BITSS is thrilled to share that it has received the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in the Institutional category. The Einstein Foundation Berlin made the announcement in a statement on November 14, 2023. This annual award recognizes individual researchers, institutions, and early career researchers whose work helps to…
Pre-results review reaches the (economic) lab: Experimental Economics follows the Journal of Development Economics in piloting pre-results review
In its April 2019 issue, the journal Experimental Economics issued a Call for Submissions for a virtual Symposium of 5-7 papers to be published under “pre-results review”. BITSS Senior Program Associate Aleksandar Bogdanoski talked to Irenaeus Wolff of University of Konstanz, who along with Urs Fischbacher is a guest editor for the…
Open Access: The timely publishing solution truly serving scientists, science and the public
This post, written by Elizabeth Marincola, Senior Advisor for Research Communications and Advocacy at the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), was originally published on the AAS Open Research blog. It has also been cross-posted on the CEGA blog. Note from Katie Hoeberling and the BITSS team: At BITSS, we actively work with…
Recipients of 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science
The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) awards eight prizes to researchers and educators demonstrating values and practices of openness and transparency in research. BERKELEY, CA (Thursday, October 12, 2017) – The open science community has grown rapidly in recent years, partly in response to a series of newsworthy…
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…
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…
SSMART Grant Recipients
We’re very happy to announce the winners of our SSMART grants! See here for more information, and remember to register for our annual meeting, where several of the winners will be presenting brief summaries of the research they plan to do.
Replication in Economics
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist CEGA faculty director Ted Miguel was quoted in a Wall Street Journal blog post by Anna Louie Sussman today: “At this point, everybody doing with [sic] work with data and economics has an expectation that their data is very likely to get posted online, that someone is…
Reproducibility Project: Psychology Released in Science
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist A paper I’ve been excited about for a while now has just been published in Science: “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science” by the Open Science Collaboration. The paper is the work of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, coordinated by the Center for Open Science (COS) and funded by…
Who Inspired the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes? PART I: Robert Rosenthal
by Alex Grossman In 1955, Robert “Bob” Rosenthal was a student in the Psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles (he is now on the faculty at UC Riverside). He spent his days thinking about “psychological projection,” a theory about how we see our own experiences in others. So he…
The BITSS Take on "wormwars" and Replication Writ Large
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist If you’re a development economist, or at all interested in research transparency, I assume you’ve heard about the recent deworming replication controversy. (If you were lucky enough to miss “wormwars,” you can catch up with just about every thing with this one set of links on storify.com). Here…
New York Times Covers TOP Guidlines
Yesterday in Science, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee published the TOP Guidelines, referred to by the New York Times as “the the most comprehensive guidelines for the publication of studies in basic science to date” (see here). The guidelines are the output of a November 2014 meeting at the Center for Open…
Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines
By Garret Christensen (BITSS) BITSS is proud to announce the publication of the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines in Science. The Guidelines are a set of standards in eight areas of research publication: Citation Standards Data Transparency Analytic Methods (Code) Transparency Research Materials Transparency Design and Analysis Transparency Preregistration of Sudies Preregistration of…
Advisory Board Established for Project TIER
Guest post by Richard Ball and Norm Medeiros, co-principal investigators of Project TIER at Haverford College. Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Economics) is pleased to announce its newly-established Advisory Board. The advisors – George Alter (ICPSR), J. Scott Long (Indiana University), Victoria Stodden (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Justin Wolfers (Peterson Institute/University of Michigan) – will…
Influential Paper on Gay Marriage Might Be Marred by Fraudulent Data
Harsh scrutiny of an influential political science experiment highlights the importance of transparency in research. The paper, from UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour and Columbia University Professor Donald Green, was published in Science in December 2014. It asserted that short conversations with gay canvassers could not only change people’s minds on a divisive social issue like same-sex…
Announcing the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science
New prizes will recognize and reward transparency in social science research. BERKELEY, CA (May 13, 2015) – Transparent research is integral to the validity of science. Openness is especially important in such social science disciplines as economics, political science and psychology, because this research shapes policy and influences clinical practices that affect…
Recent BITSS Presentations
Garret Christensen–BITSS Project Scientist BITSS participated in a pair of conferences/workshops recently that we should probably tell you about. First, BITSS was part of a research transparency conference in Washington DC put together by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Many of the presentations from the conference can be found here. The…
Arnold Foundation Launches New Evidence-Based Policy Division
The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, equivalent to CEGA’s domestic counterpart and a leading force working to institutionalize evidence-based policy making, will merge with one of its funders, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF). Also a funder of BITSS, LJAF will integrate the staff of the Coalition into its newly established Evidence-Based Policy and Innovation division.…
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…
BITSS is hiring!
