Winners of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science – Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences

"Since its inception as an initiative within the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in 2012, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the research community’s attitudes and practices toward open science. What began as a budding initiative to address the concerns of a relatively small group of researchers has evolved into a rapidly growing grassroots movement of economists, psychologists, political scientists, statisticians, and even engineers whose work spans nearly every continent. Still, there is more work to be done, and those leading this movement are not always rewarded for their efforts.

BITSS has bolstered this community in a variety of ways, funding replications, meta-analyses, and the development of open science tools through the Social Science Meta-Analysis and Research Transparency (SSMART) research program, developing a Manual of Best Practices and Massive Open Online Course on transparency methods, and supporting trainings in institutions across the globe. An exciting complement to these initiatives has been the annual awarding of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science, which recognizes important contributions by individuals in the open science movement. This year, we are honored to announce the ten exceptional educators and researchers joining the ranks of those awarded the prize last year. The review committee selected these recipients from a pool of forty-four nominees from eighteen disciplines and sub-disciplines, and twelve countries.

BITSS is also proud to award prizes in the Emerging Researchers category to seven scholars who are developing innovative methods for transparent research and using open research practices in their own work. These researchers include Dr. Abel Brodeur, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, well-known for co-authoring 'Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back,' an analysis of p-value misallocation in economics; Dr. Felix Schönbrodt, a post-doctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in Munich and leader in developing transparency and data sharing standards for psychologists; Dr. Elaine Toomey, a post-doctoral researcher at the National University of Ireland Galway focused on implementation fidelity in the health sciences; Dr. Graeme Blair, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA and co-creator of DeclareDesign, a suite of research design evaluation software; and Beth Baribault, a doctoral student in the Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine whose research represents extraordinary dedication to transparency and replicability."