Open Science communities foster cultural shift towards Open Science

Lydia Laninga-Wijnen is Senior Research Fellow in INVEST Flagship at the University of Turku. Her research interests are adolescent peer relationships and bullying, and her current research project SOLID is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Academy of Finland. Laninga-Wijnen is an active promoter of Open Science and the founder and the coordinator of the Open Science Community Turku.

Website: https://lydialaningawijnen.nl/
ORCID-ID: 0000-0001-6158-8950

In this interview, Lydia Laninga-Wijnen talks about her experience with Open Science Communities.

What is an Open Science community?

I think an Open Science community can be described as a network for researchers, students, or even societal stakeholders, who are interested in Open Science. It is both for newcomers and for experienced colleagues to interact and learn from each other with regard to Open Science. It’s a bottom-up learning community. It can involve members of all career stages and all disciplines. I have myself founded the Open Science community of Turku. It consists of the community coordinator, that’s me, the ambassadors, and the members. The ambassadors are also in a kind of a leadership position so they can also bring up ideas on directions that we should take, and take the lead some of our meetings. Of course, members are welcome to bring in ideas as well.

What are the Open Science communities aiming for? Why do they exist?

The main aim is to make Open Science the norm in research. There are a lot of researchers who acknowledge that Open Science is really good, important and valuable, but there are still a lot of them who have hesitance to endorse Open Science practices, or they just simply do not have the tools, or they do not know where to start. Open Science communities facilitate this. Mutual respect is very important: if there are researchers who are critical about OS practices, we are very willing to start a conversation with them, because then we can learn from them to further improve the directions that we want to take.

I think, overall, an Open Science community has four aims. First one is to reach and engage researchers so that they really can learn about Open Science. It’s basically a platform where we can learn from each other and where we can also discuss our failures or bottlenecks in applying Open Science practices. So, it is really a learning community.

The second goal is to inspire and enable the adoption of OS practices. We want others to learn how to adopt these practices. We just had a preregistration workshop where we did preregistration together. The participants got to experience it once and hopefully that’s a small step towards the next one that they will try to do it on their own. In this way, we hope to be inspiring researchers to take the first steps, but also to consolidate the current OS practices.

The next goal is to shape institutional policies and advise organizations on how they can promote Open Science. It is important that an Open Science community, in general, operates independently from an institutional policy. So, it is a self-steering, researcher-led organization, and we do not receive instructions or tasks from other parties. But it is, of course, also important to be connected with the organization in a way that we can inform policies from the bottom up, because the policies describe what is required or desired, and what is incentivized. We can also provide advice on infrastructure, that is, what we need for a smooth transition to a more open science.

And I think the fourth goal is that we aim to foster interactions between the academia and the society. An Open Science community is open not only for academics but also to people from societal stakeholders who may also become members and participate in our activities. We hope that such stakeholders can also enable us to engage more in citizen science and to have more contact with people for whom we are actually doing research.

We have already touched upon this topic, but how do you perceive the role of Open Science communities in this transition to Open Science?

The main role would be to bring about such a culture shift that Open Science becomes the norm, I think. You may say, yeah, Open Science is good, why do not all researchers do it. And I think that it is mostly because there is this “older” culture of doing research that people are adjusted to. This is how they are used to do their research and feel comfortable, so why change it.

There is an interesting blog post by Brian Nosek about this. He says that to generate a culture shift, it works like a pyramid. At the top of this pyramid is the policy, so you need a change in policies that promote Open Science to ensure that people also want to do it. So, it should be rewarding for researchers. And at the bottom of the pyramid, there is the infrastructure. You must have a user-friendly infrastructure so that you can put Open Science into practice.

And well, in the past years, a lot of attention has been paid to improving this upper and lower layer of the pyramid. With regard to policies, funding agencies increasingly require that we adopt Open Science practices (e.g., publish open access) and journals now provide us with badges if, within the research process of the paper, open science practices (e.g., pre-registration) were endorsed. We also have the infrastructure. We have Open Science Framework to pre-register our studies, we have WORCS to open up our workflow, and every day there are new user-friendly tools being developed to apply Open Science practices. But in the middle of the pyramid, there’s the challenge: the majority of researchers still sticks to old habits – it is not really the norm to adopt these open science practices yet. And that is where the OS communities come in, to really make this culture shift. So, you need people who actually do it and who diverge from the status quo basically. The transition to Open Science is mostly a social challenge.

Do you have critical voices in your community?

Yes, sometimes we indeed have some. And sometimes I myself am a critical voice. I think it’s very important that we are not staring blindly, like oh, Open Science is perfect as it is, and everybody should do it. It would also scare people off from doing at least something to make their work a bit more open.

