COS — Center for Open Science
Overview
The Center for Open Science (COS) is a US-based nonprofit organisation founded in 2013 in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a mission to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. It develops and maintains open infrastructure for the scientific community, most notably the Open Science Framework (OSF), a free, open-source platform for managing, sharing, and collaborating on research projects and data. COS also produced the TOP Guidelines (Transparency and Openness Promotion), a modular framework adopted by over 5,000 journals, and operates the Registered Reports publication format infrastructure in which peer review and provisional acceptance occur before data collection begins. Further COS products include OSF Preprints, a preprint server aggregating discipline-specific communities including PsyArXiv and SocArXiv, and SHARE, a metadata aggregator for open scholarship outputs. Its Metascience programme conducts large-scale empirical studies of scientific practices, including the landmark 2015 Reproducibility Project in psychology, which estimated reproducibility rates across 100 published psychological studies.
Connections
- relatedTo: TOP Guidelines (COS produced and maintains the TOP Guidelines transparency framework)
- relatedTo: Registered Reports (COS coordinates the Registered Reports publication format and hosts Stage 1 submissions via OSF Registries)
- relatedTo: GFRN (GFRN member networks draw on COS infrastructure and TOP Guidelines as practical implementation tools)
- relatedTo: cOAlition S (TOP Guidelines are widely adopted alongside Plan S requirements as a complementary transparency framework)
Resources
- https://www.cos.io
- https://osf.io (Open Science Framework)
- https://www.topfactor.org (TOP Guidelines journal adoption tracker)
- https://www.cos.io/initiatives/top-guidelines (TOP Guidelines)
- https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports (Registered Reports programme)