The Movement Toward Open Science

By Melanie B. Fessinger

Have you ever read an article that said something like, “participants completed a 25-item survey,” but the authors never explained what those 25 items were? Or read a study where the authors only analyzed a subsample, but you weren’t exactly sure why? Or read a paper where all of the authors’ hypotheses were supported, despite a lack of theoretical rationale that would have predicted those patterns? Or had an idea about how to reanalyze authors’ data, but could not get ahold of them? These are among many of the issues that open science is attempting to resolve.
 
Open science is a movement towards accessibility and transparency in the research enterprise. It aims to make science more open and reproducible. It does not describe a single behavior but rather an approach to conducting research.
 
And it is gaining popularity. In a 2019 report, the Center for Open Science sampled 69 psychology departments and nearly 2,000 faculty and found that 35% had accounts on the Open Science Framework.[1] It was particularly popular among social psychologists and younger faculty.

What are the benefits of open science?
 
Open science has benefits for researchers, for fields of study, and for the public at large. At an individual level, open science can help researchers gain visibility through higher citation counts and increased media coverage.[2] It can also help factor into funding acquisition, as some granting institutions (including NIH and NSF) recommend or even require open sharing of funded research. At a field level, open science can promote more confidence in published research findings by allowing for carefully planned studies, rigorous peer review, and opportunities for direct replication. On a societal level, some argue that publicly-funded research should be available to the public, which should both increase the spread of scientific knowledge as well as the trust in science as in institution.[3]
 
How can we participate in open science?
 
There are several ways to move toward making our science more open. Although open science is an approach rather than a single behavior, there are several steps researchers can take to promoting openness and transparency in the research process. Some popular websites to complete these steps are: AsPredicted (aspredicted.org), Open Science Framework (osf.io), and Nature Scientific Data (nature.com/sdata).

• Preregistration allows researchers to publicly explain their research questions, articulate their a priori hypotheses, detail their design and methodology, and create an analysis plan before conducting their study. Preregistrations preserve a record of the researchers’ plan before data collection has begun. It attempts to mitigate issues associated with “p-hacking,” “HARKing,” and “researcher degrees of freedom.”[4] It still allows for flexibility and new discovery, because researchers can adjust their plans as needed by providing justification and can conduct exploratory analyses as long as they indicate their intention to do so. AsPredicted and the Open Science Framework provide templates for the information one can include in a pre-registration on their websites, which include general templates, templates for planned replications, and templates specialized for specific types of research (e.g., pre-registration for social psychology research[5]).

 

• Researchers can also have open access materials. Open materials can facilitate direct replications of the procedure and data analysis by independent researchers.  

 

• Researchers can also have open access data. They will have to plan for this in advance to ensure that assurances to confidentiality are true, that participants have consented to this use of their data, and that they have approval to do so from their human research protection programs. Open data will allow independent researchers to reproduce analyses.

 

• Open access articles allow research reports to be available to the public. The current publication model often puts articles behind paywalls which block access to scientific knowledge without an institutional affiliation or a high cost. Researchers can use open access articles to make their research more widely accessible to broader audiences. Although authors or institutions may have to pay additional fees to make articles open access, some journals are entirely open access (e.g., Applied Psychology, Psychological Science) and some journals may publish open access articles without charging a fee to do so. 

 
Some journals offer badges for open science practices, which appear on the published article and alert readers to the availability of information. In fact, Law and Human Behavior was the first APA-published journal to offer badges for open materials, open data, and pre-registration!
 
 Where can I learn more about open science?
 
Open science is a movement that is gaining traction in psychology and science at large. Although open practices may not be possible or advisable for every research project, it is still important to strive for accessibility and transparency when it is. This article provides a brief—but certainly not comprehensive—overview that can hopefully spark readers’ interest in open science. To learn even more about open science practices, the following resources provide a good starting place:

• APA Science Student Council’s “An Introduction to Open Science”
• Center for Open Science Blog
• Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

[1] Nosek, B. (2019). The rise of open science in psychology, a preliminary report. https://cos.io/blog/rise-open-science-psychology-preliminary-report/

[2] McKiernan et al. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed.

[3] Fecher B., Friesike S. (2014) Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought. In: Bartling S., Friesike S. (eds) Opening Science. Springer, Cham.

[4] Simmons, J.P., Nelson, L.D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1359-1366.

[5] Van’t Veer, A.E. & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2016). Pre-registration in social psychology—a discussion and suggested template. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 67, 2-12.



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