaces for collection of social Science research participant data, with the ability to extend very easily to collection of meta-data for any research application or discipline (not limited to social Science). The osf provides a solution for researchers who are compelled to conduct their research openly and transparently. It also provides a mechanism for policy makers to enable practices of openness and transparency. The osf provides multiple points of entry into Open practices, and allows for researchers to adopt additional Open behaviors.
Metascience: cos supports research on scientific practices. These efforts can inform best practices and serve as platforms to demonstrate reproducible research methods. Some achievements include: -continued public discourse around results of the reproducibility project: psychology (results published in the journal Science in june, 2015). -continual results published by the reproducibility project: cancer biology. The project publishes the individual replications in small batches and then a summary report will be published at the very end of the project. -through external grant awards, cos continues to support the reproducibility project: transcranial direct current stimulation (tdcs)at the university of California - davis. -continued community discussion of the impact of the cos study on the impact of badges upon data sharing. This study found that the journal psychological Science experienced an increase in data sharing from around 3 percent of published articles to nearly 40 percent in only 1.5 years following adoption of badges. Comparison journals without badges showed no change in data sharing over the same period. We use these findings to promote adoption of badges as simple incentives towards more Open editorial policies.
Policy/community: an active Open Science community is essential for testing and improving infrastructure and practices. Open Science practices will accelerate dramatically if stakeholders with levers for change create incentives or requirements for researchers. Cos promotes Open Science practices with journals, funders, researchers, and societies. Our policy team tracks Open Science practices of key community changemakers. We offer solutions to change norms, incentives, and policies, working in collaboration with publishers, funders, societies, institutions, and researcher communities to promote openness, rigor, and reproducibility. This work is guided by our transparency and openness promotion (top) guidelines, a community driven effort that provides a rubric for adopting openness standards. Over 1,100 journals have adopted top guidelines since 2015. Reregistration challenge: the preregistration challenge kicked off in 2015. Preregistration increases the credibility of hypothesis testing by confirming in advance what will be analyzed and reported. for the preregistration challenge, one thousand researchers will receive 1,000each for publishing results of preregistered research. This challenge ended in early 2019.