Open science actions
Read about which actions you can take to foster Open Science.
About
Zoltan Dienes is a professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. His main field of research is in Bayesian Statistics. However, he also has a great interest in Open Science, especially in registered reports. At the SIPS conference 2023 he gave an opening talk in which he explained which actions he takes for Open Science. You can watch the video of the talk here.
Action 1
Do not review for any journal run by a for-profit: This action can also include to not only cite papers published in for-profit journals but look for equivalent papers published in non-profit journals and cite them as well. Or support alternative publishing models in another way.
Note: Of course, Zoltan himself also says that this action is easy for him to take because he’s having a position for life as a professor. He acknowledges that this action is not easy to take for some of us.
Action 2
Set up a Peer Community In (PCI) in your substantive area of psychology: This refers to this entry in the category Open Science Resources. There are already some communities for the field of biology but communities in the field of psychology are currently underrepresented. By setting up a community you contribute to making reviewing and publishing free for everyone.
Action 3
Submit a registered report to PCI RR: Support the existing PCI RR system by making use of it as an author.
Action 4
Science as theory testing: Make absolutely sure that your study provides conditions under which if the theory was wrong it would likely be shown wrong. Whenever hypothesis testing, ensure there is a scientifically justified effect of interest so that there are grounds for asserting no effect.
Action 5
On an institutional level: Hire a reproducibility statistician: In his department Zoltan Dienes hired a “Reproducibility Statistician” (Reny Baykova). Reny checks and certifies the computational reproducibility of any to-be-submitted paper by a University of Sussex psychologist. She then writes a report using a “Reproducibility Report Template” which includes questions like “Is the raw data used in the analysis shared publicly? If No, why not?; “Is the pre-processing of the raw data reproducible? If No, why not?; “ Does the shared data include a description of the structure of the data (i.e., a Metadata file)? If Yes, how detailed is the Metadata file?” etc. The report is deposited in OSF separately to the paper, which the paper can link to. The abstract of the paper can then say “The statistics, figures, and tables have been certified computationally reproducible by an independent statistician.” Reny is not a co-author on the papers to maintain independence.
Please note that the reproducibility statistician does not check the studies regarding if the hypotheses make any sense in the first place. It is just about computational reproducibility of the analyses.