Anyone can do post-publication peer review.

Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.

Anyone can do forensic metascience.

Anyone can sleuth.

However, investigating the integrity of the published scientific literature often requires domain-specific knowledge that not everyone will have. This open source project is a collection of guides written and maintained by publication integrity experts to distribute this domain-specific knowledge so that others can participate in post-publication peer review.

COSIG currently hosts 32 guides and was last updated on 24 November 2025. Guides can be downloaded as individual PDFs. A combined PDF with all guides included can be downloaded here.

Suggestions to improve COSIG can be submitted by opening an issue on COSIG’s GitHub repo or by emailing admin@cosig.net. Before contributing, read COSIG’s Contributing and Code of Conduct pages.

Table of contents

Basics
General guides
Biology and medicine
Materials science and engineering
Mathematics, statistics and computer science

License and citation

Except where otherwise indicated, all material in COSIG is available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. That means that you are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as COSIG is properly cited. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

Citing COSIG itself

APA style citation
(2025, June 4). Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ
MLA style citation
“Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.” OSF, 4 June 2025. Web.
Chicago style citation
2025. “Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.” OSF. June 5. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ.
BibTeX entry
@misc{cosig,
  title={Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides},
  url={https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2KDEZ},
  publisher={OSF},
  year={2025},
  month={June}
}

Citing a commentary explaining the motivation behind COSIG

APA style citation
Richardson, R. (2025). The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding participation in post-publication peer review. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777
MLA style citation
Richardson, R. The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding Participation in Post-publication Peer Review. Zenodo, 4 June 2025, doi:10.5281/zenodo.15564777.
Chicago style citation
Richardson, Reese. “The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding Participation in Post-publication Peer Review”. Zenodo, June 4, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777.
BibTex entry
@article{cosig_commentary,
  author={Richardson, Reese},
  title={The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG): Expanding participation in post-publication peer review},
  month={June},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Zenodo},
  doi={10.5281/zenodo.15564777},
  url={https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15564777}
}

Contributors

The following individuals have contributed to COSIG in some way: