Jeffrey Spies, co-founder of the Center for Open Science (COS), is leaving his role as Chief Technology Officer on March 16. For the next several months, he will devote his attention to SHARE, a project he co-directs, while contributing to other technological and strategic projects in higher education and libraries. More about these projects will be announced in the near future on, among other places, his Twitter account: @JeffSpies.
Spies completed his doctoral dissertation, “The Open Science Framework: Improving Science by Making It Open and Accessible” at the University of Virginia in 2013 and together with his advisor, Brian Nosek, founded COS with an initial grant of $5 million from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The Center has since developed an active community of over 80,000 users who have taken over 10 million actions within OSF that align with open and reproducible research practices. Further, OSF Preprints and community-partner servers such as SocArXiv, LIS Scholarship Archive, and INA-Rxiv now host over 8,800 documents and provide outlets for the rapid dissemination of free, open content.
“From the beginning, my goal as an entrepreneur has been to see the organization in a place to continue its mission without me. I don’t know if I can adequately express how bittersweet it is to say that I am confident we are there,” said Spies in a recent letter to the COS staff.
“The Center for Open Science would not exist without Jeff’s contributions to its founding and operation in its first five years. Designing the technical environment to affect behavioral change in scientific research was a major contribution to open scholarship, and we look forward to seeing what he does next,” said Brian Nosek, Executive Director.
In the coming year, COS will continue to build upon that design to further improve research workflow as a means to affect policy that promotes openness and reproducibility in research.
