Center for Open Sciences Inc

“The two co-founders are founding members of the organization.”

“Pursuant to the organization's articles of organization and bylaws, the founding members have the right to appoint board members.”

“Copies of the center's form 990 are provided to all members of the board for their review prior to filing of the return.”

“Copies of the center's form 1023 and form 990 are available for public inspection at the center's office. The center will provide copies of the forms 1023 and 990 upon request.”

“The center makes copies of its governing documents and financial statement available to the public upon request.”

“Cos is a non-profit technology company aiming to promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. Cos accomplishes this by: (1) providing free tools and services such as the open science framework (osf; http://osf.io/) to support research and data management; (2) engaging in community-building activities to promote transparency and openness and nudge the incentives driving researchers' behavior toward openness; and (3) conducting metascience research - research on scientific practices - to identify areas and methods to improve research efficiency.”

“Infrastructure: cos supports and maintains the osf (www.osf.io) to help researchers manage, archive, and share their research, privately or publicly. In 2015, cos made significant progress in establishing the osf as a full-featured application framework. This is the result of the release of or significant improvements to a number of core features including authentication, metadata, messaging, version control, access control, databasing, storage services, and a public api. The osf is now positioned perfectly as a free, public infrastructure for creating, connecting, and integrating countless services across the research lifecycle. Internally, this is evident through new initiatives like our behavioral research data collection tools. Building on the osf, we are creating a free, open service that will inhabit the marketplace currently dominated by tools like qualtrics, surveymonkey and some smaller, more elaborate experiment platforms. Because of the osf's open, modular design, we and others will be able to incorporate the back-end services to support any kind of front-end user interfaces for collection of social science research participant data, with the ability to extend very easily to collection of meta-data for any research application (not limited to social science). Our modular, open approach will save a tremendous amount of startup and maintenance time for those looking to build specialized services by providing them with key, common infrastructure elements that everyone else also needs. This way, new tools and services can focus on their specific interest and core expertise rather than redundant (and less effective) implementation of back-end tools that support their new service. Further, funders who sponsor projects also win by avoiding redundancy in foundational infrastructure development. Funders can get the same output with much smaller grants to teams that build their service on top of the osf application framework. Linking services under development in 2015: - discovery tools: vivo - data management planning: dmptool - research planning: evernote - research workflows: galaxy - data analysis: jasp stats - computation in the cloud: university of notre dame's center for research computing - code repository: bitbucket - data storage: onedrive - data repositories: dryad, neurovault, zenodo - authoring: sharelatex - publishing: ubiquity press, open journal systems”

“Metascience: cos supports research on scientific practices. These efforts can inform best practices and serve as platforms to demonstrate reproducible research methods. Some achievements from 2015 include: - publication of reproducibility project: psychology results in the in journal science (june, 2015). - the reproducibility project: cancer biology will soon publish its first results. That project will publish the individual replications in small batches and then a summary report at the very end of the project. - through external grant awards, cos supported the reproducibility project: transcranial direct current stimulation (tdcs) at the university of california - davis. - we conducted and completed a study on the impact of badges upon data sharing. This study found that the journal psychological science experienced an increase in data sharing from around 3 percent of published articles to nearly 40 percent in only 1.5 years following adoption of badges. Comparison journals without badges showed no change in data sharing over the same period. In 2016, we will use these findings to promote adoption of badges as simple incentives towards more open editorial policies.”

“Community: cos fosters open science communities of researchers, developers, and leaders. Many infrastructure projects in development outside cos will increase openness in science. Cos is working to establish an open developer community which will enhance collaboration and interactivity amongst siloed efforts. Further, an active open science community is essential for testing and improving infrastructure and practices. Open science practices will accelerate dramatically if stakeholders with levers for change create incentives or requirements for researchers. Cos promotes open science practices with journals, funders, researchers, and societies. Preregistration challenge: the preregistration challenge kicked off in 2015. Preregistration increases the credibility of hypothesis testing by confirming in advance what will be analyzed and reported. For the preregistration challenge, one thousand researchers will receive $1,000 each for publishing results of preregistered research. Presentations: in 2015, cos presented at 9 major conferences including the assa, slas, acs, stm association, rmpa, arl, and rda. Across conferences, meetings, and workshops in 2015 cos staff have presented at least 92 times and reached over 5,200 individuals. Funders and journals: in 2015, the following journals began recommending the osf: language learning, palgrave communications, elife, cognition and emotion, cognition, nature scientific data, human movement science, biomedcentral, f1000, peerj, and plos. Recommending funders now include ljaf, the alfred p. Sloan foundation, and the children's investment fund foundation.. Incentives for open practices: in 2015, we launched the transparency and openness promotion (top) guidelines initiative. The top guidelines are a culmination of workshops and contributions from many journal and funder representatives across many different research communities. The top guidelines integrate cos transparency products (e.g. Badges, registered reports, preregistration) into mainstream editorial policies and researcher practices. Since launch in early 2015, we have recruited 538 journals and 57 organizations as signatories. Each have committed to conduct a review of the standards and incremental levels for potential adoption. In 2016, we will work with signatories on adoption and incremental implementation. Education and training: cos operates a free education and training program in reproducible and open practices. In 2015, we held 40 training sessions and reached an estimated 850 people. This service supports our other initiatives such as the preregistration challenge, reproducibility projects, and a rct to evaluate the impact of the osf in collaboration with uc riverside.”

“No changes in the oversight or selection processes from the prior year.”

“Prior period adjustment the center has restated its beginning net assets to correct an error related to deferred revenue and grant revenue in 2014. During 2014, the center erroneously reported $191,237 of deferred revenue as grant revenue. The reporting error caused the center's 2014 revenue to be overstated while the liability was understated.”