Open Psychology: transparency and reproducibility

Abstract

I describe the attempt by a group of psychologists to reform the discipline into an Open Science (which I will call 'Open Psychology'). I will first argue that their particular version of Open Science reflects the problems that gave rise to it and that it tries to solve. Then I will describe the infrastructure that this group of people is putting in place to facilitate transparency. An important function of this infrastructure is to restrict what are called 'researcher degrees of freedom'. In Psychology, transparency is as much about closing down as it is about opening up. I will then focus on the flagship project of Open Psychology, the Reproducibility Project. According to the Open Psychologists, the neglect of replication is at the core of Psychology's current problems, and their online infrastructure offers the perfect framework to facilitate replication and give it a place in the field's research process. But replication, I will argue, is not just an epistemological, methodological issue: it implies a particular ontology and tries to enact it. The Reproducibility Project, and Open Psychology generally, can be considered as social experiments, that attempt not only to reform Psychology, but also to perform a new psychological object.