Open Science: Moving from Possible to Expected to Required

A decade ago, University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek cofounded an unusual nonprofit, the Center for Open Science. It’s been a cheerleader, enabler, and nagger to convince scientists that making their methods, data, and papers available to others makes for better science. 

The Center for Open Science has built tools to register analysis plans and hypotheses before data are collected. It campaigns for authors and journals to state explicitly whether and where data and other research materials are available. Gradually, practices that were considered fringe are becoming mainstream. The White House declared 2023 the Year of Open Science. 

Nosek refers to the pyramid of culture change as his strategy to push for reforms: first make a better practice possible, then easy, expected, rewarding, and finally, required. It starts with building infrastructure, then experience, reward systems, and ultimately policy. 

In this podcast, Brian Nosek joins host Monya Baker to discuss the movement of scientific ideals toward reality.

Resources:

• Center for Open Science

• Transparency and Openness Guidelines

• Reproducibility Project: Psychology

• Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology

• Pyramid of Social Change