Promoting open research skills and practices – Research and Knowledge Exchange Awards 2024

I work as a senior lecturer in the Criminology with Psychology group - but as my research background is in psychology, I am a member of the Centre for Psychological Research (PsyCen). I have founded several projects relating to open research within PsyCen, and I also engage with open research practices throughout my own research, as well as in an editorial capacity as the section editor for the Methods and Open Practices section of the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

The main motivation for engaging with open methods throughout my research and teaching is that I am passionate about strong research methods, and I believe that this is something that should filter through in our own research endeavours, as well as in our pedagogy. I believe that open science is only useful if colleagues and students are encouraged to get on board with key ideas, which is why much of my work centres around staff engagement and incorporating open science in teaching. Some of the ways in which I have done that are outlined below.

ORES

Within my research centre PsyCen I lead the “Open Research and Scholarship” initiative (ORES). This aims to promote open and reproducible science and scholarship across PsyCen, for example by providing resources and support for researchers who want to use open research practices in their work. Through the initiative I have worked with colleagues to incorporate the training of open research skills into their teaching (for example as an element of the dissertation for Masters courses) as well as providing advice for researchers with questions about open research.

Consortium

For the past few years I have been running a ‘consortium’ dissertation project for final year undergraduate students in psychology. These projects utilise open research principles to allow students from each university to collaborate on their dissertation research.

We get the students to collaboratively pre-register their data collection and analysis plans on a public platform the Open Science Framework, meaning there is a “locked” public record of the plans for the project that they can all refer to. They also employ data sharing practices to publicly share the data they collect so that we can combine it together into a single dataset, overcoming the common limitation of small sample sizes in undergraduate research.

The projects embed open research in pedagogy, and teach our students (i.e., the researchers of the future) good open research practices and how to openly collaborate with others.

Registered Reports

One important open research practice I have adopted in my own research is the use of the registered report publication format. This is a two-stage publication process. Along with my co-author, we submitted a ‘stage 1’ manuscript to the journal, which was essentially an introduction and method section only: what our research was about, and what we planned to do.

This was then sent out for peer review, and came back with helpful comments on our project and design. We received these comments before we began data collection, so we had the opportunity to make amendments to our plan.

Satisfied with these amendments, the journal gave us an ‘acceptance in principle’ decision, meaning they commit to publishing our work, as long as we followed our accepted methodology.

We have now collected the data, and are in the process of analysing it. Crucially, the journal will commit to publishing the results even if none of our hypotheses are supported!

This is one great benefit of registered reports that helps to deal with publication bias in the literature – articles are accepted on the strength of the method, not the novelty of the results.

In future, I look forward to building on these initiatives to further engage colleagues to incorporate open science as a natural part of their own work, and to continue training our students -  the researchers of the future – in open science practices relevant to their degrees. I would advise anyone passionate about research methods to view open science as a collaborative endeavour to jointly improve our science.