The Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) and the Center for Open Science (COS) are thrilled to announce an exciting partnership, representing a significant step forward in our shared mission to use education to promote open and reproducible research practices. The partnership enables the scientific community to build upon each other's work and advance knowledge collaboratively.
FORRT: Revolutionizing Research Training
FORRT, initiated at the 2018 Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science meeting, is a volunteer-based organization, founded by and for early-career scholars, that seeks to integrate open and reproducible science into higher education. Their goals are threefold:
- Build, together with educators, a pathway towards the incremental adoption of open scholarship practices into higher education.
- Generate a conversation about the ethics and social impact of a higher education pedagogy that emphasizes openness, epistemic uncertainty and research credibility.
- Promote reflection about the perceived importance of different academic activities and advocate for greater recognition of educational resources.
By focusing on transparency, reproducibility, and justice, FORRT enables educators to help students and researchers make informed decisions when selecting and using existing scientific evidence and to act in accordance with their ethics and values.
Uniting Forces for a Common Goal
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB) built a knowledge base platform and community of contributors to organize information on the what, why, and how of open scholarship so it is easy to find and apply. Researchers, teachers, funders, librarians, and anyone wanting to open scholarship worked together to create, edit, and curate datasets, lesson plans, readings, syllabi, and other educational materials to this community resource. Over the course of the last four years, hundreds of resources were curated for the community.
The Center for Open Science has migrated the resources gathered on OSKB, previously hosted on OER Commons, to FORRT. The combined collection is now 60% larger than FORRT’s already sizable resource list. The merger of FORRT and OSKB resources will empower researchers, particularly early-career scientists, with access to a centralized means of obtaining and improving the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct rigorous and transparent research. It also allows the important work of the OSKB community to continue with FORRT as NSF support concludes.
Researchers now have access to a unified collection of over 800 resources on topics spanning open scholarship, from preregistration to reproducible analyses, and beyond. Educators and researchers can search the collection using user-generated keywords, author names, and filtering by topical areas (“FORRT clusters”).
FORRT and COS are also joining forces to raise awareness about the importance of open and reproducible research practices. To that end, on July 12th, COS and FORRT hosted a webinar on big-team science applied to open educational resources and metascience. Make sure to watch the recording of this informative webinar highlighting a number of FORRT projects.
Looking Ahead
The partnership between FORRT and the Center for Open Science marks a significant milestone in the ongoing efforts to improve research transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration. By fostering a culture of openness and providing researchers with the tools and knowledge they need, this collaboration will empower the scientific community to generate increasingly more robust and reliable evidence going forward.
We are excited about the possibilities this partnership brings and invite researchers, institutions, and stakeholders to join us in this endeavor. Together, we can drive a positive change in the research landscape and create a future where open and reproducible science, in all its diverse forms, becomes the norm.
To stay updated on the progress of this partnership and learn more about FORRT and the Center for Open Science, become a FORRT collaborator or become a Center for Open Science Ambassador today. All are welcome to contribute to FORRT’s resource collection. Join us on this transformative journey toward open and reproducible research practices. Together, we can make a lasting impact on the scientific community and, ultimately, society at large.
The STEM Education Hub is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) award DRL-1937698. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations contained within the STEM Education Hub are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of NSF.
