October webinar: Open Science 101

Dear RP friends,   

Research Office webinar season has officially begun! We kicked off with a webinar on Open Science 101 that took place on 21st of October. 

Our speaker was Dr. Nicolás Alessandroni, a Postdoctoral Fellow working at the Concordia Infant Research Laboratory (Concordia University, Canada). His work explores the intersection of open science and infant research. He earned his PhD in Psychology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), where he investigated the relationship between object use and the early development of conceptual thinking using an ecological-enactive approach to cognition. In 2023, he was honored with the prestigious Jean Piaget Society’s Doctoral Dissertation Award (USA). Dr. Alessandroni co-leads the Concordia Open Science Working Group with Dr. Byers-Heinlein and has delivered multiple open science training sessions.

At the beginning, our Education Responsible Laura Kirin briefly introduced the speaker after which he invited participants to introduce themselves as well. The webinar itself began with the general aims: providing participants with an introduction to Open Science and helping them consider how to include Open Science practices in their research. Additional aims were: pointing them to the resources they might consult to learn more about Open Science, pre-registration, and raising awareness about the increasing importance of Open Science worldwide. The presentation he showed is based on a series of workshops on Open Science, available at http://osf.io/5x8yk, and the slides from our webinar can be found here: https://osf.io/432sd. 

What is Open Science?

Open Science can be seen as a social movement, epistemological perspective, ethical framework, set of practices, tool ecosystem, political aim (e.g., Horizon Europe Program), a cultural turn… In the words of  Jeffrey N. Rouder, Open Science is endeavoring to preserve the rights of others to reach independent conclusions about your data and work; or as Melanie Imming put it: Open Science is just science done right. Open Science requires transformation of core values: transparency, sharing, participation, cooperation, responsibility, reproducibility, inclusion…

Even though the research is funded with public money, it is not published for everyone. Further, whenever we question: how the instrument in the research was designed and how good it was, have the data been wrangled, what was the rationale for the specific analysis, would the results stay the same if it was analyzed differently, or if we had a similar dataset – what could be the outcome; we encounter not enough access. Possibly the most important part of accessible research to anyone is that the research topics are ones with high impact and thus should not be hidden. 

Open Science Practices

Some of the main Open Science practices include preprints, open access, open data, and pre-registration.

Preprints are scientific manuscripts uploaded by the authors to a public server or repository (e.g., PsyArXiv is a very useful repository for psychology preprints). The preprint has not yet been accepted by a journal, is time-stamped, not peer-reviewed and often published immediately. Preprints are useful since researchers are aware that we have published something (proof of productivity). They increase visibility of our research and citation (e.g., integration in Google Scholar), and we receive feedback, which somehow mend a long time from submission to publication and potential publishing time render of results with outdated or little social relevance. 

Open Access Publishing (OA) is a way of publishing papers that are fully and immediately available online at no cost for readers. However, there are costs associated with publishing, and Open Access comes in several types: green, gold/hybrid and diamond). In Green OA, the authors publish in a paywalled journal and upload the postprint version in a personal website (e.g., ResearchGate) or repository (e.g., PsyArxiv), while the costs of publication are covered by the publisher. In Gold OA, manuscripts are available for free and authors retain copyright, but they need to pay for this (it is free for readers, but not for authors). In Diamond OA, research papers are immediately available for free and authors retain copyright (it is both free for readers and for authors). However, Diamond OA is mostly done by non-commercial publishers such as universities, academic societies, funding agencies… 

Open Data is another important practice. It implies the idea of FAIR Data: F – findable; A – accessible; I – interoperable; R – re-usable data in order to hinder reproducibility and replicability.

Pre-registration is a research plan that is usually created before the study and submitted to a public registry (e.g., OSF, Zenodo, GitHub) with study plan and analysis plan. It prevents p-hacking and HARKing, minimizes biases and selective reporting and pushes us to think through each part clearly from the start. p-hacking occurs when researchers collect or select data or statistical analyses until nonsignificant results become significant. Hypothesizing after results are known (HARKing) refers to the process of evaluating an existing data set with a set of a priori hypotheses, and then either dropping those that were not supported and/or adding as a priori hypotheses relationships discovered to have been significant in that same data set.

Dr. Alessandroni concluded that Open Science practices are complex, and we should start by doing one thing, and start simple. Further, he stressed out the importance of being involved in such projects. One of our participants, Tamara, added that incorporating Open Science into educational contexts would be very helpful, as students often lack the information needed to understand the rationale behind researchers’ decisions. 

EFPSA Research Office webinars continue – on Nov 26th at 19 CEST, we will be talking about Men and psychotherapy with dr. Fred Rabinowitz.