Our collective vision to change the research culture is becoming a reality. For example, you may be noticing that:
- Funders are rethinking their policies to promote greater transparency and rigor.
- Journals are adopting transparency policies for data, materials, and code and offering new publishing options like Registered Reports that mitigate publication bias and focus decision making for publication on the importance of the questions and quality of the methodology.
- A growing number of departments and institutions are asking about open research practices during the hiring process and even considering how to incorporate them into promotion policies.
And, most importantly, you and your peers are taking up new behaviors like preregistration, data sharing, and preprints. Culture change is slow and hard, but it is visible and inexorable.
The Center for Open Science (COS) exists to catalyze and support this culture change by providing open source infrastructure to you and the research community to make the behaviors possible and easy. COS also connects, supports, and collaborates with dozens of grassroots networks that are conducting the on-the-ground work of educating, training, and empowering their communities to adopt more rigorous and transparent research practices. And, finally, COS provides solutions to funders, publishers, and institutions that drive the incentives for research practices. For example, COS just launched the Open Scholarship Survey, a standard assessment tool that these stakeholders can use to understand their communities’ opinions and behaviors to ease adoption of policies and incentives that will promote open practices.
Together, we are all working to make open science become the norm. To get there, we need your support, both in your individual actions and in your financial contributions, to support our culture change programs.
Your one-time or recurring gift will be combined with a $51,000 collective gift made by our generous COS Benefactors group this fall. Funds raised during this campaign will catalyze your grassroots efforts to change research norms and help us to provide solutions to stakeholders to recalibrate reward systems.
This has been a challenging year but I remain positive and encouraged that our collective action to improve research is working. Thank you for all that you do to advocate for open science through your own work and for your commitment to changing the research culture for the betterment of society.
If you are a researcher using the OSF, please consider including OSF as a line-item for infrastructure support in your next research grant proposal budget, or, if relevant, making an annual departmental contribution to support our ongoing maintenance and improvements. Contact giving@cos.io for additional information.
