How can we make our science more transparent? Will transparency lead to reproducibility and ultimately scientific progress? Is open science exclusively beneficial or does engaging in transparent science incur unreasonable costs for the individual researcher?

These and other questions were part of a recent lunch discussion at Cognitive and Decision Sciences. Two recent papers formed the backbone of the discussion. Munafò and colleagues (2017) offered a manifesto for reproducible science, highlighting several measures aimed at optimizing how science is conducted, presented, communicated, evaluated, and incentivized. In contrast, whilst McKiernan and colleagues (2016) advocated open science as beneficial for individual researchers’ development, career and scientific contributions, the paper also left room for debating the costs incurred by individuals engaging in transparent science. The debate amongst CDS team members spurred an interesting discussion about how much transparency is required, and identified ways in which transparency was already built into individual researchers’ projects, for instance through replication, or the sharing of analysis code and data.

The discussion will be followed up in the future with a session on where and how to preregister a scientific study. For those interested in the two sides of the reproducibility in science story, the two papers cited below provide an interesting start.

McKiernan, E. C., Bourne, P. E., Brown, C. T., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J., … & Spies, J. R. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. Elife, 5, e16800.

Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V., Button, K. S., Chambers, C. D., du Sert, N. P., … & Ioannidis, J. P. (2017). A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 0021.