1 Response to ASAPbio RFA : Center for Open Science 1. Information on your organization (one copy per organization) If this application involves multiple organizations, please fill out separate forms for each organization. Please indicate a lead organization for the purpose of primary ASAPbio contact. If applying as a consortium, is ​ this the lead organization? Yes X No ⬜ Name of organization Center for Open Science Contact person Brian Nosek Address 201 Ridge McIntire Road Suite 500 Charlottesville, VA 22903 Email address [email protected] Telephone number 434-806-6460 Website https://cos.io Federal Tax ID number 46-1496217 Tax status 501(c)(3) (eg 501(c)(3) etc) Date of registration February 25, 2014 Registered address (if 2857 Stratford Glen Way ​ different from above) Charlottesville, VA 22911 Is your company a subsidiary of another company? If so, please provide the name, Tax ID and status, and registered office address of the holding or parent company and the ultimate parent. No Has your organization been involved in any court action over the last 3 years? If so, please describe. No Provide a list of Directors: ​ Arthur Lupia (Chair), Alan Kraut (Vice Chair), Marcia McNutt, Maryrose Franko, Brian Nosek (Ex-Officio), Jeffrey Spies (Ex-Officio) 2 Insurance. Please provide details of your organization’s insurance protection regarding professional ​ indemnity cover and any other relevant insurance cover. Policy number 2071356 Insurer Short Insurance Associates Ltd Expiration date 5/1/2017 Indemnity value $3,000,000 Financial turnover. Please indicate your total revenue for your last three fiscal years. ​ Year 1 $2,038,896 (FY2014) Year 2 $4,863,766 (FY2015) Year 3 $6,449,363 (FY2016) - unaudited Please provide a brief description of your organisation’s Workplace Health & Safety policy ​ COS maintains policies that promote a healthy and safe work environment. This includes: accommodations for those with disabilities, a smoke free workplace, prohibition of controlled substances and firearms, harassment prevention, emergency action planning, and protocols for reporting workplace injuries. COS also offers comprehensive health, vision, and dental benefits to employees and their families. Lastly, COS offers up to 3 months paid leave per year for employees who have unique life circumstances, such as the birth of a child or who need to care for a sick family member. Please provide a brief description of your organization’s Equal Opportunities policy ​ COS is an equal opportunity employer and strongly encourages applications from members of groups underrepresented in science and technology industries. Recruiting and hiring are managed in accordance with documented workflows, candidates are vetted by multiple different members of the team, and information is maintained confidentially. Declaration I declare that to the best of my knowledge the answers submitted in this proposal (and in any supporting documentation) are correct and that I have all necessary rights or permissions to share the information contained in this proposal with ASAPbio. I understand that the information will be used in the evaluation process to assess my organization’s suitability to provide the ASAPbio Central Service. I also understand that any information contained in this proposal may be used by ASAPbio in the discussion and design of the final model, irrespective of whether this proposal is selected. Name Brian Nosek 3 Position Executive Director Date 27 April 2017 The following sections are to be completed once per application (ie, once for an entire consortium). Please respond to all of the queries listed below. You may use this document as a template or reference the questions by their numbers in a new document. 2. Summary (up to 1000 words) Provide a summary of your strategy for implementing and managing the CS. Scholarship advances by open exchange of ideas and evidence. A substantial portion of this exchange occurs via publication of journal articles following peer review. Preprints provide a means of accelerating scholarly communication by sharing manuscripts prior to formal peer review. Preprints are well established in some fields such as physics and economics, and just emerging in other fields such as biology and chemistry. Effective expansion of preprints requires modern, open infrastructure to operate preprint services and facilitate deposit and discovery, and community-based governance to test innovations, share good practices, and establish norms and standards across scholarly domains. We will create a life science preprints commons (hereafter “The Commons”) that meets and exceeds the requirements of ASAPbio RFA for a central service. This open infrastructure will make preprints from any service easy to discover, access, and deposit through a single interface. The Commons will be governed by ASAPbio’s Governing