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7 Easy Steps to Open Science: An Annotated Reading List

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The Open Science movement is rapidly changing the scientific landscape. Because exact definitions are often lacking and reforms are constantly evolving, accessible guides to open science are needed. This paper provides an introduction to open science and related reforms in the form of an annotated reading list of seven peer-reviewed articles, following the format of Etz et al. (2018). Written for researchers and students - particularly in psychological science - it highlights and introduces seven topics: understanding open science; open access; open data, materials, and code; reproducible analyses; preregistration and registered reports; replication research; and teaching open science. For each topic, we provide a detailed summary of one particularly informative and actionable article and suggest several further resources. Supporting a broader understanding of open science issues, this overview should enable researchers to engage with, improve, and implement current open, transparent, reproducible, replicable, and cumulative scientific practices.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Alexander Etz, Amy Orben, Hannah Moshontz, Jesse Niebaum, Johnny van Doorn, Matthew Makel, Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Sam Parsons, Sophia Crüwell

Preregistration Overview page

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What is Preregistration? When you preregister your research, you're simply specifying your research plan in advance of your study and submitting it to a registry. Preregistration separates hypothesis-generating (exploratory) from hypothesis-testing (confirmatory) research. Both are important. But the same data cannot be used to generate and test a hypothesis, which can happen unintentionally and reduce the credibility of your results. Addressing this problem through planning improves the quality and transparency of your research. This helps you clearly report your study and helps others who may wish to build on it.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Center for Open Science

OpenAccess.net

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The open-access.net platform provides comprehensive information on the subject of Open Access (OA) and offers practical advice on its implementation. Developed collaboratively by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universities of Goettingen, Konstanz, and Bielefeld, open-access.net first went online at the beginning of May 2007. The platform's target groups include all relevant stakeholders in the science sector, especially the scientists and scholars themselves, university and research institution managers, infrastructure service providers such as libraries and data centres, and funding agencies and policy makers. open-access.net provides easy, one-stop access to comprehensive information on OA. Aspects covered include OA concepts, legal, organisational and technical frameworks, concrete implementation experiences, initiatives, services, service providers, and position papers. The target-group-oriented and discipline-specific presentation of the content enables users to access relevant themes quickly and efficiently. Moreover, the platform offers practical implementation advice and answers to fundamental questions regarding OA. In collaboration with cooperation partners in Austria (the University of Vienna) and Switzerland (the University of Zurich), country-specific web pages for these two countries have been integrated into the platform - especially in the Legal Issues section. Each year since 2007, the information platform has organised the "Open Access Days" at alternating venues in collaboration with local partners. This event is the key conference on OA and Open Science in the German-speaking area. With funding from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK) of the State of Baden-Württemberg, the platform underwent a complete technical and substantive overhaul in 2015.

Material Type: Reading

Author: OpenAccess Germany

The Open Science Training Handbook

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Open Science, the movement to make scientific products and processes accessible to and reusable by all, is about culture and knowledge as much as it is about technologies and services. Convincing researchers of the benefits of changing their practices, and equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to do so, is hence an important task.This book offers guidance and resources for Open Science instructors and trainers, as well as anyone interested in improving levels of transparency and participation in research practices. Supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on its knowledge, the handbook suggests training activities that can be adapted to various settings and target audiences. The book equips trainers with methods, instructions, exemplary training outlines and inspiration for their own Open Science trainings. It provides Open Science advocates across the globe with practical know-how to deliver Open Science principles to researchers and support staff. What works, what doesn’t? How can you make the most of limited resources? Here you will find a wealth of resources to help you build your own training events.

Material Type: Reading

Author: FOSTER Open Science

Open Source Guides

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Open Source Guides (https://opensource.guide/) are a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project. Background: Open Source Guides were created and are curated by GitHub, along with input from outside community reviewers, but they are not exclusive to GitHub products. One reason we started this project is because we felt that there weren't enough resources for people creating open source projects. Our goal is to aggregate community best practices, not what GitHub (or any other individual or entity) thinks is best. Therefore, we try to use examples and quotations from others to illustrate our points.

Material Type: Reading

Author: GitHub

Open Science: What, Why, and How

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Open Science is a collection of actions designed to make scientific processes more transparent and results more accessible. Its goal is to build a more replicable and robust science; it does so using new technologies, altering incentives, and changing attitudes. The current movement towards open science was spurred, in part, by a recent “series of unfortunate events” within psychology and other sciences. These events include the large number of studies that have failed to replicate and the prevalence of common research and publication procedures that could explain why. Many journals and funding agencies now encourage, require, or reward some open science practices, including pre-registration, providing full materials, posting data, distinguishing between exploratory and confirmatory analyses, and running replication studies. Individuals can practice and encourage open science in their many roles as researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, teachers, and members of hiring, tenure, promotion, and awards committees. A plethora of resources are available to help scientists, and science, achieve these goals.

