Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a statistical analysis of a data set should be achieved again with a high degree of reliability when the study is replicated. There are different kinds of replication but typically replication studies involve different researchers using the same methodology. Only after one or several such successful replications should a result be recognized as scientific knowledge.
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.
Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association that was established in 1965. It covers the fields of social and personality psychology. The editors-in-chief are Shinobu Kitayama, Colin Wayne Leach, and Richard E. Lucas.
Science Exchange is a cloud-based software company offering an R&D marketplace to buy and sell scientific services. The marketplace gives life sciences companies access to the outsourced research they need and the platform fully automates R&D outsourcing from source to pay. Commercial contract research organizations (CROs) and academic core facilities can sell their products and services directly through the marketplace.
The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
The Reproducibility Project is a series of crowdsourced collaborations aiming to reproduce published scientific studies, finding high rates of results which could not be replicated. It has resulted in two major initiatives focusing on the fields of psychology and cancer biology. The project has brought attention to the replication crisis, and has contributed to shifts in scientific culture and publishing practices to address it.
Brian Arthur Nosek is an American social-cognitive psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. He also co-founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and Project Implicit. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 2002.
The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a computer-based psychological measure. It was heavily influenced by the implicit-association test, and is one of several tasks referred to as indirect measures of implicit attitudes. The IRAP is one of relatively few indirect measures that can includes relational or propositional rather than associative information. The IRAP was conceptualised by Dermot Barnes-Holmes, and originally published in 2006. A meta analysis of clinically-relevant criterion effects suggest that the IRAP has good validity. However, a second meta analysis suggests that it has poor reliability, like many reaction time based measures. Research using the IRAP is often linked to relational frame theory, a functional-analytic theory of language.
Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."
PsyArXiv is a preprint repository for the psychological sciences opened in September 2016 and officially launched in December 2016. It is hosted by the Center for Open Science. The preprint service was inspired by the arXiv repository. The service allows researchers to upload manuscripts regarding psychology and related fields prior to peer review. As of April 2017, it is indexed by Google Scholar.
In India, Open Access movement started in May 2004, when two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2011, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. The Shodhganga, a digital repository for theses, was also established in 2011 with the aim of promoting and preserving academic research. The University Grants Commission (UGC) made it mandatory for scholars to deposit their theses in Shodhganga, as per the Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M. Phil./Ph.D. Degrees Regulations, 2016. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
EarthArXiv is both a preprint server and a volunteer community devoted to open scholarly communication. As a preprint server, EarthArXiv publishes articles from all subdomains of Earth Science and related domains of planetary science. These publications are versions of scholarly papers that precede publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. EarthArXiv is not itself a journal and does not evaluate the scientific quality of a paper. Instead, EarthArXiv serves as a platform for free hosting and rapid dissemination of scientific results. The EarthArXiv platform assigns each submission a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), therefore assigning provenance and making it citable in other scholarly works. EarthArXiv's mission is to promote open access, share open access and preprint resources, and participate in shared governance of the preprint server and its policies. EarthArXiv was launched on October 23, 2017.
The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, abbreviated BITSS, is an academic initiative dedicated to advancing transparency, reproducibility, and openness in social science research. It was established in 2012 by the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action. It has worked with the Center for Open Science to define and promote a set of best practices for social scientists to maximize transparency in their research. BITSS has also worked to promote registered reports, supporting journals like the Journal of Development Economics in taking up the review track.
Preregistration is the practice of registering the hypotheses, methods, and/or analyses of a scientific study before it is conducted. Clinical trial registration is similar, although it may not require the registration of a study's analysis protocol. Finally, registered reports include the peer review and in principle acceptance of a study protocol prior to data collection.
Crowdsourced science refers to collaborative contributions of a large group of people to the different steps of the research process in science. In psychology, the nature and scope of the collaborations can vary in their application and in the benefits it offers.
AfricArXiv is an open-access repository for preprints of academic publications which are either about Africa or by African scientists. The platform was established in 2018. It was established to make preprint servers more available in various fields and regions. Its establishment happen during trends to provide more digital services to support science in Africa.
Research transparency is major aspect of scientific research. It covers a variety of scientific principles and practices: reproducibility, data and code sharing, citation standards or verifiability.
Klaus Fiedler is a German psychologist who teaches as a professor for social psychology at the Universität Heidelberg.
