In recent years, the movement towards open science has gained significant traction across various disciplines, including behavioural science. Open science refers to practices that increase transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in research. But why does this matter? BR-UK Deputy Director, Dr Sharon Cox explains and makes the case for everyone adopting open science. Image As societies face global challenges, including growing poverty, war and displacement, climate change, and the threat of novel diseases, there is an urgent need to improve how science is conducted to increase the speed at which we can accumulate knowledge. Human behaviour is key to addressing all these critical issues, so the open science movement is very important for behavioural researchers. Open science improves the rate, accessibility, integrity and transparency of the research process, and increases trust in those conducting the research. This was very evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was an urgent need to share science between researchers and policymakers, and to share data with the public. During this time, findings needed to be open and shared, replication of key study findings was urgently needed, and researchers needed to work across silos. Despite this learning, some scientific research practices lack openness, with study methods and data hidden until publication and sometimes beyond. Open science practices are now increasingly welcomed by researchers and by research funders and recognised as key for effectively developing and applying behavioural research to the critical issues of our times. As part of BR-UK webinar series (link, in May 2024 I chaired, “Open Science and the Importance of pre-registration“ where I outlined BR-UK’s commitment to open science and our strategy for using it. Professor Marcus Munafo, Chair of the UK Reproducibility Network and Dr Harry Tattan-Birch, Research Fellow at UCL joined me to discuss the key contemporary issues facing science and how open science can address them. There are both moral and pragmatic reasons to adopt an open science approach. Many studies are funded by public money or charitable donations so there is a responsibility to share data and findings for the public good. Pragmatically, the reuse of outputs such as data and code reduces duplication of efforts, improves research quality and increases accessibility and use, as indicated by citation rate. Whilst open science holds immense potential to progress behavioural science (and other disciplines) by making research more transparent, collaborative and accessible, there may be challenges to adopting it. Key ones are listed below, along with solutions. Commonly cited barriers Challenge Solution Privacy Sharing data, especially in behavioural science, can raise privacy concerns, as datasets often include sensitive information about individuals. Ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of participants is possible by implementing stringent data anonymisation techniques and secure data-sharing platforms; this is a usual step when obtaining ethics for a study regardless of whether the research will be openly disseminated or not. Credit Researchers may worry about losing control over their data and not receiving credit for their work. Using digital object identifiers (DOIs) for datasets and software, and implementing citation standards for data and methods, ensures that researchers receive appropriate credit. Platforms like the Open Science Framework and ORCID can help track and attribute contributions accurately. Research Quality With increased accessibility, the may be a risk of low-quality or non-peer-reviewed work circulating. Open science encourages open peer review, where both the reviewers and the reviews are transparent and changes to pre-registered analysis plans are reported which enhances the quality of openly shared research. Qualitative research is different Qualitative research is not assessed by the same standards as quantitative. All research, including those using qualitative methods, has a rationale, hypotheses and research questions that can be openly re-registered, as can details of the recruitment methods, sampling technique and planned analysis. As with quantitative data, things can change, and this is not a problem, in fact, transparency in deviations should be encouraged because there will be a scientific or pragmatic reason for changes; this can help others when planning studies. BR-UK’s Approach Behavioural Research UK is committed to a set of open science principles which emphasise the importance of transparency and integrity, collaboration and sharing research processes and outcomes with the broader public and the global scientific community. We recognise that science is not ‘self-correcting’, and so by sharing our research, we hope to challenge our findings, add to data and allow the wider research community to use our resources and easily access our findings. Our open science reports are living documents published on Open Science Framework and will be updated as methods and approaches evolve, and the capabilities of open science advance. How best to conduct open science is an ongoing discussion and we will share updates to our methods and strategies, including what open science for qualitative research looks like (not that different). Find out more about our approach to open science here and our use of the Open Science Framework to achieve our goals. BR-UK's OSF Sitemap provides an overview of our ongoing research projects, and the BR-UK OSF page provides more information on our projects. Additional input: Sancha Martin, BR-UK Programme Manager This article was published on 2024-09-24
