Open Science

PROSPR - We are an informal support group within Psychology, with the objective of Promoting Open Science Practices within the department and beyond.

We meet informally and discuss how open science principles can be implemented effectively, to improve research transparency across different fields of psychology.

We encourage awareness of Open Science ideas and training opportunities. We think that this is suitable for both early-career scientists - especially where you can embed best practices in your career training - and senior academics.

We promote the use of open science and research integrity within the teaching curriculum as part of an agenda for supporting students' critical thinking. We want to grow students awareness of the range of relevant topics and methods, and embed their understanding within the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The use of open science covers the spectrum from reproducibility issues, data management practices, open data and the impact of statistical and analytic procedures on likely outcomes. We also encourage innovation and IT support that can facilitate students' appreciation of open science. We promote the use of open-source software for psychology experiments and analysis where practical and feasible

We advocate for the more widespread embrace of the open science movement. We look to celebrate positive examples of open science among students, staff and potential employment recruits

PROSPR members have been involved in:

• Registered Reports
• many-lab replication projects
• study preregistrations
• open-access publishing
• open data archiving

We have also developed teaching resources for data archiving systems and received funding to promote data management practices. We welcome opportunities from like-minded researchers to discuss where these and other initiatives might be productive.

We collaborate with colleagues across Lancaster University and support institutional initiatives such as the Data Conversations programme. Lancaster University maintains a datasets repository to promote transparency and open data practices. The University library services, as part of their digital innovation programme, support the UK concordat on open research data. There is also a useful research services blog here.

We recognise other open science groups within Psychology that share our enthusiasm, such as the Open Science Working Group at Cardiff. Likewise, we support initiatives such as the commitment to research transparency.