The Pandemic as a Portal: Reimagining Psychological Science as Truly Open and Inclusive

Authors : Alison Ledgerwood, Sa-kiera Hudson, Neil Lewis, Keith Maddox, Cynthia Pickett, Jessica Remedios, Sapna Cheryan, Amanda Diekman, Jin Goh, Stephanie Goodwin, Yuko Munakata, Danielle Navarro, Ivuoma Onyeador, Sanjay Srivastava, Clara Wilkins

Psychological science is at an inflection point: The COVID-19 pandemic has already begun to exacerbate inequalities that stem from our historically closed and exclusive culture. Meanwhile, reform efforts to change the future of our science are too narrow in focus to fully succeed.

In this paper, we call on psychological scientists—focusing specifically on those who use quantitative methods in the United States as one context in which such a conversation can begin—to reimagine our discipline as fundamentally open and inclusive.

First, we discuss who our discipline was designed to serve and how this history produced the inequitable reward and support systems we see today.

Second, we highlight how current institutional responses to address worsening inequalities are inadequate, as well as how our disciplinary perspective may both help and hinder our ability to craft effective solutions.

Third, we take a hard look in the mirror at the disconnect between what we ostensibly value as a field and what we actually practice. Fourth and finally, we lead readers through a roadmap for reimagining psychological science in whatever roles and spaces they occupy, from an informal discussion group in a department to a formal strategic planning retreat at a scientific society.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gdzue

The odd couple: contrasting openness in innovation and science

Authors : Maximilian Heimstädt, Sascha Friesike

Over the last few decades, two domains have undergone seemingly similar transformations: Closed innovation turned into open innovation, closed science into open science. In this essay we engage critically with recent calls for a close coupling of the two domains based on their apparent commonality: openness.

Comparing the historically-specific ways in which openness has been defined and mobilised, we find substantial differences between open innovation and open science. While openness in innovation was developed as an analytic concept and redefined quite flexibly over time, openness in science was created as a programmatic concept and its initial definition has been preserved rather rigidly.

Contrasting openness in innovation and science helps anticipate some of the unintended consequences that a close coupling of these domains might yield. A close coupling might alienate advocates for change within the academic community, marginalise maintenance-oriented collaborations between science and practice, and increase the dependence of science on profit-oriented platforms.

Reflecting upon these unintended consequences can help policy-makers and researchers to fine-tune their concepts for new forms of engagement across the science-practice divide.

URL : The odd couple: contrasting openness in innovation and science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2020.1837631

Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

Authors : Antica Culina, Ilona van den Berg, Simon Evans, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

Access to analytical code is essential for transparent and reproducible research. We review the state of code availability in ecology using a random sample of 346 nonmolecular articles published between 2015 and 2019 under mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies.

Our results call for urgent action to increase code availability: only 27% of eligible articles were accompanied by code. In contrast, data were available for 79% of eligible articles, highlighting that code availability is an important limiting factor for computational reproducibility in ecology.

Although the percentage of ecological journals with mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies has increased considerably, from 15% in 2015 to 75% in 2020, our results show that code-sharing policies are not adhered to by most authors.

We hope these results will encourage journals, institutions, funding agencies, and researchers to address this alarming situation.

URL : Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000763

Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

Authors : Manuel Spitschan, Marlene H. Schmidt, Christine Blume

Background

“Open science” is an umbrella term describing various aspects of transparent and open science practices. The adoption of practices at different levels of the scientific process (e.g., individual researchers, laboratories, institutions) has been rapidly changing the scientific research landscape in the past years, but their uptake differs from discipline to discipline.

Here, we asked to what extent journals in the field of sleep research and chronobiology encourage or even require following transparent and open science principles in their author guidelines.

Methods

We scored the author guidelines of a comprehensive set of 28 sleep and chronobiology journals, including the major outlets in the field, using the standardised Transparency and Openness (TOP) Factor.

This instrument rates the extent to which journals encourage or require following various aspects of open science, including data citation, data transparency, analysis code transparency, materials transparency, design and analysis guidelines, study pre-registration, analysis plan pre-registration, replication, registered reports, and the use of open science badges.

Results

Across the 28 journals, we find low values on the TOP Factor (median [25th, 75th percentile] 2.5 [1, 3], min. 0, max. 9, out of a total possible score of 28) in sleep research and chronobiology journals.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest an opportunity for sleep research and chronobiology journals to further support the recent developments in transparent and open science by implementing transparency and openness principles in their guidelines and making adherence to them mandatory.

