The Center for Open Science occasionally hosts virtual hack-a-thons, 1 to 4 hour events, focused on addressing an inefficiency or dysfunctional practice in the research culture.  These hack-a-thons are concrete, task-focused sessions to generate data, review policies, or conduct outreach to move the needle on improving the research culture.  The typical session has a 10-20 minute introduction and training for the task, and then an open period in which participants contribute to the hack-a-thon objective.  Sessions are managed via Zoom and open docs and spreadsheets for tracking and coordinating the teamwork.

A current priority is reviewing and coding journal and funder policies for their promotion of rigor and transparency following the TOP Guidelines (http://cos.io/top/).  The scoring project gives journals a rating of their current policy to populate a database of TOP Factor scores (http://topfactor.org/).  These scores are used to provide researchers with information about which journals are progressive on promoting transparency and rigor.  They also provide the basis for a social campaign to encourage editors to improve their transparency policies in line with the progressive actors in their fields.  And, finally, the dataset enables tracking progress in changing the research culture with improving policies by journals and funders.

The first event will be on September 18th from 8a PT/11a ET/3p UTC to 10a PT/1p ET/5p UTC and it will focus on scoring policies of psychology journals.

If you are interested in participating in this or future hack-a-thons, please enter your contact information here and we will email you details about the events as they are scheduled.