The Center for Open Science Receives Grants from John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust and Templeton World Charity Foundation to Expand Its Open Science Activities

Jun. 14, 2018

Charlottesville, VA

The Center for Open Science (COS) is pleased to announce the receipt of three, multi-year grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and Templeton World Charity Foundation. These grants will support the development and improvement of the OSF, COS's free and open cloud-based project collaboration system for managing, registering, and archiving the process and outputs of research. Used by over 95,000 researchers around the world, OSF use improves the rigor, reproducibility, accessibility, and preservation of scholarly research across all disciplines.

“OSF development and adoption has expanded rapidly. These grants will support important improvements to the OSF user experience including expanding search tools, adding discovery landing pages, and adding metadata to files and projects that simplify discovery,” said Brian Nosek, COS’s Executive Director. “Over the next three years we will upgrade OSF to be a gold-standard service to benefit the research community.”

“We’re excited to join other funders in supporting the Center for Open Science as they seek to reorient scientific research in ways that promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility,” said Heather Templeton Dill, President of the John Templeton Foundation. “Like other science funders, we are interested in having faster resolution on which research avenues are dead-ends, and greater confidence in which results are reproducible. As a result we affirm the mission of COS to open up the market for scientific ideas, strengthen the self-corrective nature of science, and build the tools and disciplinary expectations necessary to increase the productivity of scientific work.”

COS also received grant funding to evaluate preregistration, a relatively new practice among basic and preclinical researchers, thought to improve the rigor and reproducibility of research. Preregistration is a process where a scholar commits to a research plan in advance, before data is gathered. COS will test if preregistration improves responsiveness to evidence.

"Inspired by COS’s pioneering work, we are now exploring how to incorporate open science practices within our granting mechanisms,” said Andrew Serazin, President of Templeton World Charity Foundation. “We are particularly interested in learning about the effectiveness of preregistration and how it can benefit the scientific enterprise as a whole, including the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience."

Arthur Lupia, Chair of the COS Board of Directors, added “We are grateful to receive this generous support to evaluate practices thought to improve the rigor and reproducibility of research. COS is committed to continuously evaluating and improving its tools and services to meet the needs of the research community.”

The John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust and Templeton World Charity Foundation fund projects that cross disciplinary boundaries, foster intellectual humility and speed access to information. By supporting COS in its mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research these foundations will increase academic rigor, strengthen the role of intellectual humility among scholars, and speed the accumulation of knowledge across all areas of research.


About Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) is a nonprofit 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. OSF, COS’s flagship product, is a web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use OSF to connect services, collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

About The John Templeton Foundation

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind. The Foundation supports research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and emergence to creativity, forgiveness, and free will. It encourages civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as between such experts and the public at large. In all cases, the Foundation's goal is the same: to spur curiosity and accelerate discovery.

About the Templeton World Charity Foundation

Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. (TWCF) is a global foundation headquartered in Nassau, The Bahamas with over 130 projects in 30 countries. The foundation aims to provide scientific breakthroughs and practical tools relating to the search for meaning, purpose, and truth. Through sharing these spiritual discoveries, we seek to impact individual lives across the world.

About the Templeton Religion Trust

The Templeton Religion Trust funds a wide array of projects, the majority of which pertain to what Templeton called “Humility-in-Theology”: the nature of divine or ultimate reality, the nature of persons and personal flourishing, and fundamental structures which include not only the fundamental physical structures of the world like infinity, space and time, and quantum reality, but also prayer, purpose, altruism, creativity, and thanksgiving, which Templeton referred to as ‘spiritual realities. In essence, Templeton’s wish was to encourage humility about how little we know about such realities, and to increase the level of openness to and enthusiasm for blending the resources of theology, philosophy, and the sciences in that pursuit

Contact the Center for Open Science

Rusty Speidel, Marketing Manager - rusty@cos.io

Contact the John Templeton Foundation

Michael Murray, SVP Programs - mmurray@templeton.org

Contact the Templeton World Charity Foundation

Dawid Potgieter, Senior Program Officer - dawid@templetonworldcharity.org

Contact the Templeton Religion Trust

 

Chris Stewart, VP of Programs - chris@ftbbahamas.com




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