The motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in verba (“no one’s words” or “take nobody’s word for it”). In elementary school, this is taught as “show your work.” However, in every discipline, much of the process of research is not included in the final product (i.e., book or article). For example, our scholarship may not include sufficient detail about how data are collected and analyzed to enable others to reproduce the work. Many disciplines don’t have norms of sharing their gathered research materials (aka “data”) or their methods or analysis code. Furthermore, given the nature of academic publishing, individuals who are not at academic institutions may not even be able to read or even access our scholarship. In this talk, we discuss ways that all disciplines may benefit from embracing greater transparency in their work. These benefits include building equity, creating more reproducible and robust scholarship, and providing training to our students that fosters transferable skills across disciplines.
Christopher Eaker, Reference & Instruction Librarian
Paula Lackie, Academic Technologist
Julia Strand, Associate Professor of Psychology
Useful links for exploring Open Scholarship in your Discipline:
- List of Preprint repositories for a range of disciplines
- The Open Research Toolkit, Christopher Eaker, 2021 (Useful resources for anyone interested in learning more about open research.)
- FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Principles for Data Management and Stewardship
- Publishing Open, Reproducible Research With Undergraduates, Strand and Brown, 2019
- Easing Into Open Science: A Guide for Graduate Students and Their Advisors, Kathwalla et al., 2021
- Research Preregistration 101. Lindsay et al., 2016