Open Science Practices
What are open science practices?
Open science is the movement to make the whole research life cycle open and accessible with the aim to increase transparency, accessibility of knowledge and rigor. Open science practices include preregistrations, sharing research materials and data, and publishing open access.
The Center for Open Science is a non-profit organization aiming to increase the openness, integrity and reproducibility of scientific research, founded by Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Spies. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is an open source website that facilitates open collaboration in research and facilitates preregistration, collaborations and preprints.
Preregistration
Preregistration means to preregister your research questions, hypotheses and analysis plan before collecting your data. By submitting your research plan into a registry, you enable others to review your hypotheses and increase transparency and quality of your research.
This does not mean that your ideas cannot change anymore. If things go differently than anticipated, it is easy to state that in your paper later (“contrary to expectations, we found that”; “In addition to the analyses we pre-registered, we also did…”).
Types of preregistration:
- Preregistration (unreviewed preregistration)
- Registered reports (reviewed preregistration)
- Registered replication reports
Some more information on the different types of preregistration.
Tools
- As predicted (preregistration through a simple and structured template)
- OSF (various formats and templates available)
Templates
- OSF: Templates of OSF Registration Forms
- OSF: Secondary Data Preregistration (template and instructions for registering a research project that uses an existing dataset)
- OSF: preregistration for qualitative research template (based on Haven & van Grootel: Preregistering qualitative research)
Open data
Publicly posting your cleaned (or raw) anonymous data along with a codebook that explains the different variables in your dataset. More and more journals provide badges on your published article, if you make your data and materials openly available. If you decide to make your data open, you must state this in your IRB materials and in the consent form for participants. Participants must need to agree that data will be shared openly.
Open materials
Similarly to open data, in order to increase your transparency and reproducibility of your research, you can decide to publicly share your study materials, such as your consent form, measures, surveys or questionnaires. Also here, some journals provide badges if you make your materials open.
Open access
Publish your article open access. See for more information on open access here
Registered reports
This is a form of publication in which your article will be accepted for publication in a journal based on the pre-registered study design and analysis plan, before data collection. For an overview of journals that offer registered reports see here.