Material Type: Reading

Authors: Bobbie Spellman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Katherine Corker

Open Science Toolbox

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There is a vast body of helpful tools that can be used in order to foster Open Science practices. For reasons of clarity, this toolbox aims at providing only a selection of links to these resources and tools. Our goal is to give a short overview on possibilities of how to enhance your Open Science practices without consuming too much of your time.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Lutz Heil

Awesome Open Science Resources

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Scientific data and tools should, as much as possible, be free as in beer and free as in freedom. The vast majority of science today is paid for by taxpayer-funded grants; at the same time, the incredible successes of science are strong evidence for the benefit of collaboration in knowledgable pursuits. Within the scientific academy, sharing of expertise, data, tools, etc. is prolific, but only recently with the rise of the Open Access movement has this sharing come to embrace the public. Even though most research data is never shared, both the public and even scientists in their own fields are often unaware of just much data, tools, and other resources are made freely available for analysis! This list is a small attempt at bringing light to data repositories and computational science tools that are often siloed according to each scientific discipline, in the hopes of spurring along both public and professional contributions to science.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Austin Soplata

Open Science Manual

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About This Document: This manual was assembled and is being updated by Professor Benjamin Le (@benjaminle), who is on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Haverford College. The primary goal of this text is to provide guidance to his senior thesis students on how to conduct research in his lab by working within general principles that promote research transparency using the specific open science practices described here. While it is aimed at undergraduate psychology students, hopefully it will be of use to other faculty/researchers/students who are interested in adopting open science practices in their labs.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Benjamin Le

An Open Science Primer for Social Scientists

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“Open Science” has become a buzzword in academic circles. However, exactly what it means, why you should care about it, and – most importantly – how it can be put into practice is often not very clear to researchers. In this session of the SSDL, we will provide a brief tour d'horizon of Open Science in which we touch on all of these issues and by which we hope to equip you with a basic understanding of Open Science and a practical tool kit to help you make your research more open to other researchers and the larger interested public. Throughout the presentation, we will focus on giving you an overview of tools and services that can help you open up your research workflow and your publications, all the way from enhancing the reproducibility of your research and making it more collaborative to finding outlets which make the results of your work accessible to everyone. Absolutely no prior experience with open science is required to participate in this talk which should lead into an open conversation among us as a community about the best practices we can and should follow for a more open social science.

Material Type: Lesson

Author: Eike Mark Rinke

Open Access Tracking Project

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OATP is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project running on free software to capture new developments on open access to research. Its mission is (1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Peter Suber

Harry Potter and the Methods of Reproducibility

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"Harry Potter and the Methods of Reproducibility -- A brief Introduction to Open Science" gives a brief overview of Open Science, particularly reproducibility, for newcomers to the topic. It introduces the concept of questionable research practices (QRPs) and Open Science solutions to these QRPs, such as preregistrations, registered reports, Open Data, Open Code, and Open Materials.

Material Type: Lesson

Author: Mariella Paul

R for Social Scientists

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From Data Carpentry: Data Carpentry’s aim is to teach researchers basic concepts, skills, and tools for working with data so that they can get more done in less time, and with less pain. The lessons below were designed for those interested in working with social sciences data in R.This is an introduction to R designed for participants with no programming experience. These lessons can be taught in a day (~ 6 hours). They start with some basic information about R syntax, the RStudio interface, and move through how to import CSV files, the structure of data frames, how to deal with factors, how to add/remove rows and columns, how to calculate summary statistics from a data frame, and a brief introduction to plotting.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Vicky Steeves

Jupyter Notebooks with R & Git

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Today we are going to learn the basics of literate programming using Jupyter Notebooks, a popular tool in data science, with the R kernel, so we can run R code in our notebooks. We’ll then take a look at how we use Git and GitHub to keep track of all the versions of our work, collaborate with others, and be open!

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Vicky Steeves

Reproducibility Immersive Course

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Various fields in the natural and social sciences face a ‘crisis of confidence’. Broadly, this crisis amounts to a pervasiveness of non-reproducible results in the published literature. For example, in the field of biomedicine, Amgen published findings that out of 53 landmark published results of pre-clinical studies, only 11% could be replicated successfully. This crisis is not confined to biomedicine. Areas that have recently received attention for non-reproducibility include biomedicine, economics, political science, psychology, as well as philosophy. Some scholars anticipate the expansion of this crisis to other disciplines.This course explores the state of reproducibility. After giving a brief historical perspective, case studies from different disciplines (biomedicine, psychology, and philosophy) are examined to understand the issues concretely. Subsequently, problems that lead to non-reproducibility are discussed as well as possible solutions and paths forward.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Vicky Steeves