Knowledge and scientific discovery advances by the transparent communication of ideas and evidence. No individual is the arbiter of truth. All present models of nature are incomplete or incorrect in some way. Scholars propose, challenge, and extend one another’s claims via free exchange of evidence. Moreover, the credibility of scientific evidence is established by showing that it is reproducible independent of its originator. This way, scholars individually pursue their curiosities, share their discoveries, and collectively evaluate each other’s claims for the advancement of knowledge.
The Center for Open Science’s (COS) mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. COS advances this mission by conducting metascience to understand reproducibility challenges and how to address them, builds infrastructure, provides training, builds community, and nudges incentives across stakeholder communities. Openness is an accelerant to the pursuit of truth. COS provides the means, opportunity, and motivation to pursue openness and ultimately increase the efficiency of discovery.
The focus of this proposal is advancement of the infrastructure and community efforts that will foster a transformative change in research practices toward openness. COS will empower research communities and individuals toward openness by providing technology solutions that make it easy, and shifting incentives to make it desirable. COS will achieve this by scaling its products and services to support open, reproducible research. We will accelerate adoption of open practices, and foster transition of our technology solutions toward a sustainable funding model across the community of stakeholders (funders, institutions, service providers). Success indicators will be evidence of researcher adoption of COS services; open availability of content, process, and outcomes of research; and, growing investment by the stakeholder community to sustain these public goods.
