Center for Open Science
To help move the Open Science Framework (OSF) to version 1.0, and to foster the development of an open source/open science community
This project funds an ambitious project by Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, to develop and expand an institutional framework for collaborative scientific work—the Open Science Framework (OSF)—that’s modeled on the open source development protocols that have been so successful in the cooperative development of software. Nosek’s project is based on the insight that scientists could develop much more efficient collaboration practices, saving themselves time and improving the quality and velocity of their work, by borrowing the basic methods and tools of open software development. These include versioning (creating an edit log that tracks changes to any files associated with a project), “tagged releases” (locking a particular, tested version of a project for broader dissemination), “forking” (creating a personal copy of a project to add one’s own edits or additions), and “pull requests” (a request to the owner of a project to merge changes in a “forked” version back into the original). Funded activities include further development of the OSF, the construction of an applications programming interface that would allow the OSF to seamlessly interoperate with other tools and platforms, and collaborations with other developers of scientific cyberinfrastructure.