BITSS is seeking a Senior Program Manager and Coordinator. Applications for both positions will be reviewed on a rolling basis until May 10 for employment beginning in June/July 2015. The Senior Program Manager will be responsible for the overall management, leadership, and oversight of the initiative. The ideal candidate should have: MA/MS in…
TIER Faculty Fellowships 2015-16
Richard Ball, Associate Professor of Economics, and Norm Medeiros, Associate Librarian, of Haverford College, are co-principal investigators of Project TIER. They are seeking the first class of TIER Fellows to promote and extend teaching of transparent and reproducible empirical research methods. Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) is an initiative that promotes…
The End of p-values?
Psychology Professors David Trafimow and Michael Marks of New Mexico State University discuss the implications of banning p-values from appearing in published articles. To combat the practice of p-hacking, the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP) will no longer publish p-values included in articles submitted to the journal. The unprecedented move by the journal’s editorial board signals publishing norms may…
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…
The Disturbing Influence of Flawed Research on Your Living Habits
Last year, we featured a story on our blog about the so-called cardiovascular benefits of fish oil, largely based on a seminal research study that had more to do with hearsay than with actual science. After your diet, flawed research is now trying to meddle with your sports life. A Danish study published in the Journal of the…
Announcing New Grants for Data Publication!
The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are pleased to announce the Sloan Grants for Data Publication. Regardless of how transparent or rigorous a study design may be, if the study materials (datasets, code, metadata, etc.)…
UC Press Launches New Open Access Publications
The University of California’s publishing house, UC Press, has announced the launch of two new publications, Collabra and Luminos. Collabra will publish academic articles across many academic disciplines including the life, environmental, social and behavioral sciences. Luminos will publish monographs across all fields of study. As the UC Press website indicates, the…
Science Magazine Releases Special Issue on Digital Privacy
Yesterday, January 29th, Science Magazine released a new Special Issue entitled The End of Privacy. In line with its theme, the edition will be made available online at no cost for the first week following publication. Take this chance to look through! For scientists, the vast amounts of data that people shed every…
Announcing the New BITSS Advisory Board
BITSS is pleased to announce its new Advisory Board! Members include leading academics John Ioannidis (Stanford University, School of Medicine), Matthew Rabin (Harvard University, Economics), Bobbie Spellman (University of Virginia, School of Law), and Arthur Lupia (University of Michigan, Political Science). The Board will complement the work of the Executive Committee by providing strategic guidance for BITSS’ continued development, access to…
Win a prize guessing how much trial registration reduces publication bias!
Does trial registration make an impact on publication bias? Knowing the answer could earn you a cash prize! Macartan Humphreys (Columbia, Political Science) and collaborators Albert Fang and Grant Gordon are doing research on how publication (and publication bias) changed after the introduction of registration in clinical trials. They also want you to guess what the changes…
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.
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…
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…
Scientific Irreproducibility and the Prospects of Meta-Research
A recent article from The Economist featuring John Ioannidis’ Meta-Research Innovation Center (METRICS), whose work to advance the credibility of research will be presented next week at the BITSS Annual Meeting. “Why most published research findings are false” is not, as the title of an academic paper, likely to win friends in the ivory tower. But it has certainly…
Facilitating Radical Change in Publication Standards: Overview of COS Meeting Part II
Originally posted on the Open Science Collaboration by Denny Borsboom This train won’t stop anytime soon. That’s what I kept thinking during the two-day sessions in Charlottesville, where a diverse array of scientific stakeholders worked hard to reach agreement on new journal standards for open and transparent scientific reporting. The aspired standards are intended…
Former BITSS Institute Participant Advocates for Replication in Brazil
Dalson Britto Figueiredo Filho, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, who attended the BITSS Summer Institute in June 2014, recently published a paper on the importance of replications in Revista Política Hoje. “The BITSS experience really changed my mind on how to do good science”, said Figueiredo Filho.…
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…
BITSS is on Twitter!
