Trend report: Psychologists embrace open science

"For much of the last decade, psychologists have been debating whether the field faces a replication crisis. In 2015, a widely publicized attempt to replicate 100 studies from three top social and cognitive psychology journals was able to reproduce the results of less than 40 percent of them (Science, Vol. 349, No. 6251). Other replication studies have cast doubt on once-established ideas, including ego depletion and behavioral priming. These papers have sparked controversy over their methods and over whether large-scale replication studies are a worthwhile use of time and resources. But while the debate continues over how much of the research canon will hold up to scrutiny, the psychologists spearheading the reproducibility movement want to focus on a forward-looking task as well—changing the way psychological research is done to encourage more researchers to share data and research methods, and to replicate research as a matter of course, rather than as a one-off project."