CREOS is a catalyst for collaborative evidence-based research about the best ways disparate communities can participate in scholarship with minimal bias or barriers.

As part of the MIT Libraries, CREOS leverages MIT’s longstanding emphasis on innovation, entrepreneurship, and open sharing of educational and research materials. 

Research scope

• Incentives and barriers to equitable and open scholarship
• Impacts of equitable and open scholarship
• Economic models for equitable and open scholarship

Current research activities

• • Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship supported by the Institute for Museum and Library Services 
  • Integrating Open and Equitable Research into Open Science supported by the National Science Foundation
  • Generative AI and Research Integrity supported by MIT
  • Postdoctoral research program in equitable and open scholarship supported by the Mellon Foundation
  • Designing Review and Evaluation for Open Scholarship

Learn more about current and previous research activities.

Events

• Oct 22, 2024. Open Data at MIT event, co-sponsored by MIT Libraries and School of Science. Learn more on the Libraries website.

News

• Sep 27, 2023. The National Science Foundation awards MIT Libraries an Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant of $300,000 to explore a transformative model for evaluating open science policies, practices, and interventions. The project is a collaboration between MIT Libraries’ CREOS and Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR).
• Sep 25, 2023. The Mellon Foundation awards MIT Libraries $500,000 for a second cohort in the postdoctoral research program on equitable and open scholarship. Beginning in 2024, CREOS will hire postdocs for two-year appointments, during which they will work with MIT faculty advisors and MIT Libraries staff to develop research projects under CREOS’ areas of focus.
• Sep 18, 2023. MIT Libraries was selected from a competitive process to receive exploratory funding from MIT to write an impact paper and host a follow-up workshop on “Generative AI and Research Integrity,” led by Micah Altman, Chris Bourg, Sue Kriegsman, Nick Lindsay (MIT Press), Heather Sardis, and Erin Stalberg. 
• Jan 12, 2023. CREOS seeks MIT undergraduate student Research Assistants to contribute to “Understanding Citation Imbalances and Gendered Citation Practices.” Research assistants will contribute to data science aimed to study how citation imbalances might be amplified or reduced due to online visibility. Research assistants work directly with the Postdoctoral Researcher. For more information, or to apply, see the position posting.
• Nov 29, 2022. CREOS seeks MIT undergraduate student Research Assistants to contribute to “Data Mining and Visualization for Open and Inclusive Scholarship.” Research assistants will contribute to web mining, social media mining, and data mining aimed to measure open and inclusive scholarship. Research assistants work directly with the Principal Investigator. For more information, or to apply, see the position posting.
• Oct 31, 2022. CREOS postdocs’ research featured in Bibliotech, “A Glimpse into CREOS Research.”
• Oct 29, 2022. CREOS presented a short paper on project design for the Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship project at the 85th ASIST annual conference, in Pittsburgh, themed “Crisis, Transition, Resilience: Re-Imagining an Information-Resilient Society.
• Oct 14, 2022. IMLS-supported Design paper published: “Designing Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship.”
• Sept 9, 2022. CREOS presented an abstract of research on diversity and inclusion in editorial boards for the Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship project at the 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication.
• July 25, 2022. Dr. Micah Altman’s CNI Briefing on the IMLS Community Tracking Indicators project.
• July 18, 2022. White paper: “Reproducible and Attributable Material Science Workflows” in collaboration with Ye Li and Sara Wilson (former CREOS UROP, current Material Science PhD candidate) posted to MetaArxiv.
• Jun 1, 2022. CREOS presented on project plans at the annual ACRL-NEC conference, themed “Connection, Disconnection, Reconnection: How Are We Building Community Now?”
• Jan 31, 2022. The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information published in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics.
• Dec 26, 2021. Preprints and Pandemics: Interventions into the Dynamic System of Scholarly Communication released on MetaArxiv.
• Aug 23, 2021. “Data Literacy for Entrepreneurs” published by ALA Press.
• July 30, 2021. The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awards MIT $321,557 to create measures based on open bibliometric data, web and social-media mining, and community input. The project, submitted by CREOS, titled Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship will produce standardized indicators that describe the volume and types of open science output systematically over time.

See previous news items.

Visiting scholar program

• 2018, Philip Cohen, PhD, Professor, Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park
• 2022, Ashley J. Thomas, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology at Harvard University

About CREOS

• About CREOS: Meet the team, collaborators, and learn how to engage with CREOS.