BITSS has expanded its online media presence with a new Twitter account. Keep up to date with us and the world of research transparency by following @ucbitss.
Reminder: Call for Papers Deadline is October 10th
Papers or long abstract for the Call for Papers on Research Transparency must be submitted by Friday, October 10th (11:59pm PST) through CEGA’s Submission Platform. Topics for papers include, but are not limited to: pre-registration and the use of pre-analysis plans; disclosure and transparent reporting; replicability and reproducibility; data sharing; and methods for detecting and reducing…
COS Now Offering Free Consulting Services
A close partner of BITSS, the Center for Open Science (COS) has launched a free consulting service to anyone seeking help with “statistical and methodological questions related to reproducible practices, research design, data analysis, and data management.” The Center is dedicated to increasing the “openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research” and…
Announcing The 2014 Research Transparency Forum
BITSS is pleased to announce its 3rd annual meeting (December 11-12 – Berkeley, CA). This year’s research transparency meeting will be the first to be open to the public and is anticipated to be the largest BITSS event to date. The event will act to update the academic community of the growing movement for greater…
White House Calls for Comments on Reproducible Research
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has released a request for information on improving the reproducibility of federally funded scientific research. Given recent evidence of the irreproducibility of a surprising number of published scientific findings, how can the Federal Government leverage its role as a significant funder of scientific research…
eLife, the Center for Open Science, and Science Exchange partner to assess the reproducibility of cancer biology research
eLife will be the publisher for the results of the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, an effort led by the Center for Open Science and Science Exchange. First announced in October 2013, with $1.3 million in funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aims to replicate key…
Call for Pre-analysis Plans of Observational Studies
Observational Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes papers on all aspects of observational studies. Researchers from all fields that make use of observational studies are encouraged to submit papers. Observational Studies encourages submission of study protocols (pre-analysis plans) for observational studies. Before examining the outcomes that will form the basis for…
Job Opportunity in Data Curation/Publication
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) seeks a Research Analyst to join the Data Analysis/Data Publication team. This team is leading an innovative and exciting new part of IPA’s effort to promote high quality research: releasing research data from social science experiments publicly, for re-use and replication. The position also involves helping to develop a…
Call for Papers on Research Transparency
BITSS will be holding its 3rd annual conference at UC Berkeley on December 11-12, 2014. The goal of the meeting is to bring together leaders from academia, scholarly publishing, and policy to strengthen the standards of openness and integrity across social science disciplines. This Call for Papers focuses on work that elaborates new tools and strategies to increase the transparency and reproducibility of research. A committee of…
Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good
Videos and presentations from the book launch of “Privacy, Big Data and the Public Good” (Lane, J., Stodden, V., Bender, S. & Nissenbaum, H. (Eds)) are now available online. Hosted by the NYU Center for Urban Science on July 16, the event included several panels with the book’s editors and a number of the authors. Overview of the book: Massive amounts of new data about people,…
Research Transparency & Open Knowledge: Lessons from #OKFest14
By Guillaume Kroll (CEGA) Over a thousand scientists, activists, and civil society representatives from over 60 countries gathered in Berlin last week for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival (OKFest14). The Festival is the flagship event of the Open Knowledge Foundation, an international nonprofit promoting open tools, data, and information for the positive transformation of society. It’s a…
Research Transparency & Open Knowledge: Lessons from #OKFest14
By Guillaume Kroll (CEGA) Over a thousand scientists, activists, and civil society representatives from over 60 countries gathered in Berlin last week for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival (OKFest14). The Festival is the flagship event of the Open Knowledge Foundation, an international nonprofit promoting open tools, data, and information for the positive transformation of society. It’s a…
Science Establishes New Statistics Review Board
The journal Science is adding an additional step of statistical checks to its peer-review process in an effort to strengthen confidence in published study findings. From the July 4th edition of Science: […] Science has established, effective 1 July 2014, a Statistical Board of Reviewing Editors (SBoRE), consisting of experts in various aspects of statistics and data analysis,…