We were happy to have been given the opportunity to represent the international network of open science communities at the 2023 annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Washington D.C. Alexandra Sarafoglou (coordinator of OSCA) was invited to speak about the importance of grassroot communities in the symposium titled “Open Science 2.0: Moving Beyond Statistical Reforms to Improve Psychological Science”.
Alexandra highlighted the main challenge in adopting open science practices: engaging the academic community across disciplines and beyond the open science bubble. Researchers are at the center of the transition to open science, and it is the academic community that ultimately sets the norms and standards in the field. Open science communities can address these challenges by promoting open science practices among researchers, making them visible and accessible. They also advocate for the research community’s needs and can articulate them to policy makers at both local and national levels, as seen in the Netherlands. Drawing from these experiences, Alexandra advocated the establishment of open science communities in more institutions.
The symposium, chaired and organized by Eiko Fried, and emphasized not only the significance of grassroot initiatives but also highlighted the need to prioritizing diversity (speaker: Sakshi Ghai), education (speaker: Flavio Azevedo), and theory formation (speaker: Donald Robinaugh) when moving toward cumulative, global, and truly open psychological science. The symposium slides are openly available and can be accessed on: https://osf.io/u7wba/
We are truly inspired by the amazing work from our fellow speakers and the great open science initiatives that were represented at the conference. In particular, we would like to shout out the great work done by team members of the FORRT project which aims to advance open science through pedagogical reform and meta-scientific research (Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training; https://forrt.org) and by team members of the CREP project which provides training, support, and professional growth opportunities for students and instructors completing replication projects (Collaborative Education and Replication Project; https://www.crep-psych.org).