Rationally Speaking #172 - Brian Nosek on "Why science needs openness"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2016

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's a growing anxiety about the quality of scientific research, as a depressingly large fraction of articles fail to replicate. Could "openness" solve that problem? This episode features Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology and founder of the Center for Open Science. He and Julia discuss what openness means, some clever approaches to boosting openness, and whether openness could have any downsides (for example, in the cases of peer review or data sharing).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPictics.org.
0:31.0	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.4	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, Brian Nozik.
0:45.9	Brian is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.
0:49.3	He's also the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science.
0:53.4	You might have heard Brian mentioned on this show before or heard him in the news. He's famous for a number of things, but in part, he's famous for setting up the reproducibility project, which we discussed on our episode with Yuri Simonson a few months ago, that made a splash in the world of social science by trying and failing
1:14.3	to reproduce the results of many psychological experiments in top journals.
1:20.7	So Brian and I are going to talk today about open science and what that means for the field.
1:26.8	Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
1:30.1	So, uh, what don't you start by talking about what you mean by openness in this context?
1:36.0	So openness in, uh, for our purposes is two things. One is referring to transparency, the availability of not just the outcomes of the research,
1:47.5	as in the reports that I write telling you what I found, but also in the content of that
1:53.3	research, the data, the materials, the methods, the code, the protocols, and in the workflow
1:59.7	that produced those outcomes. So I had some process of data generation,
2:05.6	of design, of analyzing that data of coming to inference at the end. And sharing that, making that
2:13.4	openly available makes it a lot easier for someone independent of me to evaluate the outcomes
2:20.1	and decide whether they are credible or not.
2:22.7	That is a core part of openness.
2:25.0	The other part of openness that we really care about at the center is openness as inclusivity,
2:30.1	and that is so that anybody who has interest, motivation, time can be involved in the research process in some way.
2:37.7	Anyone even, not a scientist.
	...

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