URL : Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16111.1

Toward Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Automation

Author : Hui Zhang

This article describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improved user experience of article deposit.

The lack of library resources and the unfriendly repository user interface are two significant barriers that hinder green open access.

Tasked to implement the open access mandate, librarians at an American research university developed a comprehensive system called Easy Deposit 2 to automate the support workflow of green open access.

Easy Deposit 2 is a web application that is able to harvest new publications, to source manuscripts on behalf of the library, and to facilitate self-archiving to a university’s institutional repository.

The article deposit rate increased from 7.40% to 25.60% with the launch of Easy Deposit 2. The results show that a computer system can implement routine tasks to support green open access with success.

Recent developments in digital repository provide new opportunities for innovation, such as Easy Deposit 2, in supporting open access.

Academic librarians are vital in promoting “openness” in scholarly communication, such as transparency and diversity in the sharing of publication data.

URL : Toward Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Automation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8020028

Reproducible research practices, openness and transparency in health economic evaluations: study protocol for a cross-sectional comparative analysis

Authors : Ferrán Catalá-López, Lisa Caulley, Manuel Ridao, Brian Hutton, Don Husereau, Michael F Drummond, Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo, Manuel Pardo-Fernández, Enrique Bernal-Delgado, Ricard Meneu, Rafael Tabarés-Seisdedos, José Ramón Repullo, David Moher

Introduction

There has been a growing awareness of the need for rigorously and transparent reported health research, to ensure the reproducibility of studies by future researchers.

Health economic evaluations, the comparative analysis of alternative interventions in terms of their costs and consequences, have been promoted as an important tool to inform decision-making.

The objective of this study will be to investigate the extent to which articles of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions indexed in MEDLINE incorporate research practices that promote transparency, openness and reproducibility.

Methods and analysis

This is the study protocol for a cross-sectional comparative analysis. We registered the study protocol within the Open Science Framework (osf.io/gzaxr). We will evaluate a random sample of 600 cost-effectiveness analysis publications, a specific form of health economic evaluations, indexed in MEDLINE during 2012 (n=200), 2019 (n=200) and 2022 (n=200).

We will include published papers written in English reporting an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio in terms of costs per life years gained, quality-adjusted life years and/or disability-adjusted life years. Screening and selection of articles will be conducted by at least two researchers.

Reproducible research practices, openness and transparency in each article will be extracted using a standardised data extraction form by multiple researchers, with a 33% random sample (n=200) extracted in duplicate.

Information on general, methodological and reproducibility items will be reported, stratified by year, citation of the Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement and journal. Risk ratios with 95% CIs will be calculated to represent changes in reporting between 2012–2019 and 2019–2022.

Ethics and dissemination

Due to the nature of the proposed study, no ethical approval will be required. All data will be deposited in a cross-disciplinary public repository.

It is anticipated the study findings could be relevant to a variety of audiences. Study findings will be disseminated at scientific conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.

URL : Reproducible research practices, openness and transparency in health economic evaluations: study protocol for a cross-sectional comparative analysis

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-034463

Open or Ajar? Openness within the Neoliberal Academy

Authors : Kevin Sanders, Simon Bowie

The terms ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are widely used across the current higher education environment particularly in the areas of repository services and scholarly communications.

Open-access licensing and open-source licensing are two prevalent manifestations of open culture within higher education research environments. As theoretical ideals, open-licensing models aim at openness and academic freedom.

But operating as they do within the context of global neoliberalism, to what extent are these models constructed by, sustained by, and co-opted by neoliberalism?

In this paper, we interrogate the use of open-licensing within scholarly communications and within the larger societal context of neoliberalism. Through synthesis of various sources, we will examine how open access licensing models have been constrained by neoliberal or otherwise corporate agendas, how open access and open scholarship have been reframed within discourses of compliance, how open-source software models and software are co-opted by politico-economic forces, and how the language of ‘openness’ is widely misused in higher education and repository services circles to drive agendas that run counter to actually increasing openness.

We will finish by suggesting ways to resist this trend and use open-licensing models to resist neoliberal agendas in open scholarship.

URL : Open or Ajar? Openness within the Neoliberal Academy

Original location : https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202001.0240/v1