When we opened the Center for Open Science (COS) 13 years ago, science was steady and the open science movement was tenuous. Today, it feels like the opposite in some regions. 

The open science movement has grown into a mainstream activity with a maturing open infrastructure system, widespread adoption of some practices like data sharing, growing adoption and experimentation with others like preregistration, and evolving norms and policies supporting those practices. Previous questions about whether researchers will do open science at all are giving way to metascience questions of whether they are doing it well, and whether open science solutions can meet their promise. Previous questions about whether funders will invest in creating open science infrastructure are giving way to practical questions about how to sustain them. A tenuous start is being replaced with a diverse, distributed, steadily advancing movement. COS’s work has evolved with the maturation of the open science movement and its entry into the mainstream. Our strategic priorities emphasize supporting the continuing growth of lifecycle open science—making research plans, outputs, and outcomes more transparent, linked, and discoverable—and evaluating the effectiveness of open science to accelerate knowledge production.

Conversely, after decades of being the global leader in research and innovation, the U.S. is systematically dismantling its investment and leadership in science. The U.S.’s position as a steady foundation for research investment, training, and collaboration globally is lost and replaced with a perception that the U.S. is a tenuous and unreliable partner and funder.

This should be a time for the ascension of the open science movement, and the associated metascience movement that is developing and testing innovations in how science is funded, conducted, and used. Instead, these political externalities create high uncertainty and potential retrenchment in the U.S. context, and potentially more broadly given the U.S.’s historical leadership in science. 

At COS, we are combating retrenchment by centering on our mission and purpose. We are wrestling with fundamental questions about how we can advance our mission to increase transparency, integrity, and trustworthiness of research. What role do we play? Given our strengths and the strengths of other organizations, what role should we play? Given our current and prospective financial resources, what role can we play?

Our way forward is to lean on the best part of the open science movement—collaboration and partnerships. COS is one organization of many, and the Open Science Framework (OSF), maintained by COS, is one infrastructure of many. Distributed systems are resilient systems. By strengthening our organizational and technical connections with others, we can lean on their strengths and they can lean on ours. This can reduce redundancy in investments and increase responsiveness when components of connected systems are threatened. 

Concretely, this means several things:

• Our new strategic plan reflects our focus on our strengths: demonstrating, improving, and promoting pathways for lifecycle open science. We aim to make the process, contents, and outcomes of research transparent to enable scrutiny, facilitate trustworthiness, and accelerate discovery.

• We have filed paperwork to open an office in the E.U., specifically Brussels, to make it easier to collaborate and partner with other open science groups, and to increase COS’s adaptability to federal policy and funding shifts in different regions.

• COS is actively developing partnerships with other organizations to lean on their strengths so that we can focus on ours and increase sustainability of our services, particularly OSF, but also our support of TOP Guidelines, Registered Reports, and advancement of innovation, standards and evidence related to lifecycle open science.

• We do not pursue funding for funding's sake. We are committed to our mission and must find alignment between funder priorities and our work. For example, the current AI craze has opportunities that fit our strengths and our commitment to advancing openness, integrity, and trustworthiness of research. 

As COS and OSF evolve in the coming year, our focus will be on making strategic choices that strengthen the sustainability and resilience of our work. With good stewardship and partnership, these changes will meet the destabilized moment and emerge from it with a more resilient, effective, and sustainable foundation to continue to build on the momentum of the open science and metascience movements from the last decade.