ReproducibiliTea started as a journal club at the University of Oxford and is now also a podcast co-hosted by Sam Parsons, Amy Orben, and Sophia Crüwell. As the name suggests, the leaders are focused on research reproducibility and subtopics including transparency and rigor. BITSS Catalyst Amy Riegelman interviewed Sam Parsons who responded…
Research transparency in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons learned and ways forward
Guest post by Soazic Elise Wang Sonne (World Bank) Despite efforts by African governments to significantly raise public spending on scientific research, the continent, which is home to 14% of the world’s population, contributes to less than 1% of published research outputs (David Dunne, 2017). While this can be partly attributed to…
Navigating the Garden of Forking Paths
Guest post by Kweku Opoku-Agyemang (Center for Effective Global Action, Cornell Tech, and International Growth Centre) Improving ethical and transparency standards within and across the social and behavioral science professions appears to be more of a journey than a destination. Thankfully, this is a voyage that has an ever-growing number of travelers.…
Diary of a Research Transparency Postdoc: South America Tour
Fernando Hoces de la Guardia – BITSS Postdoctoral Scholar I joined BITSS in September as its first postdoc and was excited to hit the ground running with a series of events to promote research transparency in Latin America. Through partnerships with local universities, we managed to organize back-to-back seminars in Chile, Peru…
Kicking off a new partnership with The Choice Lab at the 68° North Conference
Jennifer Sturdy–BITSS Program Advisor Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. It seems fitting that I read a book which references this Jules Verne quote just before our BITSS panel on research…
It Depends…(and not on the weather)
A read out on key questions from Day 2 of our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Workshop (RT2) in Berkeley, California. Well, Day 1 of RT2 was foggy – but Day 2 brought the Northern California rain. If you participated in Day 2, or visited our OSF page to follow along on your…
Trying to clear the fog
We had a lovely, foggy morning start to our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Training (RT2) here in Berkeley yesterday, and we have already had the opportunity to enjoy some great conversations with participants and faculty alike. One early suggestion brought to us by Arnaud Vaganay was the need to first frame what…
Announcing Open Enrollment for the BITSS MOOC: Transparent and Open Social Science Research
Most of you probably noticed that 2015 marked a turning point for BITSS. It was the year we launched our Social Science Meta-Analysis and Research Transparency (SSMART) Grant Program, the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science, and our new website. It was also the year we started focusing on two main objectives…
Reproducibility of Research: Issues and Proposed Remedies – A Sackler Colloquium Reflection
Guest post: Cynthia M. Kroeger, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham From March 8-10, 2017, I had the honor of joining scientific researchers, publishers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and funders from all over the world to discuss Reproducibility of Research: Issues and Proposed Remedies. This Sackler colloquium of the…
Reflections from BITSS’s First Workshop in South Asia
By BITSS Program Manager Kelsey Mulcahy You’ve probably noticed the growing interest in research transparency and reproducibility issues and training – conversations with your colleagues, increasing numbers of high-profile panels – and of course, a number of BITSS workshops this Spring from UC Merced, California to Cuernavaca, Mexico to Delhi, India. We…
Research Transparency Workshops in Cameroon, South Africa, and the UK
Guest post: Elise Wang Sonne, United Nations University-MERIT, Netherlands 2016 was definitely a very exciting year for me as a BITSS Catalyst, as I organized three transparency and reproducibility workshops in Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. The transparency journey ended with my speech during the 2016 OpenCon Conference on a plenary panel on…
CEGA and the African School of Economics collaborate at the Summer Institute for Economics Research
This is a reblog from the EASST Collaborative, written by former EASST Visting Fellow Constantine Manda. See the original post here. From December 12-17 2016, the African School of Economics (ASE) hosted its annual Summer Institute for Economic Research (SIER) in Contonou, Benin. Over the course of the week, over 100 participants were able…
Our 2017 ASSA Session
