COS seeks to understand current research behaviors to identify opportunities for interventions to improve. Recent work in this area includes:

Replicability Project: Health Behavior 
The Replicability Project: Health Behavior (RP:HB) is replicating a sample of published quantitative studies in health research. This project aims to assess the robustness of findings and promote best practices in research transparency, methodological rigor, and reproducibility. RP:HB has engaged a broad community of researchers: 276 researchers expressed general interest in participating, with 54 conducting replications and 68 contributing as reviewers and editors.

Predicting Replicability Challenge 
The Predicting Replicability Challenge is a public competition designed to investigate automated assessments of replicability of research claims. Ten teams participated in the first round, and each developed their own solutions for automating assessment of replicability. Results from the first round suggested that the machine algorithms were not very effective at predicting replicability. This underscored the difficulty of reliable prediction and the challenge for automated methods to support more efficient, evidence-based evaluation of research.

We pilot and evaluate innovative policies, practices, and solutions that could accelerate research progress. Highlights from this year include:

Global Flourishing Study
As a partner in the Global Flourishing Study (GFS)—a large-scale, longitudinal study of human flourishing—COS manages data access for researchers seeking to use GFS data and promotes lifecycle open science practices by requiring preregistration and connecting outputs and outcomes throughout the research lifecycle.

Gallup releases one wave of data on an annual basis. Each year, an additional wave is added to the existing data to allow for longitudinal analysis. Non-Sensitive data is provided separately from Sensitive data, which requires ethical approval. An additional dataset exists for the United States only where data has been weighted at the state level.

Most recently, Wave 2 US responses weighted by state and sensitive global variables were released, joining other GFS datasets previously made available. Following the Wave 2 data release, 128 new preregistrations were completed, demonstrating continued uptake of lifecycle open science practices. This high-control context is helping COS understand how structured support and incentives can encourage researcher engagement with open practices.

Lifecycle Journal
In 2025, COS launched Lifecycle Journal—an innovative publishing pilot that reimagines how research is shared and evaluated. Rather than focusing solely on final manuscripts, Lifecycle Journal enables research outputs to be shared and evaluated at all stages of the research lifecycle, allowing the community to assess transparency and credibility from planning through results. The platform also functions as a decentralized community for independent evaluation services, with each diversifying and refining methods of evaluating research. To date, Lifecycle Journal has published 34 submissions, demonstrating proof of concept for a more transparent, community-driven approach to facilitating rigorous research.

COS provides open solutions to make open science practices standard, rewarded, and required. Highlights from 2025 include:

TOP 2025 Guidelines
Led by COS, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines are a community-driven policy framework for advancing open practices. The updated TOP 2025 guidelines offer a shared framework for journals, funders, and institutions to advance open science practices and increase the verifiability of empirical research claims. COS has kicked off a campaign showcasing its own TOP implementation efforts and highlighting open science policymaking efforts by external members of the research community to spur further adoption of the guidelines.

Preregistration Template Working Group
The Preregistration Template Evaluation Working Group of experts from across disciplines helps curate, evaluate, and promote high-quality preregistration templates. These community-developed templates aim to improve transparency and make preregistration more accessible and fit-for-purpose across methodologies and disciplines. For example, the new Simulation Studies Template draws on standards from other preregistration templates to specifically support researchers in documenting their plans for conducting simulation research.

We support researchers, organizations, and communities in adopting open science through engagement, education, and training. Milestones from this year include:

Metascience Alliance
The Metascience Alliance is a coalition for connecting stakeholders, identifying and advancing shared priorities, and accelerating collective progress. Since the Alliance’s launch at the 2025 Metascience Conference, we’ve worked to enact clear roles and begin stewarding ideas generated at the conference into actionable activities.

Expanding Our Work in the EU
Building on our commitment to global collaboration, COS has begun the process of establishing a formal presence in Brussels, Belgium. This enables us to participate more fully in EU-funded initiatives and consortium-based projects, and strengthens mission advancement across distinct regions and regulatory environments. This expansion reflects where strong relationships and collaborations already exist, allowing us to operate in closer alignment with the values and priorities of the communities we serve. In the near term, our EU-specific work will center on listening, connecting with existing open scholarship efforts, and identifying where COS can add value rather than duplicating work already underway.