“Open science seeks to create a prosperous collaborative environment for scientific research, enabling groundbreaking discoveries that improve people’s lives.”
Open Science is a movement to make research and scientific dissemination accessible to all social, professional, and amateur levels. This trend has gained significant traction in the last decade, emerging as a remedy to the shortcomings of traditional scientific investigations throughout history, specifically by simplifying the replication of research methods reported in published scientific literature.
Open Science aims to accomplish two main benefits: 1) increase the transparency and replicability of research, and 2) allow formulating new research questions that would otherwise be impossible to consider. These benefits extend to various fields of science, including Education Sciences; therefore, this movement has become highly relevant in recent decades.
“The principles of open science aim to expand traditional research mechanisms to achieve greater dissemination and replicability of the results.”
A brief introduction to open science
In recent years, “open science” has become a buzz term that emerged due to the errors and weaknesses found in traditional approaches to scientific research. However, the origin of open science goes back decades, related to events that generated great concern in the academic community. For example, the presentation of selective reporting of results, or “HARK-ing” (hypothesizing after the results are known), was highlighted as a severe problem in psychology in the sixties and epidemiology in the nineties (Meehl, 1967; Taubes and Mann, 1995, cited by van Dijk, W. et al., 2021).
The five basic principles of Open Science are: 1) Open Data, 2) Open Analysis, 3) Open Materials, 4) Pre-registration and 5) Open Access (Van Dijk, W. et al., 2021). These principles seek to expand traditional research procedures to achieve better dissemination and replicability of results. Each of the elements is described below.
Elements that comprise Open Science
-
Open Data: Refers to the practice of making available to the public the data used in research, contrasting with the general practice of peer-reviewed journals, where summary data are usually published in the form of statistics such as means, medians, and variances. Open Data is the element of open science receiving the most research funding. Naturally, the data used and produced during the research is publicly accessible, and the research institution assumes the role of guardian of the data.
-
Open Analysis: The purpose of Open Analysis is to provide researchers with a detailed analysis of the methods and steps used during the investigation. Such procedures include cleaning and processing data, generating new variables, and detailed statistical procedures. Contrary to what open analysis dictates, the tendency in journals, for space reasons, has been to publish procedures and methodologies that are often insufficient to replicate the results.
-
Open Materials: The third component of open science is Open Materials. This component refers to making public all instruments and materials used during the research. Such materials vary according to the research. They include assessments designed for the research, questionnaires, intervention protocols, and checklists for implementation. Currently, journals usually require a list of materials for submitted articles. However, such a list is often incomplete or lacks detailed descriptions of the materials, limiting the opportunity to reproduce such work.
-
Pre-registration: The fourth element, pre-registration, refers to delimiting the research protocol in advance. In the pre-registration, the researcher must detail the purpose of the research, the hypothesis, and the data collection and analysis methods before carrying out the research. Subsequently, during the writing of the research article, the investigators can review their pre-registration to identify all differences from the original plan. The main objective is to identify and differentiate exploratory vs. confirmatory results.
-
Open Access: The last principle is perhaps the most important. Researchers who adhere to the principle of Open Access seek to ensure that research results are accessible to anyone and not just to researchers with a subscription to a specific journal. Usually, this goal is achieved by publishing in an Open Access journal or by paying an additional commission to have an article published in a traditional Open Access journal. Similarly, it is possible to achieve this goal by publishing a pre-print or post-print version of the article on an institutional (university) or research community platform.
Together, these principles benefit science in two key ways: 1) They increase the transparency and replicability of the research by providing the data, analyses, and materials used in the investigation, and 2) they provide the opportunity to develop new research questions that would otherwise be impossible if financial resources were unavailable to pay for access. On the other hand, many researchers dedicated to high-quality scientific production likely adhere to the pillars and principles of open science, thus creating a more conducive environment to achieve these benefits.
Open science has not been indifferent to the Education Sciences. On the contrary, education researchers have expressed concerns similar to those of other disciplines during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For example, Peterson et al. (1982) encouraged researchers to provide more detailed descriptions of their variables, stating that this would decrease the replication failure rate of studies. More recently, in the early 2000s, special education researchers met to define quality correlation indicators, group designs, single cases, and qualitative research (IES, 2021). On the other hand, since 2019, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has adopted the Standards of Excellence in Educational Research (SEER) as a way to promote the transparency and replicability of published studies (IES, 2021). To encourage their inclusion in research, the IES requires the implementation of these protocols to qualify for the funds granted to researchers (IES, 2021).
Finally, the essential goal of open science is to establish a thriving environment for collaboration that encourages researchers to make revolutionary discoveries that help improve people’s lives on many levels, including education.
Tecnológico de Monterrey has joined the Open Science movement by creating the Living Lab & Data Hub of the Institute for the Future of Education (IFE). From this initiative, calls for experimental research in educational innovation will be launched under the principles of Open Science. We invite you to learn more about the initiative on our web page.
This article is inspired by the original research article “Open Science in the Education Sciences” (van Dijk, W. et al., 2021).
About the author
Irving Andreé Vela Miam. Masters in Computer Science from Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey. His research interests include analyzing data related to social issues such as health, education, and economic development.
References
Peterson, L., Homer, A. L., & Wonderlich, S. A. (1982). The integrity of independent variables in behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 15(4), p. 477–492. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1982.15-477
Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education. (2021, June 10). Standards for Excellence in Education Research. Institute of Education Sciences. https://ies.ed.gov/seer/
Van Dijk, W., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S. A. (2021). Open Science in Education Sciences. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 54(2), p. 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420945267
Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Observatory of Educational Innovation.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
