Open science is surging
The global crisis of COVID-19 has caused scientific insights and discoveries to evolve at an incredibly rapid pace. As a result, the push for open and transparent science has become more vital than ever.
Open-source projects like Nextstrainopens in new window, where scientists around the world can sequence and share genomic data of SARS-CoV-2, for example, have proven invaluable in aiding researchers’ and public health officials’ understanding of how the virus is spreading and mutating. Many scientific publishers have also sped up their adoption of open science to help improve patient management, reduce mortality, and prevent new infections (Besançon, L., et al., BMC Medical Research Methodologyopens in new window, Vol. 21, No. 117, 2021). In fact, there were more than 125,000 COVID-19-related scientific articles published within 10 months of the first confirmed case, of which more than 30,000 were hosted by preprint servers (Fraser, N., et al., PLOS Biologyopens in new window, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021).
In psychology, open science has been a point of discussion for many years, but the pandemic has forced researchers to become even more aware of its importance, said Peggy Christidis, PhD, a science program officer at APA. "With school closures and conferences going virtual, many people started relying on open science tools for the first time," she said.
Tools such as Open Science Frameworkopens in new window, or OSF—a free, open platform that offers researchers, journals, and institutions the ability to submit preprints, share research posters, and more—bolster scientific research by allowing scientists to reanalyze data and verify whether past study findings are replicable. This increases not only research transparency but also collaboration, thus amplifying the power of data and promoting a swifter path to innovation.
Work like this is particularly vital in the field of psychology, which has been dealing with its own reproducibility crisis since the early 2000s. The amount of scientific misconduct that occurs in the field is hard to quantify, but one study found that between 0.6% and 2.3% of psychologists admit to falsifying data, and between 9.3% and 18.7% have witnessed another researcher doing so (Stricker, J., & Günther, A., Zeitschrift für Psychologieopens in new window, Vol. 227, No. 1, 2019). Additionally, just under 65% of retractions in the APA database PsycInfo were due to misconduct.
Open science can help ensure that the "publish or perish" mentality doesn’t lead to journals printing embellished, flashy, positive results. "Fraudulent behavior can still occur with open science, but openness makes some fraudulent behaviors more inconvenient to do and easier to detect," said Brian Nosek, PhD, founder and executive director of the Charlottesville, Virginia–based Center for Open Science. "For example, a recent case of fraudulent dataopens in new window was detected because of open science—the data set was posted to OSF, and other researchers identified problems in the data set."
Before the pressures of the pandemic took hold, researchers at the National Institutes of Health noted increased rates of data sharing in studies published from 2014 to 2016 in the popular journal PLOS ONE (Federer, L. M., et al., PLOS ONEopens in new window, Vol. 13, No. 5, 2018). Another analysis found that preregistration—or the specification of research design, hypotheses, and analysis prior to seeing the outcomes of a study—is becoming the norm in psychology. In 2019, Nosek and colleagues also discovered that of the 1,987 tenure-track research faculty studied in one psychology department, 35% had accountsopens in new window with OSF.
Nosek believes this trend will only strengthen in the years to come. "Adoption of open science behaviors continues to accelerate in psychology," he said.
2022 trends report
- This article is part of our 14 emerging trends special report. Explore our full coverage on how the pandemic era is changing attitudes toward science and mental health.