In this class I introduced to students the idea of scaling up open science practices for use in extended research networks. When I first taught this course many of these initiatives were relatively new and some were untested, and the students were excited about the possibility of these large scale collaborations. I will only discuss a few of the current extended research networks in this post.

One of the earlier extended research networks that incorporated open science practices was the Registered Replication Reports (RRR) initiative originally offered by Perspectives on Psychological Science and originally headed up by Daniel Simons. The basic idea was that individuals or groups of researchers would propose a study that they would like to re-run on a large scale with a number of independent labs after input from the original author(s). When a proposal was approved the submitting researchers worked closely with Dan and the original author(s) to reproduce the methods of the original study as closely as possible (or in some cases settle on a particular method/approach they felt was optimal to assess the effect of interest). A call would then go out to the research community, asking others to use the agreed upon methods/measures and collect a given amount of data to contribute to the project. All study details were shared with this extended group on the Open Science Framework. When the data was collected members of the extended research team submitted their data to the person in charge of overseeing the statistical analyses. This person was not part of any of the research groups, and the statistical analyses as well as the syntax used to run these analyses were agreed upon in advance. The team that submitted the original proposal for the replication project worked with Dan and the original author to draft a methods/results section in advance of knowing the results; the goal was to be able to drop the results into the already prepared manuscript. When all was ready the results would be revealed. I participated in one of these projects (I wrote about it here). Here is a link to the final product. Overall these projects were focused on large scale replication research, and presently RRRs are now offered via the journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.

Another successful extended research network is the Many Babies initiative. From their website, Many Babies “is a collaborative project for replication and best practices in developmental psychology research. Our goal is to bring researchers together to address difficult outstanding theoretical and methodological questions about the nature of early development and how it is studied.” The basic idea here is to enhance collaboration between labs all over the world that collect data from babies in an open and transparent manner. This also helps with increasing sample sizes, given that any individual lab faces challenges collecting data from large samples of babies. Check it out.

Lastly I will mention the Psychological Science Accelerator. From their website: “The Psychological Science Accelerator is a globally distributed network of psychological science laboratories with 1328 members representing 84 countries on all six populated continents, that coordinates data collection for democratically selected studies.” They have many committees to assist with every aspect of the research process for everyone involved (e.g., translation, ethics review, statistical analyses, and so on), and the entire process is guided by open and transparent research interests. I was part of some of the early discussions of this initiative and am very impressed with the leadership team during the handful of years it has existed. They are truly inspirational. This type of large scale extended research network seems to be an ideal manner to test ideas with lots of data, but more importantly data from all over the world. This allows for testing group/cultural differences in the effects of interest. Check out the results from the first project of this initiative here.

I have not gone into any detail on the Many Labs projects that sparked a lot of discussion, or other initiatives that sought to bring together researchers from different Universities and countries to collectively test hypotheses in an open and transparent manner. Overall, there are many exciting options available to researchers at all stages of their career to get involved in these extended research networks.