Enabling Research Rigor and Transparency, Fostering Researcher Intellectual Humility

The Center for Open Science (COS) has a mission to promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility in researchers’ everyday behavior. Their focus is to stimulate behavior change in the 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.

The COS 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.

Through this grant, the COS, led by project director Brian Nosek, will improve the Open Science Framework (OSF), the open-source infrastructure they maintain, to more fully embody their mission, making it easier for researchers to report outcomes of pre-registered research to reduce publication bias and selective reporting. They will achieve this outcome in three key ways:

• incorporating just-in-time training and support tools in workflows to increase the quality of researchers' open behaviors;
• enhancing the collection of research project metadata to improve discoverability and to enable funders and institutions to increase adherence to policies promoting rigor and transparency; and
• advancing the sustainability of the infrastructure by increasing earned revenue and mitigating OSF maintenance costs.