Center for Open Science, Inc.

We envision a future scholarly community in which:

The process, content, and outcomes of research are openly accessible by default;
All scholarly content is preserved and discoverable, and openness, interoperability, and transparency are normative for scholarly services;
All stakeholders are included and respected in the research lifecycle; and
All stakeholders share pursuit of truth as the primary incentive and motivation for scholarship.

Achieving the mission requires culture change in the incentives that drive researchers’ behavior, the infrastructure that supports research, and the business models that dominate scholarly communication.

To scale sustainable adoption of open behaviors by researchers, 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 and train adopters and make their behavior
visible to shift community norms toward the behaviors,
4. offers solutions to journals, funders, and institutions to nudge incentives to make it
desirable to do the behaviors, and
5. provides and promotes a policy framework for stakeholders to make the behaviors
required.

What started as a small project in Charlottesville, Virginia in the United States, has evolved to be a more distributed
workforce with more than 50 employees. COS is committed to openness and treating scholarly research and the infrastructure supporting it as public goods. All COS produced data, materials, code, and reports are openly licensed and publicly accessible to the maximum extent possible. COS made its progress with a dedicated, diverse, and skilled core staff, and, critically, thousands of individual researchers and stakeholders who provided time, energy, and action as a service because of their shared vision for improving the research culture. COS’s contributions outstrip its staff size and resources because of the collaborative partnerships with so many groups across the research landscape.

COS accomplishments are noted in the Impact Summary, and future goals are noted in the Goals section.