The Center for Open Science (COS) has a mission to promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility in researchers’ everyday behavior. Our focus is to stimulate behavior change in adoption of preregistration and sharing of research data, materials, and code. The purpose of this mission is to improve the credibility of research, foster intellectual humility among researchers, and, ultimately, accelerate the discovery of knowledge, solutions, and cures.
Our theory of change presumes that researchers need infrastructure to make behaviors possible; user-centered product design to make behaviors easy; grassroots organizing and visibility to make behaviors normative; and journals, funders, and institutions to shift incentives and policies to make behaviors desirable and required. All five elements are necessary for broad, effective culture change. As an organization, COS has departments and programs to advance each of these levers of behavior change in tandem.
With support from the John Templeton Foundation, we will improve the Open Science Framework (OSF), the open source infrastructure we maintain, to make it easier for researchers to report outcomes of preregistered research to reduce publication bias and selective reporting. We will incorporate just-in-time training and support tools in workflows for preregistration and sharing data and materials to increase the quality of researchers' open behaviors. We will enhance collection of research project metadata to improve discoverability and enable funders and institutions to increase adherence to policies promoting rigor and transparency. Finally, we will advance sustainability of the infrastructure by increasing earned revenue and mitigating OSF maintenance costs.
