Social Science Space

A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.

The ‘replication crisis’ certainly is uncomfortable for many scientists whose work gets undercut, and the rate of failures may currently be unacceptably high. But psychologist and statistician Eric Loken argues that confronting the replication crisis is good for science as a whole.

Elie Diner presents arguments for and against sharing research presentations online, arguing that sharing research presentations should be seen as part of the mainstream of open scholarship and is a natural way for academics to present their preliminary findings.

Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, ultimately makes research more efficient and effective. Yet despite policies that encourage and require data sharing, researchers in the UK and US report lower percentages of data sharing than average. Grace Baynes suggests researchers be given incentives, expert support, and training to make it easy to share data.