Nici Pfeiffer is the Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pfeiffer joined the COS team in 2015 and is responsible for guiding COS products through the product life cycle. Her focus is on making it possible for communities of researchers to share their work, and show their work to advance the transparency and reproducibility of science through the advancement of the Open Science Framework (OSF). Pfeiffer's team builds the infrastructure to enable open science practices in research workflows as part of a broader Open Science culture shift movement calling for openness, transparency, and reproducibility of research. Striking the balance in infrastructure design to overcome the hurdles to adopting new behaviors of sharing data, preregistering study plans, and reporting the outcomes of studies, with the need for easy, streamlined workflows that don't add burden and duplication to the researcher.
Her priority is to engage internal and external stakeholders to understand needs and challenges for adopting open science best practices, identify opportunities, and partner to set strategies. Focusing on a strategy where data and metrics inform the user experience needs, developing products to solve tangible problems, and formulating iterative development roadmaps to fulfill long- and short-term milestones. Collaborating with researchers, institutional librarians, research funders, and scholarly publishers to assess workflows and burdens to define new product features and enhancements to facilitate adoption of open science practices throughout the research lifecycle.
Pfeiffer serves on the Crossref Board of Directors and is a member of the Preprint Metadata Advisory Commmittee, is a co-chair for the NIH's Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) Community Engagment committee, is a FAIR Workflows Project Advisor, and served as a founding steering committee member for Invest in Open Infrastructure. Pfeiffer received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where she is a member of the school's first class of engineers to graduate. While studying at VCU she met her husband, a fellow mechanical engineer. Together they have three amazing kids - surely at least one will be an engineer!
