Collaboratory Science Research Institute

The Home of Sovereign Science

CoSci is the original Lifecycle Open Science program, serving the community of unaffiliated researchers, STEM professionals, inventors, and citizen scientists who work outside the sponsored research pipeline. We support sovereign science through grant hosting, project management, and affiliation.

Working with Collaboratory Science

Process

We host research grants and support investigators through the full project lifecycle, from pre-award services through to post-closeout research administration. Candidates can apply for membership below to begin proposal development on eligible solicitations. We will work closely with members to draft budgets and proposal documents, handle the submission process, and manage the award. We negotiate access to facilities, equipment, and research assets through the Research Exchange platform (REX) as needed.

Eligibility

CoSci is an inclusive organization that provides affiliation to anybody who has the capacity to contribute to the production of scientific knowledge. We do not impose restrictions based on age, credentials, or location. Members may contribute to our research agenda through administrative roles, such as IRB support or project management; basic and applied research roles, including investigators and research assistants; peer review; and data wrangling.

Collaboratory Science Policies

CoSci registers all research activities that it supports through its Research Administration Office.

This rule encompasses all sponsored projects, including meetings, classified studies, and work that leads to protected IP. Restricted research may be registered without data or sensitive details, as negotiated with the sponsor.

Selection

PIs may choose their own platform(s) to report project details, such as hypothesis, methods, data, results, and the access and storage plan for data and published materials.

During proposal development, PIs select the service or set of tools that they plan to use to preregister their project. This selection process will produce an Open Source Science Plan, which will be added to the Facilities statement and Budget Justification portions of the proposal.

Management & Oversight

Upon award notification or transfer, an Open Source Science advisor will be assigned to the project.

The advisor will work closely with the research team to provide support and guidance in OSS best practices, and to ensure that CoSci's institutional commitments are met through the project lifecycle, including post-project asset management.

Costs & Budgeting Guidance

The standard budget item for OS projects is $2,500 per year and $10,000 in the final year to cover costs of quarterly reporting, coordinating and responding to peer review, data management, and null result analysis. Post-project expenses will cover the cost of open access publication, long-term data storage, and curation of project outputs. This may include special provisions for FAIR, CARE, TRUST, HIPAA, Indigenous Knowledge, embargoed and/or classified assets.

Platform Guidance

CoSci will periodically review its preregistration policies, with input from its community of practice.

This policy framework will be registered and archived on GitHub, forked to track changes over time.

Framework Commitments

Our reflexive research activities model OS practices and our methods are led by FAIR and TRUST principles. We follow the guidance outlined in the Beijing Declaration on Research Data and our ethical and responsible research commitments are aligned with JEDI+A and CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Our protocols are registered with OSF, ARTiFACTS, and GitHub.

Open Science (OS) practices range from sharing published findings after an embargo period to engaged research on a fully open platform, with the former providing more protection to intellectual property and quality control, and the latter offering more access and input. Our projects deliver transparency whenever possible, and we ensure quality control through registered protocols, which prevent changes to tools, methods, and commitments.

FAIR

Our data, process, and findings are curated to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable whenever possible. FAIR artifacts generally require time for processing, review, and posting to the project website; however, we are obligated to share our project's knowledge, tools, and resources with the research community to the extent possible and reasonable. Findable material is Accessible on the website. Our methods model Interoperable good practices in research, and our products are delivered on Open Access (OA) platforms for Re-use.

CARE

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance assert human-in-the-loop intentionality in sociotechnical systems by centering the role of the individual or community within the research enterprise.Collective Benefit: Our project will extract knowledge from the UVA community of practice (COP), and then return it in the form of collaboratory frameworks that meet the stated needs and interests of the COP. Authority to Control: We will develop metrics that enable the researchers to determine how their work, their effort, their curiosity, and their outputs should be defined and valued.Responsibility: We apply rigorous OA approaches and active, ongoing engagement with campus stakeholders to share our resources and learnings, and to provide complementary support that promotes the interest and well-being of the COP.Ethics: In addition to applying JEDI+A, FAIR, TRUST, and data sharing best practices, we treat research ethics as a management tool that promotes well-being across the COP, and prevents fraud and misuse, which is frequently unintentional--particularly when multiple disciplinary customs come together in the collaboratory.

TRUST

TRUST Principles provide guidance for digital knowledge stewardship, and reinforce other best practices in data science, information science, AI systems, and sociotechnical research. We support Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, and Technology through the curation of project journals.

JEDI+A

Justice: We express our commitments to Justice, Equality, Diversity, and Accessibility by developing and promoting the collaboratory as a specialized research infrastructure that embraces partnerships, ideas, and methods that differ and even diverge from the status quo. Equity: We observe equity by delivering opportunity, knowledge, trust, and authority to our staff and Collabolier partners based not on the individual's professional credential or status, but on their direct contribution to our work, as well as the potential downstream impact that work might have on the individual and/or community.Inclusion: We adopt Articles 2-4 of the SDS Inclusive Excellence Plan (Articles 1 and 5 extend beyond the scope and capacity of our project to enable). Article 2: Continuously promote and strengthen an inclusive community of trust, a culture of integrity, mutual respect, excellence, collaboration, and innovation. Article 3: Enable faculty, staff, and students to work across traditional boundaries and prepare servant-leaders to shed new light on enduring and profound questions in our diverse community and globally connected world. Article 4: Be a community that consistently lives its values and ensures that our systems enable our students, faculty, and staff to do their best work.

DMP

Our data management plans can be accessed at GitHub and by request.

IRB

Our projects are reviewed by IRB consultants per sponsor requirements and risk to research participants.

Apply for Membership

Collaboratory Spotlight

IGDORE USA

IGDORE USA is the US-based operational arm of the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education, based in Sweden. IGDORE USA operates as fully independent research non-profit within the United States.

Photo by Brad Mann on Unsplash.

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