The open science movement does not lack a shared vision. Decades of declarations, statements of principle, and calls to action have failed to put that vision into practice. This essay proposes a minimum viable scientific record (MVR) that would make the open science vision possible, and asks funders to make operating on it a condition of their money.
Center for Open Science
At the Center for Open Science, our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. Promoting these practices within the research funding and publishing communities accelerates scientific progress
System: Formalizing Science: From Open Corpus to Computable System
Open access made much of the scientific record openly available. An enormous opportunity now exists to make it computable and systemic.
Introduction to Open Science
This course introduces the principles and practices of open science, with an emphasis on reproducible research workflows, transparent reporting, and collaborative scholarship. Students will critically examine reproducibility, explore tools that support openness (such as Git, GitHub, and Quarto), and apply these tools in hands-on assignments and a final open project. Students will also explore how open science practices vary across disciplines, including education, humanities, social sciences, industry and government, and STEM contexts. This course emphasizes applying open science principles to real-world data problems in alignment with the principles of producing reproducible research.
Open Science Needs Open Compute
Why independent science will depend on compute, not just funding, and why providing it is the best bet we can currently make.
Open Science Needs Open Compute
Why independent science will depend on compute, not just funding, and why providing it is the best bet we can currently make.
Open Evaluation: A Vision for Entirely Transparent Post-Publication Peer Review and Rating for Science
The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide access to and evaluation of scientific papers. While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups (e.g. scientific societies) and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers (e.g. by H-factor) and rating scales (e.g. by relevance to a decision process) in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.
science funding and the cherry picking problem
Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…
A Data Utopia for Science-of-Science
Here I want to briefly sketch out a vision for how to solve a key set of problems facing science-of-science researchers, using the relatively new idea of a ‘data trust.’ In my ideal wor…
DataColada: No Comments - Replicability-Index
Science is like an iceberg. The published record is only a fraction of the things that university -paid academics do. Some time ago, Brian Nosek dreamed about a scientific utopia of open science that would make the workings of academia more transparent, but all we got was preprints and some badges - that are apparently DataColada: Open Science, but Closed Comments?
A Science Funding System Beyond the Linear Model
Research funders should embrace a new ontology of scientific work to improve the relationship between science and the public.
From Albums to Streams: How Modularity Changes Systems
Scientific publishing is breaking under document-centric formats designed for a physical world. Borrowing from music’s shift from albums to streaming, we make the case that open access alone cannot deliver reuse, trust, or scale. The future of science depends on modular, interoperable research components that move across tools, enabling new workflows, tools, and ecosystems.
Governing by dismantling: tech oligarchy and the stifling of public data infrastructure
Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2026)
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and at ...
