David Mellor leads the policy and incentive programs at the Center for Open Science that reward increased transparency and reduced bias in scientific research. These programs include polices for publishers and funders in the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP: cos.io/top); preregistration to increase clarity in study design and analysis (cos.io/prereg); Registered Reports to address publication bias (cos.io/rr); and badges to signal and reward increased transparency (cos.io/badges).

Before coming to the Center for Open Science, David worked with citizen scientists to design and implement authentic scientific research (collaborativescience.org) and as the Director of Advising in the Division of Life Sciences at Rutgers University. His dissertation and research background is in citizen science and behavioral ecology of cichlid fishes.