First mini open science fair at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Some reflections on the first mini open science fair at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Yesterday, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel organised the first Mini Open Science Fair (click here to go to website). The event focused on researchers sharing their experiences with using various open science practices or tools. For example, I gave a brief presentation on the Open Science Framework (osf.io); I explained what the Open Science Framework allows you to do and how I used the website in my own research practices. The slides from my presentation can be downloaded from OSF (https://osf.io/uq9jk/).

I really appreciated this event, as there aren’t that many initiatives in my university to promote open science. I decided to write this short blogpost to share some of the things that I learned during the event or that I found striking.

1. The event was organised for researchers from all possible disciplines, and it was refreshing to see how researchers from other disciplines approach open science. It’s easy to get caught up in the replication crisis in Psychology and forget that other disciplines have already discussed similar problems in the past. In many cases, other disciplines have even—sometimes succesfully—adopted their own solutions to deal with these issues. That being said, it was striking that the idea to preregister your research or to use registered reports was novel to many conference participants. Researchers working in Psychology appeared to be more aware of the use of preregistration and registered reports. Yet, these practices could be very relevant to other disciplines as well.
2. I was surprised by the amount of platforms that are available to share and/or archive data. I used the Open Science Framework in the past, and I was aware that Zenodo existed as well (zenodo.org). However, I did not know that there are literally dozens of platforms that you can use. In fact, there is even a search engine to find the best platform for your needs: re3data.org.
3. One presenter (Wouter Ryckbosch, Twitter: @wryckbosch) talked about using citizen scientists for their research. Briefly put, they use volunteers to transcribe thousands of text fragments from the 18th and 19th century (https://www.getuigenissen.org/team?lang=en). I found the idea of using volunteers to help in research fascinating. Undoubtedly, this approach could also be used in psychological research, for example to watch and code video fragments. While using citizen scientists can also be challenging (e.g., recruiting and training volunteers can be a huge time investment), it can also speed up research and it can help to democratize research. Researchers interested in using citizen scientists can use zooniverse.org to set up a website for this.