POSE: Phase II: Open-Source Ecosystem to enable Open Scholarship

Center For Open Science, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Open science, also called open research or open scholarship, is a movement that advances the free and open sharing of research. The goal of open science is to make the research process open for review by everyone with the goal of improving the quality of scientific results and usefulness of scientific discoveries. Tools are needed to encourage and support researchers to work together, share data and analyses, and discover and reuse research. The Center for Open Science (COS) has built and maintains the Open Science Framework (OSF), which is a free, open-source platform that provides these tools. Researchers use this platform to manage and conduct their research while following open science practices. The involvement of research communities in the co-development of the tools that support them in practicing open science is important to secure robust and long-standing scientific knowledge. This NSF POSE Phase II award creates a distributed Open Source Ecosystem (OSE) around the OSF: the Open Scholarship OSE. This project permits the expansion of community-driven open scholarship by (1) creating a governance structure that guides the trajectory of the Open Scholarship OSE by developing a community of user-contributors to the ecosystem, (2) connecting new digital storage locations, tools, and other services, expanding the range of applications of and disciplines using the OSF, and (3) developing improved workflows that enable open scholarship across a wider range of research goals, methods, processes, and outputs. The Open Scholarship OSE develops communication pathways for researchers to become part of the development process and to implement open scholarship practices while making the barriers to participation as low as possible. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.