Garret Christensen –BITSS Project Scientist BITSS organized a session on meta-analysis and reproducibility in economics for the recent Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA, but better known as the AEAs, the largest annual economics conference and job market for PhD economists) in Chicago. Chicago, as much of the country, was in the midst…
Panel on Reproducible Journalism
–Garret Christensen, BITSS Project Scientist Last month a colleague of mine from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), John Bohannon, and I organized a panel discussion on the subject of reproducible journalism for Stanford’s Computation + Journalism Symposium. John is a contributing correspondent for Science, but he’s been visiting BIDS for…
Berkeley Initiative Scales up Research Transparency and Reproducibility Trainings
Annual trainings will bring together researchers from across the social sciences to promote transparency and reproducibility in social science research Berkeley, Calif – Sept. 30, 2016 – To scale up and institutionalize open science trainings, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) award…
Research Transparency in Social Sciences Landed in Francophone Africa
Guest Post: Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo Everything started in March 2016, when I attended a workshop in Athi River (Nairobi, Kenya) organized by Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences about “Research Transparency in Social Sciences” (RTSS, hereafter). What caught my attention first is…
Upcoming Opportunities: Call for Papers x2, Nominations x1
We’ve got three big opportunities coming up. Two are new announcements, and one is a reminder. NEW: Annual Meeting Call for Papers– The 5th BITSS Annual Meeting will be in Berkeley December 15-16. This is our annual forum to highlight advances in the field of transparency and reproducibility across the social sciences.…
Research Transparency Enhances Evidence Credibility in East Africa
EASST fellow Saint Kizito Omala, Lecturer at Makerere University and Senior Examinations Officer at the Uganda National Examinations Board. Technical details, which are often hidden, are what guarantee the credibility of published scientific work. In this regard, Research Transparency (RT) is a primer! To lay bare all retraceable procedures and facts that…
UC Berkeley and California Government Data Sharing Forum
BITSS and Berkeley Opportunity Lab When a representative from the California Judicial Council attended the BITSS Annual Meeting last December, she asked the group an interesting question – if we want to be more transparent and share data, how can we do so in a responsible way that limits risk to those…
Save the Dates: Upcoming BITSS Events
If you’re interested in joining BITSS and others as a presenter at a conference session on transparency, replication, and reproducibility at the Institute for New Economic Thinkings’ Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) Plenary in Budapest Oct 19-22, please contact Garret. We’re hoping to submit a session proposal by the end of July. The…
Mid-Summer Recap
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist BITSS and I have been busy lately. Here’s a quick rundown: If you want to learn or teach reproducible programming, Software Carpentry is one of the best organizations out there–check out their lesson materials and see if they’re offering a workshop near you. I got hooked up with…
BITSS Bits: Repro at UC Davis and the World Bank, Job Openings
–Garret Christensen, BITSS Project Scientist BITSS Bits. Too cheesy for our newsletter name? My guess is yes. Regardless, here’s an update on recent BITSS activities. I presented on p-hacking, publication bias, and pre-registration at the Making Social Science Transparent conference at the UC Davis Institute for Social Sciences April 22. My slides…
Upcoming Events and Links
Fitsum Mulugeta, a former EASST fellow who attended the IPA/BITSS transparency workshop in Kenya last month, wrote a blog post about his experience. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla (Leamer-Rosenthal prize winners) got more press coverage about their paper in Science on voter persuasion, this time from This American Life. Ted Miguel will…
BITSS/IPA Kenya Workshop on data-sharing and reproducibility
BITSS and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) recently co-hosted a workshop on reproducibility outside Nairobi, Kenya. IPA’s Stephanie Wykstra wrote a post for the IPA blog about the event: During the workshop (agenda here) we covered topics on how to make research reproducible. The sessions included an overview of why research is unreliable and…
Upcoming Events & Recent Papers
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist How has registration affected publication bias in medical research? This comes as a surprise to me, but maybe not so much, says Grant M. Gordon. He’s presenting on this research Monday 1/25 in the BIDS space (190 Doe Library) at UC Berkeley. Find the paper and more…
BITSS 2015 Annual Meeting NOW!
