This blog post is based on a webinar that explored how funders develop, implement, and manage open science policies. The panel featured two funding organizations, Stiftelsen Dam and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, sharing insights on how they align open science requirements with organizational mission and research community support while driving cultural change. View the recording here.
For funders, open science can feel challenging to implement. The core principles—transparency, reproducibility, and accessible data, code, and materials—are widely understood, but translating those principles into policies that actually work across grantees, staff, and organizational leadership is a different challenge entirely.
Open science policymaking is a central component of the COS Theory of Change. Requirements alone are not sufficient to meaningfully shift research practices; they must be paired with social and technical infrastructure that enables adoption and monitors compliance, as well as incentives and community norms that support and reward sustained use. This approach underpins the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines—a modular framework designed to increase the verifiability of empirical research—and is reflected in how funders are beginning to implement policy in practice.
What the TOP Guidelines Offer Funders
The strategies of both Stiftelsen Dam and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation (FUSF) relate to practices in the TOP Guidelines.
TOP provides a modular "menu" of seven core research practices, including study registration, data sharing, and analysis code. Because every research community uses different methods and has different questions, TOP allows funders to select the practices that are most relevant to these methods, and to choose between three levels of intensity for each practice:
Level 1: Disclosure (Reporting whether a practice was followed).
Level 2: Share and Cite (Requiring that the output is made available)
Level 3: Certification (Third-party checking against community standards)
This modularity allows a funder to determine the policies that work best for them, based on the methods prevalent in the research communities they support and the outputs they want to see preserved.
As COS Senior Policy Analyst David Mellor noted, "One of the most important things about policy change and putting in great policies is to get the timing right. The TOP guidelines are designed in a way that helps introduce some of these practices early on, in ways that are low-burden, and the more advanced levels of the TOP guidelines create additional ways to increase rigor and transparency.”
Aligning Open Science Policy with Research Realities
While both Stiftelsen Dam and the FUF share a strong commitment to open practices, they have respectively applied the TOP framework in different ways. Their experiences illustrate how open science policy implementation is often shaped by an organization's specific scale, the nature of the research they fund, and the current norms of their scientific communities.
Stiftelsen Dam: Building Incrementally, Pushing Boldly
While they are one of the largest private research funders in Norway, Stiftelsen Dam operates with a lean staff of 13. As their Chief Program Officer Jan-Ole Hesselberg shared, this is actually a strategic asset: “We’re fairly small, and we’re able to move and make changes fast. We’re able to test things that other funds can’t test.”
Their open science journey demonstrates how a funder can implement a wide range of requirements through a decade of steady policy evolution. The organization’s approach has been characterized by a deliberate, multi-year rollout that allowed their community to adapt to new standards:
2016–2019: Established basic requirements: Open Access, preregistration for all research (including qualitative), and FAIR data sharing.
2022–2024: Launched a dedicated registry on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and opened their peer review process to increase transparency.
2025 and beyond: Implementation of a strict eligibility rule—if a researcher has unreported results from clinical trials completed more than 12 months prior, they are ineligible for new funding.
Building on this momentum, the foundation is also reimagining the grant application process by championing Registered Reports—a type of journal article in which methods and proposed analyses are peer reviewed and subsequently preregistered prior to research being conducted. They currently use a funding algorithm that gives a higher probability of success to applicants who opt into the Registered Report pathway, an incentive that has already led about one-quarter of their applicants to choose this format. Following a February 2026 board vote, they are now launching a dedicated program where all funded research must be published as a Registered Report. This shift aims to prioritize robust methodology over the flashier results that the traditional system often rewards.
Stiftelsen Dam is also removing technical barriers to replicability. Starting this year, they require that analysis code be shared specifically in R or Python. Hesselberg noted during the webinar that while researchers can use any software for their work, they must share core code in open languages "so that it's possible to replicate by people who don't have the expensive licenses that some of the languages required.”
Ultimately, Hesselberg highlighted that metascience was their strongest tool for building support among the board and stakeholders: “Those trials have been so important in convincing both our applicants and stakeholders, and also the board, that this is the right thing to do. It's not hard to argue for why we need this—it's probably an easier sell than many other things we try to convince the board to do.”
Focused Ultrasound Foundation: The Case for Piloting
The FUF operates in a highly specialized field where technology is often custom-built, which in turn shapes their approach to policy.
"A policy without a community infrastructure will always be limiting in its impact," said Frédéric Padilla, Director of FUSF's Open Science Program. “Moving forward, we are trying to develop these success stories to show that it is possible, it is doable, and it's not that difficult.”
Accordingly, FUSF is piloting a complete open science pipeline on a single project led by researcher Adam Maxwell, an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech.
This veterinary clinical trial uses histotripsy to treat canine lipomas and serves as a test case for what "open" looks like in their specific field. To make the transition to an open workflow easier, FUSF offered direct support to help Maxwell’s team navigate the new requirements. The initiative revealed key learnings that offer potential benefits for other specialized funders:
Early Design Clarity: As Maxwell shared in the webinar, preregistration helped the team sharpen their study design and hypotheses before a single patient was treated.
Flexibility in Practice: "When you do a preregistration, it doesn't mean you are beholden to not change anything at all,” Maxwell said. “You just have to enter what you're changing as you go, and what the justification for those changes is, so that it's transparent how you're carrying out the study."
Direct Support: FUSF makes the incentive explicit by supporting the cost of this additional open science work as part of the grant.
Padilla reflected on the importance of focus and knowing when a community isn't yet ready for a specific tech infrastructure, noting, “A deep opinion about what not to do is also part, I think, of good stewardship for us as funders."
What This Means for Funders Thinking About Next Steps
The experiences of both Stiftelsen Dam and FUSF point to a number of practical takeaways for funders.
Both foundations started with practices that were easier to implement and support. Open access had established infrastructure, the value was easy to explain to leadership, and compliance was straightforward to track. From there, both organizations were able to build toward more complex requirements over time.
Getting buy-in from boards, program teams, and grantees requires adapting the positioning to each audience. For boards, the metascience literature on replication rates, publication bias, and unreported trials, makes a compelling case for implementing open science policies. For researchers, the key is demonstrating that requirements come with support and guidance, not just rigid expectations.
“You need to build your case internally before you do anything, and the case has to be built toward the different stakeholders,” Padilla said. “It will be different to your leadership, to your team, and toward your grantees."
Beyond stakeholder alignment, policy and infrastructure must evolve in tandem. Stiftelsen Dam learned this through iteration; FUSF learned it when a data sharing mandate outpaced community readiness. The TOP framework's graduated levels exist precisely to help funders avoid that gap, but it requires honest assessment of where your research community actually is, not where you would like it to be. Ambitious policy is most effective and impactful when it aligns with the values and realities of the communities it aims to serve.
If you're a funder interested in using the TOP Guidelines to strengthen your policies, we invite you to reach out at top@cos.io.
Looking for a resource to share with your team or leadership? Download our quick-reference guide for a summary of key takeaways for funders.