Rewarding Open Science Practices in Research - NIH OBSSR: The Connector

"Being a scientist is a competitive career choice. Career advancement relies heavily on being the first to publish novel and exciting findings. As scientists compete to be first to publish, transparency and reproducibility in research may be sacrificed. Concerns surrounding reproducibility of research have been gaining attention in recent years. As such, the NIH is stepping in to lead the effort to improve reproducibility in pre-clinical research.  In a recent commentary in Nature, NIH Director, Dr. Francis Collins, and NIH Principal Deputy Director, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, tackle the concerns of low reproducibility and transparency in pre-clinical research. In the commentary, the authors highlight an initiative to increase transparency, a funding opportunity calling for the development of a Data Discovery Index, a platform to facilitate sharing and citation of primary unpublished data. While NIH is exploring a number of initiatives to increase transparency and reproducibility, it alone cannot solve the problem. Enacting change will required a coordinated effort across academia, non-profit, industry and government.  Initiatives to increase transparency and reproducibility have already begun throughout the scientific community.The Center for Open Science, a non-profit organization founded in March 2013, has been developing tools that are designed to provide researchers with new incentives to conduct transparent and reproducible research. In an effort to increase openness and transparency, COS has created the Open Science Framework, an open source web app that serves as a centralized system for data sharing. This app functions as a project management tool for researchers that allows individuals to upload project data to a private site and share data with collaborators or with the public. Any data or component of a project that is made public becomes an independent citable unit. This provides an incentive for researchers to upload and share data. The OSF provides a means to track these citations and other metrics related to data usage available on the site.  As an additional incentive to use data sharing resources such as the OSF, COS has developed a number of badges for open practices. COS is working with organizations and journals to promote the use of the open practice badges. In the social and behavioral sciences, a number of journals, such as Psychological Science, have adopted the use of open practice badges to acknowledge and reward transparency ..."