As mentioned in another post, sharing the materials you have used to conduct a study can help others to replicate your work. Replication is important because it allows the research community test how robust the findings we have generated are, and sharing materials makes it much, much easier to replicate others’ work. In addition, by freely sharing testing materials, we can cut down on research waste, as it means that someone who wants to replicate your study does not have to spend time, for example, searching for the version of the questionnaire you used, or building their own version of the task you used.

However, one way in which another researcher can be prevented from reproducing your methods and attempting to replicate your findings despite you sharing your testing materials is if those materials are not ‘open source’ – for example if you make a task openly available, but that task is programmed in E-Prime, which can only be used if you pay a license fee. While many hallucinations researchers work in well-resourced institutions, many may not, and these researchers may not be able to fund the licence fees for software like E-Prime. Thus, these researchers would face an extra barrier of trying to replicate studies that have employed paid-for software.

In addition, there is a moral/political argument to be made about how happy we are about for-profit companies generating revenue from our (typically) tax-payer funded work. But I won’t get into that here.

There can be some challenges to using some free/open source software (e.g., it may be more clunky than paid-for software). But wherever possible, we should try to use free/open source materials.