Summary:
- "The incentive structure really is changing. The main drivers are funders, who are alarmed that they might be spending their precious funds on results that are not solid. In the UK, funders (Wellcome Trust and Research Councils) were behind a high profile symposium on Reproducibility, and subsequently have issued statements on the topic and started working to change policies and to ensure their panel members are aware of the issues. One council, the BBSRC, funded an Advanced Workshop on Reproducible Methods this April. In the US, NIH has been at the forefront of initiatives to improve reproducibility. In Germany, Open Science is high on the agenda.
- Some institutions are coming on board. They react more slowly than funders, but where funders lead, they will follow. Some nice examples of institution-wide initiatives toward open, reproducible science come from the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Cambridge MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. In my own department, Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, our Head of Department has encouraged me to hold a one-day workshop on reproducibility later this year, saying she wants our department to be at the forefront of improving psychological science.
- Some of the best arguments for working reproducibly have been made by Florian Markowetz. You can read about them on this blog, see him give a very entertaining talk on the topic here, or read the published paper here. So there is no escape. I won't repeat his arguments here, as he makes them better than I could, but his basic point is that you don't need to do reproducible research for ideological reasons: there are many selfish arguments for adopting this approach – in the long run it makes your life very much easier.
- One point Florian doesn't cover is pre-registration of studies. The idea of a 'registered report', where your paper is evaluated, and potentially accepted for publication, on basis of introduction and methods was introduced with the goal of improving science by removing publication bias, p-hacking and HARKing (hypothesising after results are known). You can read about it in these slides by Chris Chambers. But when I tried this with a graduate student, Hannah Hobson, I realised there were other huge benefits. Many people worry that pre-registration slows you down. It does at the planning stage, but you more than compensate for that by the time saved once you have completed the study. Plus you get reviewer comments at a point in the research process when they are actually useful – i.e. before you have embarked on data collection. See this blogpost for my personal experience of this.
- Another advantage of registered reports is that publication does not depend on getting a positive result. This starts to look very appealing to the hapless early career researcher who keeps running experiments that don't 'work'. Some people imagine that this means the literature will become full of boring registered reports with null findings that nobody is interested in. But because that would be a danger, journals who offer registered reports impose a high bar on papers they accept – basically, the usual requirement is that the study is powered at 90%, so that we can be reasonably confident that a negative result is really a null finding, and not just a type II error. But if you are willing to put in the work to do a well-powered study, and the protocol passes scrutiny of reviewers, you are virtually guaranteed a publication.
- If you don't have time or inclination to go the whole hog with a registered report, there are still advantages to pre-registering a study, i.e. depositing a detailed, time-stamped protocol in a public archive. You still get the benefits of establishing priority of an idea, as well as avoiding publication bias, p-hacking, etc. And you can even benefit financially: the Open Science Framework is running a pre-registration challenge – they are giving $1000 to the first 1000 entrants who succeed in publishing a pre-registered study in a peer-reviewed journal.
- The final advantage of adopting reproducible and open science practic
Link:
http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2017/05/reproducible-practices-are-future-for.html
From feeds:
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) »
lterrat's bookmarks
Tags:
Date tagged:
05/02/2017, 22:30
Date published:
05/02/2017, 18:30