Open Science Foundation
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| Open Science Foundation | |
|---|---|
| Name | Open Science Foundation |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founder | Aaron F. Schwartz |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Type | Nonprofit research infrastructure |
Open Science Foundation is an international nonprofit organization that promotes open research practices, open data, open methods, and reproducible scholarship. The foundation collaborates with universities, publishers, libraries, and funders to develop infrastructure for preprints, open repositories, and registered reports. It engages with policymakers, research councils, and academic societies to advance standards and tools that increase transparency across scientific fields.
History
The organization was established in 2012 following community-driven initiatives that included advocates from arXiv, PLOS, Creative Commons, Mozilla Foundation, and Center for Open Science. Early activities intersected with developments at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, and the National Science Foundation (United States). Growth periods corresponded with milestones such as the adoption of open-access mandates by European Commission funders, the launch of open-data policies at NIH, and high-profile reproducibility projects from teams at University of Cambridge and Stanford University. The foundation's platforms were influenced by technical work from groups at GitHub, Zenodo, and Dryad.
Mission and Objectives
The foundation's stated mission emphasizes reproducibility, transparency, and accessibility in scholarly communication, aligning with principles promoted by OpenAIRE, COAR, SPARC, Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Objectives include developing persistent identifiers interoperable with CrossRef, ORCID, and DataCite; promoting registered reports used in journals such as Nature and PLOS Biology; and supporting open infrastructures similar to those run by Digital Science and Elsevier initiatives that favor open metadata. The organization frames its objectives to assist researchers at institutions like Oxford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University.
Organizational Structure
The foundation is governed by a board comprising academics, librarians, and technologists from institutions including Columbia University, University of Toronto, Max Planck Society, and Australian National University. Executive leadership has included directors drawn from Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University. Operational teams manage engineering, product, and policy functions with advisory input from committees linked to Canadian Institutes of Health Research, German Research Foundation, and Swiss National Science Foundation. The legal and compliance unit interacts with regulators such as European Commission units and national agencies like UK Research and Innovation.
Programs and Initiatives
Major initiatives encompass an open repository platform for preprints and data modeled on bioRxiv and MedRxiv, a registry for methods akin to ClinicalTrials.gov, and tooling for reproducible workflows interoperable with Jupyter, RStudio, and Docker. The foundation ran fellowship programs in partnership with Mozilla Foundation, collaborative workshops with International Science Council, and training courses delivered alongside Carpentries and EIFL. Pilot projects included collaborations with publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Wiley, and Springer Nature to implement registered reports and open peer review workflows. Community-built integrations were developed for services like Figshare, ORCID, and Crossref.
Funding and Partnerships
Funding sources have included grants and contracts from philanthropic institutions such as Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as competitive awards from European Research Council and national agencies like National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (United States). Corporate partnerships involved infrastructure collaborations with GitHub, cloud credits from Amazon Web Services, and indexing agreements with Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic. The foundation also received support via consortium models with university libraries at University of Michigan, University of Oxford, and ETH Zurich.
Impact and Criticism
Supporters cite impacts on citation practices at journals including PLOS ONE and Nature Communications, improvements in replication attempts led by teams from University of Pennsylvania and University of Amsterdam, and wider adoption of open-data badges popularized by Psychological Science. Criticism has come from stakeholders worried about sustainability and centralization, voiced by commentators associated with Elsevier and some editorial boards at The Lancet and BMJ. Debates have touched on interoperability with proprietary platforms such as Scopus and Web of Science and the balance between open licensing favored by Creative Commons and publisher business models defended by Reed Elsevier interests. Independent audits by firms linked to Deloitte and academic reviews from groups at University College London have informed responses to governance concerns.
Governance and Policies
Governance documents outline board responsibilities, conflict-of-interest policies, and data-management principles aligned with frameworks from OECD and UNESCO. The foundation's open-source licensing choices reference standards used by Apache Software Foundation and Free Software Foundation, while privacy and data-protection practices are designed to comply with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation and guidance from National Institutes of Health. Policy engagement has involved submissions to consultations by European Commission directorates, testimony before committees at US Congress and advisory panels attached to National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.