Inspired by Sir John Templeton’s vision, Templeton World Charity Foundation approaches open research as a practice that puts humility, transparency, and the belief that knowledge should benefit everyone into operation.
Research culture and practice have been undergoing a shift. Open research is not new, but it has gained significant momentum over recent decades. What began as a push for access to published findings has expanded into a broader movement focused on transparency, reproducibility, and access to the research process itself.
For Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) the idea that research should be freely available to anyone with an internet connection is not an abstract principle. It is a practice deeply rooted in the Foundation's identity and, increasingly, central to its future direction.
TWCF's Director of Operations Kristin Eldon Whylly, who helped architect the Foundation's open research policies. For Whylly, the math is simple and sobering. Subscriptions to top academic journals can cost institutions millions of dollars annually. More broadly, paywalls limit access for practitioners and researchers working outside of universities. For TWCF to be genuinely committed to global impact, supporting researchers and ideas wherever they emerge, more than a privileged few would have to have access to findings.
But accessibility is only part of the story. Another reason TWCF embraces open science is directly related to the particular nature of the research it funds. Discovery science exploring consciousness, human flourishing and the deepest questions about what it means to be human can produce findings that challenge conventional thinking, and contrarian results that carry a higher burden of proof. For those findings to earn trust from skeptical scientific communities, the research must be unimpeachable.
"If there were questions about the results of the research, researchers could say, 'well, we preregistered it, you can replicate it, all the data is here.' That kind of transparency and rigor is something TWCF especially values," said Whylly. Open research practices – pre-registration, shared data, transparent methods – help build trust by inviting scrutiny rather than avoiding it.
"Where open access fits into all of this is being willing to lay everything bare," said Dr. Nick Higgs, TWCF's Vice President of Strategy and Programs. "Here's all the data, here's my interpretation of it, here's what I think it tells us. But if you think differently, take the data, do your own analysis, and tell me if you think it's different." For Higgs, open research practices are fundamental to how TWCF approaches its work. And, as the Foundation enters a new strategic chapter, are being positioned both as a practice embedded across all funding areas and a priority in their own right.
The ethos tracks back to the Foundation’s origins and the vision of its founder, Sir John Templeton – and is one that Higgs posits as a direct philosophical line, with open research a manifestation of Sir John’ desire for intellectual humility; not as a technical requirement, but as a practice that embodies one of the Foundation’s core ideals. Sir John believed that producing new discoveries and information, particularly about the spiritual aspects of life, would spur human progress. But for that to happen, the information would have to be accessible and usable. In a sense, open research is that belief made operational.
“Open science and open research in general are really about making information available so we see developments faster for humanity,” said Higgs. “But they’re also about being humble.”
TWCF’s approach represents a meaningful departure from how a lot of scholarship has historically operated, one where proprietary data meant ownership and power. The alternative – a constructive dialogue where people can access information and challenge it – speeds up the ability of science to self-correct and advance.
Launched in 2021, TWCF’s open access policy was initially intended to ensure published research articles were freely available. The policy aligned with Plan S and the coalition of funders known as CoAlition S, and the Foundation even signed onto the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). But the team quickly recognized that a research article is often the final step in a long process – it typically appears several years after the actual work is done – and that encouraging openness earlier in the research lifecycle could accelerate discovery.
To that end, the Foundation relaunched and expanded its approach in 2023 to define open research more broadly, including practices such as pre-registering research designs – stating hypotheses and methods before running experiments to prevent researchers from adjusting their questions to fit whatever outcomes emerge. It also encouraged preprints so findings could circulate faster, promoted digital object identifiers to make outputs findable and attributable, and emphasized sharing datasets and code so others could replicate and build upon the work.
"If you say at the beginning what you’re going to test and how you're going to test it, you're less likely to lean into whatever narrative is convenient,” said Whylly. "If you say exactly what recipe you are going to use and what you expect will come out of it, it's a much cleaner pathway and the results are clearer as well."
Rather than simply mandating compliance, TWCF adopted what the Center for Open Science calls a pyramid model for changing research culture – essentially a recognition that different researchers need different kinds of support to change their practices. At the Foundation level, this meant funding infrastructure platforms, such as the Open Science Framework, to provide researchers with a place to register their studies and share data; and supporting communities like the Open Research Funders Group and Coalition S to build shared standards. It also meant adjusting TWCF's own criteria to include asking about open practices in grant applications and requiring open access for funded publications.
"Infrastructure is very impactful because it's meeting a direct need," explained Higgs. "But it often goes unnoticed. It's like the Wikipedia effect – we just assume someone else is doing it and it will always be there. But there is no magic hand behind it. It's individual people and private funds that are funding all of this." Things like digital object identifiers (DOI) and open data repositories need ongoing support, often from private philanthropy rather than governments or large-scale public funders.
Perhaps no initiative better illustrates why open science matters for ambitious research than TWCF's Accelerating Research on Consciousness (ARC) program. The consciousness field has long been fragmented, with competing theories and researchers drawing different conclusions from similar data. Rather than continuing to fund isolated studies, the program pioneered structured adversarial collaboration that brought proponents of competing theories together to design experiments that could genuinely distinguish between them.
