The Center for Open Science (COS) has been selected as the inaugural institutional recipient of the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.
The award “aims to provide recognition and publicity for outstanding efforts that enhance the rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency of research in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and stimulate awareness and activities fostering research quality among scientists, institutions, funders, and politicians.”
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COS is a nonprofit culture change organization founded in 2013 with the mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. COS takes a systems approach to supporting research culture change. COS builds and maintains a free, open source infrastructure for all disciplines of research, called the Open Science Framework (OSF), that enables the adoption of open practices across the research lifecycle. OSF flexibly integrates with other tools and services to make it efficient for researchers to plan, conduct, report on, and discover research within their current workflows. COS collaborates with grassroots organizations that support training and changing communities’ norms toward openness and integrity and provides solutions that empower communities to customize and promote open practices from within. COS works with funders, publishers, societies, and universities to shift incentives and policies to foster culture change toward rigor and transparency. Finally, COS investigates the state of research practices and evaluates the effectiveness of culture change initiatives. These interdependent activities incorporate a theory of change to create sustainable improvements to science as a social system.
The Einstein Foundation’s jury offered its official statement about the institutional award winner: “The Center for Open Science (COS) catalyzes global research culture change via a unique integrated behavior change model. By offering the Open Science Framework (OSF), collaborating with grassroots communities to grow engagement, advocating with stakeholders to adopt new policies and incentives, and evaluating effectiveness, COS helps to make open science the default. The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, launched by COS in 2015, and supported by over 5,000 signatories, along with all of the major publishers, have initiated an overdue transformation in the publishing culture.”