Bringing Change to the Mainstream With Visibility and Values: Make It Normative

If we are building a movement to improve psychological science or biology or whatever discipline, it needs to be a movement that benefits everyone. We need to have a diversity of perspectives. We need to have that input, we need to listen, and we need to make sure that we're serving as many people as possible.

Katie Corker
Executive Director
ASAPbio

The research community embraces the core values of open science: transparency, collaboration, collective benefit, inclusivity, and openly available materials, data, and code. But while these principles are widely accepted and even desired, we face challenges in translating those ideals into everyday practices.

Several factors hinder the progress toward open science norms. Researchers may be unfamiliar with open science methods, feel the process is too time-consuming, or worry about potential data misuse and negative feedback. The rewards for open publishing are not always clear for researchers, and limited institutional policies can create barriers to implementing these shared values. The current research structure encourages researchers to seek publication in high-impact journals that may not encourage open science practices.

Action gap in open scholarship

Despite these challenges, we are witnessing a growing movement toward open science. By bridging the gap between what researchers value and the practical challenges they face, we can slowly and steadily transform open science from an ideal into a norm.

Signs of Progress

Indications of a growing momentum include researcher-driven grassroots efforts, such as reproducibility networks that create spaces for collaboration and discussion around open science practices. These networks address a crucial need within the research community, demonstrating a strong desire for increased transparency.

One example is the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), a leader in the open science movement. Founded in 2016, SIPS is focused on advancing the mission of open scholarship in the psychological sciences. The society hosts the largest preprint service on OSF Preprints, with more than 25,000 free prints shared since its inception.

SIPS uses preprints to help foster collaborative initiatives within its research community that promote open scholarship adoption in the field. One such cooperative example is a psychological science accelerator, which leverages global crowdsourcing for original and replication research.

Open Science Badges is another method for transforming these practices into new standards. The Badges program offers a powerful way to make open practices visible. By publicly acknowledging researchers who embrace open science, Badges incentivizes researchers and contributes to the creation of new standards for research.

Paving the Way

Moving open science from a shared value to an established norm will take time and effort. These positive indicators show that the scientific community is on the right path. Realistic approaches are making incremental progress, and continued collaboration with research communities is vital to sustaining this momentum.