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There have been numerous efforts documenting the effects of open science in existing papers; however, these efforts typically only consider the author’s analyses and supplemental materials from the papers. While understanding the current rate of open science adoption is important, it is also vital that we explore the factors that may encourage such adoption. One such factor may be publishing organizations setting open science requirements of submitted arti- cles: encouraging researchers to adopt more rigorous reporting and research practices. For example, within the education technology discipline, the ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) has been promoting open science practices since 2018 through a Call For Pa- pers statement. The purpose of this study was to replicate previous papers within the proceedings of L@S and compare the degree of open science adoption and robust reproducibility practices to other conferences in education technology without a statement on open science. Specifically, we examined 93 papers and documented the open science practices used. We then attempted to reproduce the results with intervention from authors to bolster the chance of suc- cess. Finally, we compared the overall adoption rates to those from other conferences in education technology. Our cursory review sug- gests that researchers at L@S were more knowledgeable in open science practices, such as preregistration or preprints, compared to the researchers who published in International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education and the International Conference on Educational Data Mining as they were less likely to say they were unfamiliar with the practices. However, the overall adoption of open science practices was significantly lower with only 1% of papers providing open data, 5% providing open materials, and no papers with a preregistration. Based on speculation, the low adoption rates maybe due to 20% of the papers not using a dataset, at-scale datasets and materials that were unable to be released to avoid security issues or sensitive data leaks, or that data were being used in ongoing research and are not considered complete enough for release by the authors. All openly accessible work can be found in an Open Science Framework project
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Champions of Transparency in Education: What Journal Reviewers Can Do to Encourage Open Science Practices
As the field of education, and especially gifted education, gradually moves toward open science, our research community increasingly values transparency and openness brought by open science practices. Yet, individual researchers may be reluctant to adopt open science practices due to low incentives, barriers of extra workload, or lack of support to apply these in certain areas, such as qualitative research. We encourage and give guidelines to reviewers to champion open science practices by warmly influencing authors to consider applying open science practices to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research and providing ample support to produce higher-quality publications. Instead of imposing open science practices on authors, we advocate reviewers suggest small, non-threatening, specific steps to support authors without making them feel overwhelmed, judged, or punished. We believe that these small steps taken by reviewers will make a difference to create a more supportive environment for researchers to adopt more open science practices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1937698
- PAR ID:
- 10550304
- Publisher / Repository:
- EdArXiv
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Gifted Child Quarterly
- Volume:
- 67
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0016-9862
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 337 to 351
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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There have been numerous efforts documenting the effects of open science in existing papers; however, these efforts typically only consider the author's analyses and supplemental materials from the papers. While understanding the current rate of open science adoption is important, it is also vital that we explore the factors that may encourage such adoption. One such factor may be publishing organizations setting open science requirements for submitted articles: encouraging researchers to adopt more rigorous reporting and research practices. For example, within the education technology discipline, theACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) has been promoting open science practices since 2018 through a Call For Papers statement. The purpose of this study was to replicate previous papers within the proceedings of L@S and compare the degree of open science adoption and robust reproducibility practices to other conferences in education technology without a statement on open science. Specifically, we examined 93 papers and documented the open science practices used. We then attempted to reproduce the results with invitation from authors to bolster the chance of success. Finally, we compared the overall adoption rates to those from other conferences in education technology. Although the overall responses to the survey were low, our cursory review suggests that researchers at L@S might be more familiar with open science practices compared to the researchers who published in the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM): 13 of 28 AIED and EDM responses were unfamiliar with preregistrations and 7 unfamiliar with preprints, while only 2 of 7 L@S responses were unfamiliar with preregistrations and 0 with preprints. The overall adoption of open science practices at L@S was much lower with only 1% of papers providing open data, 5% providing open materials, and no papers had a preregistration. All openly accessible work can be found in an Open Science Framework project.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00169862231184575