Board; the service providers will be the technical partner to that governing board. COS established OSF Preprints as an interface to the OSF--an open, scholarly commons for data and ​ ​ ​ ​ workflow management, archiving, and sharing. OSF Preprints aggregates search across existing preprint services (11 preprint services, 2M preprints as of April 2017) using SHARE, another COS-led consortium ​ ​ project. Groups can operate branded interfaces and aggregators for their own communities. Five are in production and seven will launch soon including partnerships with funding organizations (e.g., Mind & Life Institute) and consortia (e.g., NELLCO Law Library Consortium). ​ ​ A collaborative team from Manuscripts, Authorea, and others are prepared to contribute as a technical partner ​ ​ ​ ​ for document conversion. Existing services interoperate with DOCX, HTML, Markdown and JATS XML amongst other formats. The team will offer and extend open structured document editing and conversion technologies. The Commons will connect preprint services in a community-based model. For the typical user discovery interface, The Commons will facilitate discovery of preprints, and guide users to engage with the preprint on that service. For preservation and data mining research applications, The Commons will store full-text of preprints that qualify for storage. This community-centered model is illustrated with 12 attached letters of support from preprint services: arXiv, bioRxiv, AgriXiv, MarXiv, MindrXiv, PaleorXiv, BITSS, SocArXiv, SciELO, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ PsyArXiv, engrXiv, and FocUS Archive. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Our approach achieves the benefits of interoperability, programmatic access, preservation, and discoverability via centralization and the benefits of innovation, independence, and sharing of best practices via decentralization. Standards and best practices are identified most efficiently by facilitating an open marketplace 4 for innovation. Standards and best practices are adopted most effectively by facilitating collaboration among the community of stakeholders. The Commons will be built on the OSF scholarly commons--modern, extensible, scalable public goods infrastructure that archives papers, data, protocols, registrations, and connects the research lifecycle. The commons is modular such that the underlying tools and services are independent of the interfaces. This fosters economy of scale and mutual benefits across stakeholder communities. Feature enhancements to The Commons will extend to the other services built on OSF (e.g., preprint services, registries, repositories, research management). Simultaneously, OSF’s rich services provide substantial added value to The Commons. For example, the RFA requests integration between preprints and a data repository to encourage open data. OSF is a data archiving service, but it is also a commons of repositories. Authors will be able to connect their preprints with data in general and domain-specific biomedical repositories. To illustrate, we attach 15 letters of support from biomedical-relevant repositories: Dryad, Protein Data Bank, TalkBank, NIAGADS, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ NeuroMorpho, NAHDAP, ICPSR, Figshare, flybase, Mouse Phenome Database, Dataverse, Protocols, Sage ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Bionetworks (Synapse), DIP, and Vector Base. We will also work with NIH-hosted repositories (NIH staff ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ cannot write letters of support). The RFA priorities for open, free infrastructure are highly aligned with COS’s mission and approach. COS builds entirely free, open infrastructure to support the research lifecycle. COS services are built to scale, and already support preprints. We can deliver an initial version of The Commons immediately. Our highly skilled team will deliver rapid, incremental advancement of The Commons during the grant period. The proposed budget anticipates consistent interest by the Governing Body (GB) in expanding features. As a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, we welcome regular budget negotiation and transparent accounting of the actual costs to run the service. We also propose a substantial marketing campaign to support adoption of preprints. This portion of the budget can be adjusted depending on delegation of responsibilities with ASAPbio. The RFA goals for sustainability are perfectly aligned with COS’s model. The Commons infrastructure and ​ ​ content are public goods. COS is developing a sustainability model for the scholarly commons that will be elaborated and implemented during the grant period. The plan will ensure that the user public will always have free deposit and access to preprints. The long-term costs for The Commons will be substantially