About Metascience 2021

We gratefully acknowledge each participant, community partner, and organizing member that has worked to make Metascience 2021 possible. Please email metascience2021@cos.io to inquire about partnership opportunities.

Our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. These are core values of scholarship and practicing them is presumed to increase the efficiency of acquiring knowledge. For COS to achieve our mission, we must drive change in the culture and incentives that drive researchers’ behavior, the infrastructure that supports their research, and the business models that dominate scholarly communication. This culture change requires simultaneous movement by funders, institutions, researchers, and service providers across national and disciplinary boundaries. Despite this, the vision is achievable because openness, integrity, and reproducibility are shared values, the technological capacity is available, and alternative sustainable business models exist.

COS’s philosophy and motivation is summarized in its strategic plan and in scholarly articles outlining a vision of scientific utopia for research communication and research practices. Because of our generous funders and outstanding partners, we are able to produce open-source products and services. Use the header above to explore the team, services, and communities that make COS possible and productive.

AIMOS (the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science) seeks to advance the interdisciplinary field of meta-research by bringing together and supporting researchers in that field. 

Science aims to produce robust knowledge and the concept of reproducible experiments is central to this. However the past decade has seen a ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science. Across a number of scientific fields, such as psychology and preclinical medicine, large-scale replication projects have failed to produce evidence supporting the findings of many original studies. Meta-research will address this challenge head on.

We believe more effort is needed to develop theoretical frameworks, standardize methods, strengthen networks, and test the transferability of approaches from one context to others.

Worldwide, interest is intensifying in how research is funded, practiced and evaluated, and in how research cultures and systems can be made more efficient, open, inclusive and impactful. But research on research (RoR) – also called science of science, or meta-research – is often poorly joined-up. Over the next decade, policymakers, funders, universities, publishers and researchers themselves are likely to require greater RoR capacity to navigate continued expansion of the research enterprise, accompanied by greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, mission and challenge-directed research; open scholarship and open data; collaboration and team science; and creative solutions to the linked imperatives of diversity, inclusion, integrity and reproducibility. To strengthen this field, Wellcome Trust, Digital Science and the Universities of Sheffield and Leiden have joined forces to establish the Research on Research Institute (RoRI), and to build an international consortium of funders, academics and technologists committed to transformative & translational RoR.  RoRI launched on 30 September 2019, and will be based for an initial two-year incubation phase at Wellcome’s offices in London.