In 2014 my lab began the transition to using open and reproducible research practices (I wrote a blog post about it). Almost a year later, and after a steep learning curve, I realized I needed to organize my open science. There was a lot of discussion within the field of psychology at that time on the idea of open science, but few suggestions on how to actually implement different open science practices throughout the research workflow for different types of research projects. Along with Etienne LeBel and Tim Loving we thought it through, published a paper in December 2014 with some specific recommendations (or so they seemed like it at the time), and then our lab made it up as we went along. To my pleasant surprise I was asked to give a workshop on “doing open science” in November 2015 at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. I really enjoyed talking to faculty and students about this topic, and I was honored to be asked to give similar workshops/talks at many different places during the next two years. Overall, I have now given 14 presentations on open and reproducible science in Canada, the USA, New Zealand, and Turkey (at the bottom of this post there is a list of these talks, including links to slides and recordings where available). I am also very happy to see that in the 3 or so years since publishing our open science recommendations, many journals in the field of psychology are changing their editorial policies to align with open science practices.
As I developed and tweaked my slides over this two year period, I learned a lot more about (a) what is being done in different fields to enhance research transparency and reproducibility, and (b) what can be done with existing technology. With all of this information, I decided to create a new graduate course called “Open and Reproducible Science” so I could share with trainees how they can begin their research career in a way that makes their future publications more open to evaluation and more likely to be reproducible (in many ways) by others (something I suggested was lacking in our graduate training programs here). I put together a syllabus and solicited feedback via Twitter. I received many helpful suggestions, as well as two offers for guest lectures—one by Seth Green from CodeOcean.com, and on from Joanne Paterson, a librarian at Western University. Click here to see what I ended up putting together for this inaugural course. I am excited that 16 grad students from different areas of my psychology department enrolled for this course, beginning January 11, 2018.
My goal is to write expanded lecture notes in a blog post for each week of the class. In these posts I will discuss my planned talking points for each class, as well as flesh out specific examples of how one might use different open science practices throughout the research workflow. Ok, now I need to go re-read the assigned article for the first class: Munafo et al’s (2017) “A manifesto for reproducible science”.
Invited Talks on Open Science and Replication
2015
- November 3, Workshop presented at the University of Toronto, Mississauga (Psychology), Canada
2016
- January 28, Pre-Conference of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), San Diego, USA
- June 10, Conference of the Canadian Psychological Association, Victoria, Canada
- October 3, York University (Psychology), Canada (audio recording)
- October 11, University of Toronto (Psychology), Canada
- October 19, University of Guelph (Family Relations and Applied Nutrition), Canada
- October 21, Illinois State University, (Psychology), USA
- November 11, Victoria University Wellington (Psychology), New Zealand
- November 24, University of Western Ontario (Clinical Area), Canada
- December 2, University of Western Ontario (Developmental Area), Canada
2017
- January 19, Workshop presented at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey (with thanks to a Travel Grant awarded to Asuman Buyuckan-Tetik and me from the European Association of Social Psychology)
- March 10, Western Research Forum Panel Discussion on Open Access: “What’s in it for me?”, London, Canada
- May 25, Workshop presented at the conference of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), Boston, USA
- November 10, Plenary address, conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), Atlanta, USA