Organized Open Science

Over a year ago I committed to adopting more transparent research practices. Since then I have been adding projects and registrations to my Open Science Framework account (https://osf.io/sa9im/). Over time, and with new students joining the lab and new collaborations with colleagues being established, many of these research projects are at different stages of completion. I have also been asked, many times, variations of this question: “What information should I include in the files to put on the OSF?”; as well as this question: “When should I put this information on the OSF?”. Answering these questions has helped create informal guidelines for how we do open science in our lab, but I realized recently that there was in fact a lot of variation within the lab regarding what information was included in the files posted to each project page, the number of files posted, when they were being posted, the timing of registering projects, and if/when projects were being made public. I felt the need to get my open science organized.

I decided to use my OSF account to create an organizational system that is open and transparent. Check it out: https://osf.io/jrd8f/. The public project page includes some templates for different types of disclosure forms for research projects that all lab members and other collaborators can easily access. These templates indicate the types of information I typically prefer to be made available for my research projects, but of course not all of these disclosures are needed for every research project; these are guidelines, not inflexible rules. The page also includes an excel sheet to keep track of different OSF milestones for each research project. This is a master file listing all of our research projects that also includes links to the project and registration OSF pages, and asks the person taking the lead on a research project to indicate if she or he has put the information in question together into disclosure files and uploaded these files to the OSF. All lab members can then check to see the OSF status of each project, and quickly link to other lab members’ projects/registrations for tips on how to create the disclosure files (e.g., formatting, organization of the information, how much information presented, and so on). The excel file is empty right now—our lab is just getting started with this new organizational system. It will start to fill up soon.*

My primary motivation for creating this new organizational system was to standardize the process of doing open science in my lab. I am open to suggestions for improvements, additions, or other changes.

*a few studies have been added now, taking a total of a few minutes. As time goes on, there will be a noticeable increase in the consistency of disclosure statements for studies

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