What is Open Science? And how did we end up here?

Open science (or open research) is an umbrella term for a group of practices that, when adopted by a researcher, should result in that researcher conducting their work in a more transparent manner. This should be done in a way that generates more robust, reliable, or trustworthy findings.

For example, we know that when we run small studies, the findings we generate are unreliable and noisy. A nice example of this is given in this paper by Schonbrodt and Perugini (2013) where they demonstrate how ‘noisy’ estimates of typical correlations (i.e., r = .26) are when you employ small samples (see Figure 1 of that paper). Thus, one open science practice is simply running studies that employ larger samples (when I say ‘simply’ here I mean that this is conceptually a simple idea – larger samples allow us to estimate effects with greater precision. I very much understand that recruiting large samples of participants is not simple in terms of logistics et cetera).

Since 2012, at least at the time of writing, a growing number of psychology researchers have been adopting open science practices. And this stems from a series of events or issues that began around 2012/2013, which highlighted the fact that the evidence base psychologists had been generating was not as trustworthy as it should have been. The history of these events and the responses they elicited are excellently covered in a talk by Gillad Feldman. And rather than re-inventing the wheel, I have embedded his talk below. So, if you want to know more about the history of the open science movement, please have a watch of this talk.