The BITSS 2015 Annual Meeting is going on now (Thursday and Friday Dec 10-11, at the Magnes in downtown Berkeley). The agenda is here. Tweet about it using #BITSS2015. We’re awarding the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science. The prizes have been covered by NYMag and the Atlantic! Materials (slides and such)…
BITSS Sessions Around the World
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist I’ve recently had the opportunity to represent BITSS at a few interesting meetings and conferences that you might be interested to hear about. A group of political scientists and other social scientists met at Stanford and held a daylong workshop to discuss steps the discipline could take to…
Open Science Framework Presentation
Courtney Soderberg from the Center for Open Science will be at UC Berkeley for a few days to lead a few workshops that we think you might be interested in. The D-Lab is hosting one of these workshops on November 18: Open Science Framework: Increasing Reproducibility Across the Entire Research Lifecycle. We…
Replication and Transparency Workshop Jan 6-7, 2016
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist BITSS is happy to announce a workshop on replication and transparency coming up in January, 2016 right after the AEA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. Before I get to that, a reminder about our workshops in November and December. In November, Nicole Janz (of Cambridge University and…
Workshops in Kenya on Research Transparency
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist BITSS has recently launched an initiative to expand research transparency efforts in developing countries. I think this is a very good fit for BITSS–we are housed within the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), our faculty lead Ted Miguel is a preeminent development economist, our program director…
Call for Papers, BITSS Annual Meeting Dec 10-11, 2015
We are now accepting submissions of papers to be presented at our 2015 Annual Meeting, which will be held Dec 10-11, 2015 in Berkeley, CA. Submissions are due by Friday, October 9. You can find more information here, or go directly to the submission portal here. Basically, we’re looking for the best…
Save the Date: BITSS Annual Meeting Dec 10-11, 2015
Mark you calendars now: the fourth BITSS Annual Meeting will be held Thursday and Friday December 10th and 11th in Berkeley, CA. Similar to last year, the event will be open to the public, and will feature an open call for papers (coming soon)! We will also feature presentations of research by…
BITSS on OpenCon Webcast
CEGA Executive Director Temina Madon was the speaker for this month’s OpenCon community webcast and did an excellent job discussing BITSS and the movement for transparency in the social sciences. You can watch her presentation below, or you can download her slides here. We livetweeted during her presentation, so you can find…
Emerging Researcher Perspectives: Presenting a Pre-Analysis Plan at WGAPE in the Early Stages of Experimental Design
Guest post by Emily A. West, Ph.D. candidate presenter at the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) Spring 2015 Annual Meeting. I feel lucky to be a graduate student at a time when many in political science are emphasizing two complementary agendas that are helping the discipline evolve. First, opportunities are being…
Call for Papers: Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE)
BITSS is co-sponsoring the 4th Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) Annual Meeting, taking place May 29-30 at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. WGAPE brings together faculty and advanced graduate students in Economics and Political Science who combine field research experience in Africa with training in…
Now Accepting Applications for Summer Institute
BITSS is pleased to announce it is now accepting applications to attend its 2015 Summer Institute. This year’s workshop entitled “Transparency and Reproducibility Methods for Social Science Research” will be held in Berkeley, June 10-12. The intensive course will provide participants with a thorough overview of best practices for open, reproducible research, allowing…
Research Transparency Meeting with CGD
By Garret Christensen (BITSS) Though BITSS hopes to increase research transparency across the social sciences, several of us, myself included, have a background in development economics. So we were happy to take part in a meeting last week at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC. In addition to BITSS…
Join an Open Call on Reproducibility Tomorrow at 11 am (ET)
BITSS Project Scientist Garret Christensen will be participating in a discussion with the Mozilla Science Lab on reproducibility in research tomorrow at 11 am ET. The call is open to the public. For those interested in joining, more information can be found here.
Annual Meeting Speakers Now on YouTube!
In case you missed the 2014 BITSS Research Transparency Forum, you can watch the presentations of all five speakers featured on the BITSS YouTube Channel and embedded in our Annual Meeting page. The YouTube channel also includes videos with interviews from the BITSS Board on the importance of research transparency.
