#1 Open science is flourishing

The idea of open science has certainly taken hold in recent years and is growing in a number of exciting and complementary directions. Presenters introduced a range of new initiatives — some being pushed by small groups of young researchers, others by the scientific establishment.

In her lightning talk, Fiona Fidler introduced SCORE, an initiative from DARPA (an agency of the United States Department of Defense) aimed at developing measures to “enable someone to understand the degree to which a particular claim or result is likely to be reproducible and/or replicable.”

Nik Steffens, Harry Manley, and Mike Phillip talked about their experience with the Psychological Science Accelerator, described as psychology’s answer to CERN. It’s an initiative to enable rapid large scale replication studies through researchers working together and pooling the data they collect.

Cooper Smout introduced another collective effort — Project Free Our Knowledge. The idea is for researchers to commit to boycotting closed access journals as a collective with names held anonymously until critical mass has been reached.

Nick Tierney introduced ROpenSci, a community of R users working towards more open scientific and statistical practices.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Willen talked about IGDORE, the scientific institute for independent researchers that aims to make research more global and accessible.