Previous event: Celebrating openness (2020)

Abstract: Science is often said to be self-correcting, but we rarely hear about what makes science self-correcting. Some mechanisms that are meant to provide quality control, such as peer reviewed journals, or textbooks, have recently been found not to provide much of a safeguard against invalid claims. Instead, I argue that we should look for visible signs of a scientific community's commitment to self-correction, rather than taking it for granted that all of science is self-correcting. The first pillar of commitment to self-correction is transparency. Without transparency, detecting and correcting errors is almost impossible. However, transparency is not sufficient for self-correction. The second pillar of a commitment to self-correction is critical appraisal. Transparently-reported research outputs are the beginning of a process, not the endpoint. Researchers should be encouraged to take advantage of each other's transparency to interrogate and scrutinize one another's claims, and rewarded for this type of work. The self-correcting mechanisms in science can be found in a community's commitment to transparency and critical appraisal.

Simine Vazire is a Professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines individual and institutional practices and norms in science, and the degree to which these norms encourage or impede self-correction and credibility. She is Editor in Chief of Collabra: Psychology and has served as an editor at several other journals. She is a board member of the Public Library Of Science and the Berkeley Institute for Transparency in the Social Sciences, was a member of the US National Academy of Science study committee on replicability and reproducibility, and co-founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS).

Abstract: The replication crisis in psychology and the subsequent rise in the use of open research practices requires a radical change in perspective for more senior researchers. “Old-school” researchers who are looking to implement change may feel challenged by old habits at an individual (How to recognize questionable research practices?) as well as a more systemic level (e.g. bias in the academic publishing process, reward structures at their institutions). In the present contribution I will talk about some of those challenges and possible ways of dealing with them. As an illustration, I will present a recent project that involved a) writing up decades-old null-results rather than leaving them in my file drawer; b) exploring multiple ways of data analysis rather than deciding on one (arbitrary) best analysis (i.e., multiverse analysis) and c) collaborating with early career researchers with up-to-date technical knowledge (e.g., R., RMarkdown).

Ineke Wessel is an associate professor of experimental psychopathology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She has studied (emotional) autobiographical memory since the 1990s. Her research interests include the involvement of memory in the origins and maintenance of psychopathology and the malleability of emotional memories themselves, including false / recovered memories. Relatively recently, she became fascinated with the question of what the current replication crisis in psychology may mean for clinical psychology. Having received “old school” academic training, she tries to switch to Open Science practices as much as possible. She wrote a series of blogposts about her experiences.