CORES Impact

The Center's 2025 key milestones and initiatives included:

• The fifth annual CORES Symposium, held on May 20, 2025, convened an impressive group of exceptional educators, innovators, and thought leaders who explored the transformative potential of this year’s focus on “Connecting Open Science and Open Education.” The Symposium effectively launched our “Living Textbooks” initiative in collaboration with MIT Press to bring innovations from Stanford classrooms and share them openly with the public under Creative Commons licenses. Matthew Rascoff’s remarks speak to our intended impact with Living Textbooks, modeled on open source software communities.
• The Annual Open Science Awards: Recognized and elevated individuals and teams exemplifying excellence in transparent, reproducible research, amplifying high-impact open science projects, and reinforcing a culture of rigor, transparency, and collaboration across campus and beyond. CORES awards prizes for senior faculty (Open Science Champions) as well as grad students and trainees (Open Science Innovators), who represent the future of these scientific fields. Building on the success of our open science prizes, we offered the Stanford Open Source Software Prize for the second year, honoring both breakthroughs and veteran projects that have been underrepresented in their impact.
• OpenSource@Stanford, the Open Source Projects Office (OSPO) for the university, delivered year-round workshops, technical talks, and meetups, accelerating adoption of open-source tools and reproducible workflows while building a sustained, interdisciplinary community committed to implementing open science practices. The OSPO has emerged as a highly regarded and sought-after center of excellence by Stanford researchers looking to release their work as open source, and we have delivered numerous consultations, including developing new guidance on funding, governance, project sustainability, and open source business models.
• Taking the Pulse of the Planet initiative: Taking the Pulse of the Planet aims to build an international network of sensors, sensor data, and people to create world-leading data models for our environment to inform better stewardship and a sustainable future, beginning with freshwater in California but inclusive of other research in oceans, hazards, and carbon fluxes. CORES crafted the open science strategy for this initiative and works closely with PI Rosemary Knight and the impressive community of researchers she has convened. This is not just a research project; it is a platform for many future projects, and CORES has established best practices for data sharing in an open data enclave that allows for radically open collaboration, reproducibility, and public engagement beyond Stanford.
• HELIOS Open: CORES provides direct staffing support to the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship, a consortium of 100+ colleges and universities dedicated to realizing a more open, trustworthy, and reproducible research ecosystem.  HELIOS Open is one of the only organizations well-positioned to tackle the incentivization challenges that have limited open science adoption by leading change through its membership and collective action.