The Center for Open Science (COS) retains a fundamental commitment to the principle that academic scientific research is a public good.  The papers, data, materials, registrations, and infrastructure hosting research should be open to the maximum extent possible. COS exists to improve the research culture so that scientific values are embodied in scientific practices.

 

Founded in 2013, COS is a nonprofit culture change organization with a mission to increase openness, integrity , and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by connecting communities of researchers, institutions, funders, societies, and publishers around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools, including the Open Science Framework (OSF).

 

To scale adoption of open behaviors by researchers, such as overall research transparency and rigor, and sharing of design, methods, code, data, and outputs COS:

​[1] provides open infrastructure that makes it possible to do the behaviors,

[2] conducts user-centered product development to make it easy to do the behaviors,

[3] supports grassroots organizing to activate early adopters and make their behavior visible to shift community norms toward the behaviors,

[4] offers solutions to journals, funders, and institutions to nudge their incentives to make it desirable to do the behaviors, and

[5] provides and promotes a policy framework for stakeholders to make the behaviors required.

 

Effective policy implementation requires effective infrastructure for doing the behaviors, and community buy-in to treat the behaviors as good practice rather than administrative burdens. 

These five levels of intervention are highly interdependent, each necessary, none sufficient