Encouraging Open Science Practices in Minority Serving Institutions

We will be providing funding in the range of $1000 to $5000 to researchers from under-represented institutions.
ORFG initiated a funding call during the pilot phase of the study. Participants whose proposals are above the quality bar will be randomly assigned with equal probability to one of two experimental conditions:

1. Participants will receive a grant equal to the amount they requested in the proposal.
2. Participants will not receive any grant.

Our pilot aims to test the hypothesis that targeted interventions, even with modest funding amounts, can kickstart a broader movement towards open science practices at traditionally underrepresented institutions. To evaluate this hypothesis, ORFG will initiate a funding call during the pilot phase of the study with a budget ranging from $1000 to $5000. Students, faculty, and staff at traditionally underrepresented institutions can propose activities in three categories – infrastructure support, capacity building, and awareness – to promote open science practices.

At each deadline, following recent work, proposals will be evaluated and rated as either above or below a certain threshold, and awards will be randomly allocated among the proposals that are rated as above the threshold.

We expect to be able to fund about 20-40 proposals through this award program. Assuming we get about double the number of applications (about 80) and that 75% of them are above the bar, we expect to have another 30-35 proposals that could act as a control group.

2024-02-01

2024-08-30

We will evaluate four sets of outcomes: (a) attitudes towards OS collected via surveys, (b) observed adoption of OSPs (collected through a quantitative index), (c) responses to data/code sharing requests and (d) citations to publications.

Attitudes towards OS collected via surveys: The surveys will examine attitudes towards open science on a subjective scale (survey to be developed).
Responses to data/code sharing requests: we hope to run email audit studies to measure the willingness of researchers to share data from published research.
The bibliometric data for observed adoption of OSPs and citations to publications will be collected after a period of 1 year of disbursement of grants.
We will obtain these results by asking confirmed participants to fill out an optional survey detailing attitudes toward open science.

The study will have a between subject design with 1 factor (funding received) and 2 levels (funded, not funded).

1. The ORFG will issue funding calls (using their own funding) in the range of $1000-$5000 with two designated dates during the 2023-24 academic year. The scope of the funding call will cover the following activities.
a. Infrastructure: the development of new infrastructure or improvements to existing ones, improvement of governance mechanisms of existing infrastructure, creation of institutional infrastructure capacity, i.e., collaborative makerspaces (open hardware), etc.
b. Capacities: proposals aiming to develop capacities and training for open scholarship practices. For instance, seminars on output sharing policies and licensing (manuscripts, data, et al.); training on data and software management skills; capacities for scholarly communication, and further engagement with society.
c. Awareness: proposals to raise awareness of open scholarship practices and incentives like building and sustaining community-led events, i.e., hackathons, communities of practice, conferences, seminars, summer schools, etc. Or events to discuss institutional capacities and incentives to enable open scholarship practice on topics like Review, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) policies within academic institutions.

2. The first funding call will open in August 2023 and accept proposals till September 15th, 2023. The second call will accept proposals between October 2023 and December 2023. Students, faculty, and staff at traditionally underrepresented institutions can apply for awards and propose activities to promote open science practices. Applicants will be asked to provide a list of 20 researchers who would benefit from the proposed activities.

3. At each deadline, following recent work, proposals will be evaluated and rated as either above or below a certain threshold, and awards will be randomly allocated among the proposals that are rated as above the threshold.

4. They expect to be able to fund about 20-40 proposals through this award program. Assuming they get about double the number of applications (about 80) and that 75% of them are above the bar, we expect to have another 30-35 proposals that could act as a control group.

We will use simple randomization. Each proposal that is rated above the predetermined quality threshold will have an equal chance of being assigned to either treatment (funded) or control (not funded) groups. The randomization will be performed using a computer.

The primary unit of randomization in this study will be the Proposal.

Yes

80 - 120 proposals

The subject population is researchers from traditionally underrepresented academic institutions and will include research active members -- faculty, Ph.D. students, etc. The maximum number of subjects planned for the study is 1200 researchers.

We expect to be able to fund about 20-40 proposals through this award program. So, the treatment group is 20-40 proposals with 300-600 treated researchers. There will be a comparable number of control proposals and researchers for the pilot study.

Data Sharing: With treated 80 clusters, we can identify an increase of 25% or above in willingness to share data. Citations: With 80 clusters, we can only identify effect sizes that are 30% or higher (with 0.8 between cluster variation).