Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Open Science is the idea that as far as possible, every part of the scientific process should be made freely accessible.52 The perfect Open Science study would have an associated webpage where you could download all its data, all the statistical code that the scientists used to analyse those data, and all the materials they used to gather the data in the first place.53 The peer reviews and previous drafts of the article could be published alongside the article (even if the identity of the reviewers isn’t revealed), allowing the reader to see the whole publication process.54 Providing free access to all your data and methods is an embodiment of the Mertonian norm of communalism: allowing other scientists to re-use your work to make their own research more efficient. It also serves the norm of organised scepticism: it makes it easier for other researchers to check your paper for negligent errors, attempt to replicate your results, and generally dig into your findings in more detail. They can do that far more readily than they could were they using just your study’s summary tables and graphs, which are typically all that’s included in a journal publication; and they can do it without having to write to you directly to beg for your dataset, which as we know rarely works. Taking the Open Science approach demonstrates to your scientific colleagues that they don’t need to have blind faith that everything’s been reported accurately: you have nothing to hide.