Responsible Research Assessment

Felix Schönbrodt, Professor of Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, tells about an initiative that he coordinates within the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie (German Psychological Society). Motivated by the Reproducibility Crisis and a rising frustration with the publishers of high-ranking journals, Schönbrodt has co-authored three position papers on the theme of responsible research assessment. The suggestion is to develop a two-stage evaluation system for hiring, the first of which will use responsible metrics with emphasis on open data, pre-registration and several aspects of reproducibility, whereas the second stage will focus on a qualitative (content-oriented) evaluation of selected candidates. The propositions of Schönbrodt’s group have so far led to published feedback from more than 40 different scholars. Besides his nation-wide work within the German Psychological Society, Schönbrodt is the managing director of LMU’s Open Science Centre, where scholars from different disciplines convene for workshops on various aspects of Open Science. Under the nickname «nicebread» (Schön = nice, Brodt = bread), he also runs a personal blog and a project webpage on GitHub. Interview recorded in Munich, October 2023. First published online: November 29, 2023.