Open Science is a practice that promotes transparency and openness in research. Data, methodologies, tools, and other resources, involved in the research process are made readily available to the public. Our lab director, Prof Suzy Styles presented at the ‘Open Science Talk’ held at the Nanyang Technological University on 15 August 2019 alongside Prof Daniel Ansari and Prof Gianluca Esposito. The event was organized by the NTU Library in collaboration with NTU Centre for Research and Development Learning (CRADLE).

Prof Daniel Ansari from Western University started the talk by introducing the components of Open Science, emphasising on the significance of open reproducible research, and how poor research practices have led to poor reproducibility. He argued that without being able to reproduce prior research findings, we cannot build on them and make progress. These poor practices include: hypothesizing after results are known (HARKing); having low reporting power; hacking statistical significance values; and publication bias. Access to research methodologies and subsequent replication of research did not find significant results can address such issues.

Prof Suzy Styles elaborated further on how academic institutions can play a part by providing platforms or repositories for researchers to share and access data. Through proper storage, identification, and tracking of data, researchers can continue to have their research data and materials accessible. There are different platforms with various features that are useful for researchers. She mentioned that using for-profit (as opposed to nonprofit platforms) can affect access to our research in the future.

Lastly, Prof Gianluca shared with us the importance of data sharing and preregistration. This practice encourages researchers to register the details of their research including their hypotheses, methodologies, and analyses before collecting data. Pre-registration of studies requires researchers to be stringent and precise about their research, and it prevents HARKing and hacking statistical significance values.

The BLIP Lab proudly supports Open Science. We preregister all our studies and continuously make our research resources available to the public. If you’re interested to read more about Open Science, check out the following links!

Prof Danial Ansari: https://www.edu.uwo.ca/faculty-profiles/daniel-ansari.html
Prof Suzy’s slides: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/Z3W4CP
Prof Gianluca’s slides: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/STAOMJ