Recap of Research Integrity in Economics Session at ASSA 2015
By Garret Christensen (BITSS) BITSS just got back from the ASSA conference, the major annual gathering of economists. The conference largely serves to help new PhD economists find jobs, but there are of course sessions of research presentations, a media presence and sometimes big names like the Chair-of-the-Federal-Reserve in attendance. BITSS faculty…
Come Learn More About Research Transparency at ASSA/AEA
If you’re at the ASSA meetings in Boston this weekend, and you are interested in learning more about research transparency, then please stop by booth 127 in the exhibition hall to speak with BITSS and Center for Open Science representatives. Or you can attend our session Monday morning at 10:15am: “Promoting New…
This Monday at AEA2015: Transparency and Integrity in Economic Research Panel
This January 5th, 10.15am at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting in Boston, MA (Sheraton Hotel, Commonwealth Room). Session: Promoting New Norms for Transparency and Integrity in Economic Research Presiding: Edward Miguel (UC Berkeley) Panelists: Brian Nosek (University of Virginia): “Scientific Utopia: Improving Openness and Reproducibility in Scientific Research” Richard Ball (Haverford College): “Replicability…
Reflections on Two Years Promoting Transparency in Research
By Guillaume Kroll (CEGA) Two years ago, in December 2012, a handful of researchers convened in Berkeley to discuss emerging strategies to increase openness and transparency in social science research. The group’s concerns followed a number of high-level cases of scientific misconduct and unethical practices, particularly in psychology (1,2). As researchers started to question the…
Tomorrow! BITSS Research Transparency Forum to Be Livestreamed
Can’t attend our Annual Meeting? Not to worry, our Public Conference (Thu, 1.30 PM – 5.00 PM Pacific Time) will be livestreamed. For those who will be joining us virtually, questions can be submitted for the Q&A panel session starting at 4:30 PM via Twitter using #bitss2014. All other participants who will be able to attend the Public…
Psychology's Credibility Crisis
In a recent interview appearing in Discover Magazine, Brian Nosek, Co-founder of the Center for Open Science and speaker at the upcoming BITSS Annual Meeting, discusses the credibility crisis in psychology. According to the article, Psychology has lost much of it credibility after a series of published papers were revealed as fraudulent and many other…
Psychology’s Credibility Crisis
In a recent interview appearing in Discover Magazine, Brian Nosek, Co-founder of the Center for Open Science and speaker at the upcoming BITSS Annual Meeting, discusses the credibility crisis in psychology. According to the article, Psychology has lost much of it credibility after a series of published papers were revealed as fraudulent and many other…
Tools for Research Transparency: a Preview of Upcoming BITSS Training
By Garret Christensen (BITSS) What are the tools you use to make your research more transparent and reproducible? A lot of my time at BITSS has been spent working on a manual of best practices, and that has required me to familiarize myself with computing tools and resources that make transparent work easier.…
Paper Presentations for Annual Meeting Confirmed!
With the 2014 Research Transparency Forum around the corner (Dec. 11-12), we are excited to announce the papers to be presented during Friday’s Research Seminar. After carefully reviewing over 30 competitive submissions, BITSS has selected 6 paper presentations: Neil Malhotra (Stanford University): “Publication Bias in the Social Sciences: Unlocking the File Drawer” Uri…
Creating Standards for Reproducible Research: Overview of COS Meeting
By Garret Christensen (BITSS) Representatives from BITSS (CEGA Faculty Director Ted Miguel, CEGA Executive Director Temina Madon, and BITSS Assistant Project Scientist Garret Christensen–that’s me) spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at a very interesting workshop at the Center for Open Science aimed at creating standards for promoting reproducible research in the social-behavioral…
First Swedish Graduate Student Training in Transparency in the Social Sciences
Guest Post by Anja Tolonen (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) Seventeen excited graduate students in Economics met at the University of Gothenburg, a Monday in September, to initiate an ongoing discussion about transparency practices in Economics. The students came from all over the world: from Kenya, Romania, Hong Kong, Australia and Sweden of course. The initiative…