Open Psychology: transparency and reproducibility

Maarten Derksen

doi:10.26864/pcs.v9.n2.13

Abstract

I describe the attempt by a group of psychologists to reform the discipline into an Open Science (which I will call 'Open Psychology'). I will first argue that their particular version of Open Science reflects the problems that gave rise to it and that it tries to solve. Then I will describe the infrastructure that this group of people is putting in place to facilitate transparency. An important function of this infrastructure is to restrict what are called 'researcher degrees of freedom'. In Psychology, transparency is as much about closing down as it is about opening up. I will then focus on the flagship project of Open Psychology, the Reproducibility Project. According to the Open Psychologists, the neglect of replication is at the core of Psychology's current problems, and their online infrastructure offers the perfect framework to facilitate replication and give it a place in the field's research process. But replication, I will argue, is not just an epistemological, methodological issue: it implies a particular ontology and tries to enact it. The Reproducibility Project, and Open Psychology generally, can be considered as social experiments, that attempt not only to reform Psychology, but also to perform a new psychological object.

Highlights

I describe the attempt by a group of psychologists to reform the discipline into an Open Science
Its report appeared in 2015 and it concluded that, depending on how one defined a successful replication, only about 40% of the original results could be reproduced. This diagnosis of the state of the field – too many irreproducible results – is widely shared and many support the Open Science solution, at the same time it runs up against a conviction that is firmly ingrained in the minds of many psychologists: that human behaviour is so sensitive to context, that replication is especially difficult in this field
In Psychology, they insist, replication must take the form of conceptual replication: rather than precisely reproducing the original experimental conditions, a researcher derives a novel hypothesis from the same theory, and tests that

Summary

Introduction

I describe the attempt by a group of psychologists to reform the discipline into an Open Science (which I will call 'Open Psychology'). According to the Open Psychologists, the neglect of replication is at the core of Psychology's current problems, and their online infrastructure offers the perfect framework to facilitate replication and give it a place in the field's research process. The Reproducibility Project, and Open Psychology generally, can be considered as social experiments, that attempt to reform Psychology, and to perform a new psychological object.

Results

Conclusion