What's Happening at COS - May 2018

"Dear Colleagues, 

In my last update I introduced the concept of the pyramid of interdependent mechanisms for altering behavior. Below are a few highlights from the first quarter of 2018 at each level of the pyramid.  These illustrate COS’s connections and collaborations with our community of stakeholders to accelerate science.

INFRASTRUCTURE: OSF adoption and usage

We added 11,000 new users in the first quarter of 2018, at a far more aggressive growth rate than previous quarters. OSF now has over 90,000 registered users sharing a substantial amount of open content:  Sharing research data, materials, and outcomes does not ultimately mean much if others don’t review and reuse it.  Visits and downloads of OSF content are up in the first quarter of 2018 by over 130% and 800% respectively compared to the first quarter of 2017, which itself was 100% higher than the first quarter of 2016. At minimum, data sharing provides for transparency and accountability of claims made in the original research.  Open data also offers opportunity for reuse for new research applications that can dramatically increase the return on investment of the original research dollars.  For example, Project Implicit is sharing its datasets of implicit attitudes and stereotypes on OSF (https://osf.io/y9hiq/ and https://osf.io/kaqi5/).  Already, those public datasets are the basis of more than 40 publications, many investigating questions that were not conceived by the originating researchers...."