Yes / Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. Whilst there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, little research has assessed general uptake of such practices across psychology university researchers. The current study estimates psychologists’ level of engagement in open research practices across universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, while also assessing possible explanatory factors that may impact their engagement. Data were collected from 602 psychology researchers in the UK and Ireland on the extent to which they have implemented various practices (e.g., use of preprints, preregistration, open data, open materials). Here we present the summarised descriptive results, as well as considering differences between various categories of researcher (e.g., career stage, subdiscipline, methodology), and examining the relationship between researcher’s practices and their self-reported capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM-B) to engage in open research practices. Results show that while there is considerable variability in engagement of open research practices, differences across career stage and subdiscipline of psychology are small by comparison. We observed consistent differences according to respondent’s research methodology and based on the presence of institutional support for open research. COM-B dimensions were collectively significant predictors of engagement in open research, with automatic motivation emerging as a consistently strong predictor. We discuss these findings, outline some of the challenges experienced in this study, and offer suggestions and recommendations for future research. Estimating the prevalence of responsible research practices is important to assess sustained behaviour change in research reform, tailor educational training initiatives, and to understand potential factors that might impact engagement. / Research funding: Aston University. Article funding: Open access funding provided by IReL.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19874 |
| Date | 08 March 2024 |
| Creators | Silverstein, P., Pennington, C.R., Branney, Peter, O'Connor, D., Lawlor, E., O'Brien, E., Lynott, D. |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2024 The Authors. British Journal of Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The British Psychological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., CC-BY |
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