The Metascience Alliance was created to serve as a coalition and hub for alignment and collaboration in the growing area of metascience, bringing together organizations across sectors, regions, and disciplines to strengthen how science is conducted, evaluated, and communicated. As the Alliance continues to grow, new activities are beginning to take shape, including a new pilot series called Perspective Sessions. This is a first, experimental iteration that we expect to review and refine over the coming months, informed by participant learning and additional external input.
A new pilot activity for the Alliance
This new pilot activity is designed to create space for focused, cross-stakeholder conversations on timely issues affecting research systems. We’re testing the sessions in this form initially and expect to adapt them over time in response to what we learn and to outside perspectives. Over the coming months, we’ll gather feedback to help the format, structure, and scope evolve as the pilot develops. We’re starting this as a pilot with participating Alliance organizations, and we’ll share public-facing takeaways after each session. Each session centers on one stakeholder perspective, one concrete topic, and a structured exchange focused on shared understanding. The aim is to surface how different stakeholders in the research ecosystem understand their constraints, trade-offs, and responsibilities in practice, helping participating organizations build a clearer shared understanding of the challenges shaping reform.
Perspective Sessions reflect the next phase of the Alliance’s development. Since launch, the focus has been on building the coalition and creating the conditions for meaningful coordination across the field. This pilot turns that foundation into a more concrete form of shared learning, giving participating organizations a structured way to engage across roles, sectors, and perspectives.
The format is intentionally designed to support thoughtful discussion. For this pilot phase, the sessions are proposed as moderated, small-group conversations built to encourage curiosity, candor, and reflection. Rather than functioning as a public panel or open debate, the sessions are meant to create a high-trust setting where a focal stakeholder can speak frankly about how they are navigating a live issue, and where others can engage in a way that is constructive and exploratory. We expect to adjust this approach over time based on participant and external feedback.
We've already added extra sessions for later topics in the series in response to demand. The level of interest in these sessions has been really encouraging. It suggests there's a real appetite for engaging with these questions through open, collaborative reflection. We'll use this pilot to see whether the format needs adjusting, and if it lands the way we hope, we're looking forward to bringing it back in the fall.
Grounded in concrete, timely challenges
A first pilot series is currently being planned around three sessions, each focused on a different stakeholder perspective and issue area. Those focal areas will help ground each conversation in a concrete, current challenge.
Planned pilot sessions:
Session 1 — Veronique Kiermer and Suzanne Farley (PLOS) on Collaborating with researchers
Session 3 — Jo Weech (BITSS) on Dealing with evolving training needs in metascience
Transparency through shared outputs
While the conversations themselves are being launched first with organizations already engaged in helping shape the Alliance, the insights will not stay siloed there. A key part of the concept is developing a public-facing output after each session—such as a short perspective brief or similar summary—that captures the perspective shared, major constraints and trade-offs discussed, recurring misunderstandings, and open tensions that emerged. In that way, the sessions are designed not only to support candid exchange among participating organizations, but also to contribute useful insights back to the broader community. These public-facing outputs are also intended to invite reflection and input that can inform how we revise and refine the pilot.
This reflects a core principle behind the Metascience Alliance itself: creating space for coordination and collaboration while supporting openness, transparency, and broader collective progress.
How to stay informed
We’ll share more as the pilot series develops, including public-facing takeaways following each session and updates on how the pilot is being refined over the coming months based on feedback and emerging needs. If you’d like to receive those updates as they’re published, we invite you to join the Metascience Alliance mailing list to stay informed about new outputs, developments, and future activity.
If you represent an organization that may be interested in opportunities like this in the future, you can also review the Letter of Intent and email metasciencealliance@cos.io to express interest before signing. We’ll follow up with next steps.
We’re looking forward to sharing more soon.
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