"What I think we've learned is that the whole concept of coming together in a productive and open way actually makes things happen that might not have otherwise happened. Some of these researchers had no incentive to interact until that idea came about," said Higgs. At the end of the day, open science practices proved critical – pre-registered hypotheses prevented after-the-fact interpretation changes; registered reports committed journals to publishing results regardless of outcome; and open data allowed the broader community to verify findings. The reason the debate can continue productively, noted Higgs, is that there was a mutually accepted standard for how the team would report information and share it between groups.
“You have less of a situation where it’s one person’s word versus another, as opposed to different interpretations of the same information,” said Higgs, in citing examples from his own field of marine science where findings seemed to fall along geographical or ideological lines – Latin American researchers reaching one conclusion and American researchers reaching another with regard to the same questions about the fisheries. Having open practices where scientists can interrogate each other’s data should reduce the ability for ideology to get in the way of good conclusions.
The Global Flourishing Study, co-funded by all the Templeton philanthropies, exemplifies this same commitment on a different scale. "One thing I was really impressed with when I was watching the global launch of the first results was the commitment to pre-registering the studies and making all of the data openly accessible to anyone who wanted to analyze it,” said Higgs. “That was us as Templeton philanthropies standing up and saying we're doing science in the best possible way that we can."
As TWCF transitions its strategic priorities, open research will remain embedded across all funding areas while also continuing as a distinct investment priority. Higgs sees it as integral to what he refers to as holistic science. "We're essentially helping mold science into the kind of open and productive endeavor that Sir John Templeton thought it should be.”
Looking ahead, Higgs envisions success as genuine system change in how scientific information is shared. The current model, he suggests, is a mashup from a bygone era increasingly stressed by new pressures, including artificial intelligence. The combination of openly accessible data and generative AI has created what Higgs calls "AI slop" – automatically generated papers flooding journals with low-quality submissions. Some journals have begun rejecting papers based on certain open datasets because the volume has become unmanageable. "That's a real threat to the rationale behind open data," Higgs acknowledged. The solution, he suggests, is not to abandon openness but to shift the research ecosystem toward valuing quality over quantity, though he notes the challenge of deciding who judges quality, as well as ensuring early-career researchers still have pathways to contribute.
Getting there, however, will require not just policy changes, but a fundamental shift in how researchers are evaluated and rewarded. One promising direction is "diamond open access," where neither the author nor the reader pays – instead, costs are covered by funders or institutions. In practice, the model could separate the gatekeeping and quality control functions from the profit motive that has distorted publishing economics.
"It doesn't have to cost as much as it does," said Higgs. "But, if it's not a profit-making entity, how do you drive investment without profits?" Though preprints have started this process, there is room for much more innovation, even if it means taking a long view – decades or even on a hundred-year timescale. "Just because something's going to take a long time doesn't mean we're not interested in investing in it," said Higgs.
In the meantime, real challenges persist. Article processing fees that were supposed to cover reasonable production costs – perhaps $750 – have in some cases ballooned to $10,000, creating what Higgs calls significant market distortions. Career pressures push researchers toward prestigious paywalled journals even when open access alternatives exist. While early-career researchers in particular worry that sharing data openly means others could scoop their work without giving proper credit. A marine biologist by background, Higgs spent most of his career in the grantee's position. He recalled that as a research lab director, it was challenging to convince some of his more early-career colleagues to make their data openly accessible. "A lot of this comes down to how do we judge people's worth and give people credit where it's due.”
Interestingly, Higgs sees these challenges as connecting back to values like purpose, meaning and recognition, which is exactly what TWCF as a foundation is focused on. “We have to improve the research ecosystem in order to see the kind of world that we want to see,” said Higgs. Having humility and openness and transparency as qualities to look for in scientists aligns with the Foundation’s deeper mission.
At the end of the day, researchers and academics will have to take a greater role in shaping these policies. Afterall, if the people who will have to implement these practices are not involved in designing them, adoption will likely stay uneven. “A lot of discussion and policy around this is being driven by those who don’t have to live it,” said Higgs. “It doesn’t matter how much you want to drive change as a funder if your grantees are still saying ‘I really want to publish open access, but I have to publish in this prestigious journal for my career.’”
For TWCF, the commitment to open research ultimately serves the same purpose as all the Foundation’s work to accelerate discoveries that benefit humanity. "If we can make information more freely available, shareable and able to be challenged, we believe that will speed up the rate of human progress and speed up the benefits that we should be getting from all of this new research," said Higgs. When Sir John Templeton imagined science producing new information about the spiritual aspects of life, he imagined that information spreading, being tested and being refined through collective inquiry. Open science is the mechanism that makes that all possible. It is how findings reach researchers in smaller nations and under-resourced institutions. It is how contrarian discoveries earn enough trust to be taken seriously. And it is how the Foundation puts its money where its philosophy is.
It is also the mechanism that taps into TWCF’s most sacred ethos. Being willing to share your data, pre-register your hypotheses and invite scrutiny of your methods and conclusions takes intellectual humility. It means acknowledging that you might be wrong, that others might see things you missed, that progress comes through dialogue rather than declaration. All of which Sir John hoped to see more of in the world. And what TWCF, through its commitment to open research, continues to foster. One transparent study at a time.
