Charlottesville, VA — The Center for Open Science (COS) announces the launch of the Open Scholarship Knowledge Base, a community-led initiative to create a comprehensive and open access source of open scholarship knowledge and resources.

The Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB) will broadly collate and disseminate the high-quality content developed by the open scholarship community. Navigating the abundance of rich open scholarship resources across websites has proven to be a scattered and inefficient experience. By building a living resource, the OSKB aims to reduce knowledge gaps and increase the speed with which transparent research practices are discovered and adopted in the field.

“This project arose from a problem we have all faced when trying to learn, adopt, or teach new methods. Discovering the materials that answer my question or address my need can be time-consuming, or impossible, to find when you need them. And if you don't know what terms to search for, Google isn't that helpful," said project lead April Clyburne-Sherin. "We are excited to make existing open scholarship resources more discoverable, easily comparable, and therefore easier to teach or adopt."

The project is spearheaded by volunteers from across the open scholarship landscape, including researchers, funders, librarians, and educators. Anyone wanting to open scholarship is invited to edit, curate, and contribute to this community resource. Together we can better support the instruction and application of open scholarship best practices.

Educational content (tutorials, workshop materials, videos, papers, and more) generated by contributors from many disciplines and regions will be organized and maintained as openly accessible modules and resources. Users may search materials related to their interests with the ability to discover topics pertaining to their discipline, role, method, and question. Users can also contribute missing resources, refine the metadata, and curate learning pathways to help improve the platform.

The OSKB project is possible through support from Fetzer Franklin Fund and DARPA’s Next Generation Social Science. With the funds designated, the project aims to engage communities to collect and contribute resources on best practices in the field of open scholarship.

“Researchers working on improving methodology and open scholarship have generated lots of amazing resources—papers, lesson plans, primers, even videos. The OSKB will make it easier for others to find and benefit from this content,” said Brian Nosek, Executive Director of the Center for Open Science.

The OSKB community invites the contribution of content from researchers and research stakeholders. Those interested in contributing may visit cos.io/oksb to learn more about submission criteria and collaboration details.

About the Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science is a non-profit technology and culture change organization founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. The OSF is a web application that provides a solution for the challenges facing researchers who want to pursue open science practices, including: a streamlined ability to manage their work; collaborate with others; discover and be discovered; preregister their studies; and make their code, materials, and data openly accessible. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.



Inquiries: April Clyburne-Sherin oskb@cos.io

Web: https://cos.io/oskb

Twitter: @osframework