Applying OS practices can also be a bumpy road sometimes, and that is also important to acknowledge so that people who are initially very enthusiastic and want to do everything with regard to Open Science won’t get disappointed. I think that Open Science communities are helpful here, because otherwise it might be that researchers mostly hear about success stories from ambitious colleagues like yeah, I did a registered report, and it went very well. Whereas in an OS community you can also share some of the things that did not go right.

How do you view the benefits of participation from a researcher’s perspective?

There are many benefits. I think one important thing is that Open Science will become the norm. So, it is not a movement that will blow over. The culture shift is already happening, and as a researcher you will eventually be asked to do these things. So, it is good to step on the train that is rolling now. And one way to do that is to be part of a community and to learn more about open research practices. There are still many researchers who believe that Open Science is mostly about publishing Open Access, but there’s so much more to it. Topics can include transparent methods, preregistration, sharing data, code, research tools, reproducibility, replication research, citizen science, open peer review, diversity and inclusion, research integrity. All these are covered by Open Science.

As a researcher, you do not have to do it all. As I said, you can first take steps that fit best to your own project. I also think that Open Science can be very liberating for researchers. It kind of frees researchers from this ‘publish or perish’ thinking. For a long time, researchers may have felt pressure to publish clean and interesting stories. Sometimes a researcher may have worked on a project for years and then they conduct their analysis and the analyses do not produce significant results. The researcher may become afraid, like oh, maybe I can’t publish it. And all the work is seen as non-relevant. But it’s now recognized that this thinking is super problematic and can create a replication and publication bias.

I think, as researchers, we may increasingly experience freedom that, regardless of outcomes, if our study is well-designed, we can have more and more confidence that it can be published. Also, this way, we will have a fairer view of reality. Because if you only have significant and interesting stories, then to which extent does science really say something about practice? Open Science is also increasingly rewarded, by journals and also by funding agencies. For a researcher, it is still important that you sometimes publish in scientific journals or that you gain funding from agencies. Yet, by being a member of an Open Science community, you show like, okay, I am active in the field of Open Science. I think that is really a big thing, if you can say that.

The adoption and the relevance of OS practices vary across disciplines, and then again, the OS communities are interdisciplinary. How disciplinary differences manifest themselves in the activities of OS communities?

I think that, in general, we can learn a lot from other disciplines. A particular OS practice may be very common in a certain discipline, whereas in another it can be quite new. For instance, with regard to registered reports, some disciplines are underrepresented. If I look in the literature, I do not see many registered reports for longitudinal projects, and I think that’s partly because it’s quite hard to make a registered report for such projects. This is not desirable so there is a need to think about how we can fix this and make sure that it is possible also for longitudinal projects. Within an OS Community, we can share experiences and bundle them together with researchers from other disciplines who may have some keys on how to do it. And I think that in this way we can really learn from each other. At the same time, there may be practices that are only relevant for a certain discipline, and then they can be organized as a kind of a sub-activity just for that discipline. We researchers have a lot of things in common and sometimes more than we think, so that is really the value of interdisciplinary OS communities.

Could you share some practical tips or recommendations for a researcher who wants to get started with an Open Science community?

My first step would be to connect with the international network of Open Science communities as soon as possible, because they can really help you to make a solid plan. I was initially quite enthusiastic and did a lot of things in between my other tasks. If I had contacted earlier, it would have helped me a lot in that I wouldn’t have needed to reinvent the wheel myself sometimes. It is also good to be aware of what is already happening in your university regarding Open Science, so that you can really learn from people who are already involved in it and who know the right people to make a connection with. It is also good to be aware that endorsing Open Science can be a bumpy road and to be prepared for that. The initial enthusiasm of people can be tempered when they experience these bumps.

It is also important that the university has a favorable attitude towards Open Science and takes it into account also when assessing researchers, so that this enthusiasm for Open Science can remain, and that people do not take it as a failure, if for instance, they do not succeed with their registered report even if they try hard. They should be assessed based on their endorsement of Open Science practices rather than based on maybe not having everything published. So, I think these are important things for an Open Science community to flourish and also to be sustainable. Because you can activate people to do Open Science; but if it eventually doesn’t pay out for them because the university evaluates and rewards other aspects of research (e.g., publishing many papers), they may lose their enthusiasm and stop doing it.

Acknowledgements: This interview was conducted as part of the Research & Innovation for Cities & Citizens (RI4C2) project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101035802.

Julkaisun tiedot: 2/2023, Open Up!-blogi, ISSN 2814-8967