INVEST Conference promotes open science practices

The INVEST Conference is an interdisciplinary, international and high-level scientific conference. Bringing together researchers from different countries and disciplines, it is an excellent opportunity for scholars and professionals to learn about research in the field, expand their networks, deepen their knowledge and create new opportunities for collaboration. The INVEST conference will be held 15-17 of May, 2024.

The theme of the conference is Digitalization, social inequality and behavioural change. Digitalization is a very important social issue. It describes the spread of digital information technology into everyday functions and environments such as schools, workplaces and community services. It has the potential to offer a wide range of opportunities, but it can also be a major challenge, for example in terms of equality. Digitalization is linked to many of the major challenges of our time, such as marginalization, mental health and the collapse of the birth rate.

We have two visionary keynote speeches given by Vili Lehdonvirta, University of Oxford and Eva Serlachius, Karolinska Institutet. In addition, we will organise open science presentations and open science track.

INVEST is at the forefront of promoting the adoption of open science practices among its researchers. A key practice is pre-registration: researchers can publicly register their hypotheses, methods and analysis plans before conducting any analysis, ensuring complete transparency from the outset. This proactive measure not only discourages questionable research practices, but also increases the replicability of research and is strongly encouraged by scientific journals.

However, scientific conferences often still focus on presenting research results rather than on presenting research ideas (and encouraging peer feedback on these ideas). We want to change this by explicitly inviting researchers to present their pre-registrations to each other, so that colleagues can think along in their study from the start – rather than after the results are known. If you would like to submit a paper that would be suitable for the Open Science track, please tick the “Open Science” box on the submission form. You can also submit a short abstract for open science practices related speech (about 5min or so). The call for abstracts is open until 31 January 2024. We welcome short open science speeches both from researchers AND administrative personnel!

We are looking forward to receiving research papers on topics related to this year’s theme.

More information and abstract submission, visit INVEST conference 2024 website.