The practice of science is sometimes thought of as an iterative process of reducing uncertainty about a specific theory or hypothesis. For scientific progress to occur, researchers must practice intellectual humility by confronting the limitations of their current understandings of reality. However, many of the incentives in present-day science are in the opposite direction, privileging intellectual hubris and flashy headlines over intellectual humility and a rigorous consideration of the evidence required to support new claims. Well-publicized failures to reproduce findings previously thought to be well-established in disciplines from social psychology to cancer biology have led to a reconsideration of how science is done.

The thrust of the project is the development of an infrastructure that will foster a transformation in research practices towards openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. The Center for Open Science (COS) will use the funds to support four types of work:

1. improvements to the Open Science Framework (OSF), a modern-day scholarly research commons that facilitates transparency, collaboration, archival, and reuse;
2. empirical investigations into the impact of open science best practices on researchers' willingness to revise their beliefs in the face of new evidence;
3. construction of an interface to the OSF to better facilitate the deposit and discovery of openly accessible research materials and data; and,
4. the testing of three fee-for-service models as a next step toward long-term sustainability.

The project will achieve an increased willingness among researchers to update their individual practices by providing the means, opportunity, and motivation to pursue openness. Accelerating the adoption of these open research practices will lead to a self-sustaining public good, and a return to the intended self-correcting nature of science.