Public Data that Isn’t (or Wasn’t) Public

–Guest Post: Justin Gallagher, Assistant Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University           I recently completed a coauthored working paper, together with Paul J. Fisher, that examines whether electronic monitoring via red light traffic cameras leads to fewer vehicle accidents and injuries.  As part of the project, we…

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…

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…

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…

Call for Cases of Data Reuse: Still Seeking Answers

Guest post by Stephanie Wykstra, Innovations for Poverty Action         As advocates for open data, my colleagues and I often point to re-use of data for further research as a major benefit of data-sharing. In fact there are many cases in which shared data was clearly very useful for…

Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Winners in the News Again

Last year BITSS gave some of our first Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science to David Broockman and Joshua Kalla. They just had a new paper published in Science, and are keeping up the transparency–the supplementary materials file points clearly to a data, code, and interview scripts archive on Harvard’s Dataverse. Their paper…

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…

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.)…

Scientists Have a Sharing Problem

Dec 15th Maggie Puniewska posted an article in the Atlantic Magazine summarizing the obstacles preventing researchers from sharing their data. The article asks if “science has traditionally been a field that prizes collaboration […] then why [are] so many scientists stingy with their information.” Puniewska outlines the most cited reasons scientists reframe…

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…

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…

The Ethics of Using and Sharing Data for Development Programming (5/22 @ NYC)

The Responsible Data Forum is a new effort to map the ethical, legal, privacy and security challenges surrounding the increased use and sharing of data in development programming. The Forum aims to explore the ways in which these challenges are experienced in project design and implementation, as well as when project data is…

New book: Implementing Reproducible Research

New book from Victoria Stodden, Friedrich Leisch, and Roger D. Peng: “Implementing Reproducible Research“. In many of today’s research fields, including biomedicine, computational tools are increasingly being used so that the results can be reproduced. Researchers are now encouraged to incorporate software, data, and code in their academic papers so that others can…

Just published: SAGE handbook on Managing and Sharing Research Data

Research funders in the UK, USA and across Europe are implementing data management and sharing policies to maximize openness of data, transparency and accountability of the research they support. Written by experts from the UK Data Archive with over 20 years experience, this book gives post-graduate students, researchers and research support staff…

Deadline Extended for BITSS Summer Institute!

The deadline for applying to the BITSS Summer Institute (June 2-5, 2014 – Berkeley, CA) has been extended to Wednesday, April 2. The week-long course will cover a broad array of topics related to openness and transparency in social science research, including the theory and implementation of pre-analysis plans; building reproducible knowledge; emerging techniques to carry…

Deadline Coming Up for BITSS Summer Institute!

Applications for the first BITSS Summer Institute (June 2-5, 2014 – Berkeley, CA) are due by Wednesday, March 26. The workshop will inform participants about the latest trends in the shift towards increased transparency in the social sciences, providing an overview of new tools and techniques for rigorous research in economics, political science, psychology,…

The changing face of psychology

Important changes are underway in psychology. Transparency, reliability, and adherence to scientific methods are the key words for 2014, says a recent article in The Guardian. A growing number of psychologists – particularly the younger generation – are fed up with results that don’t replicate, journals that value story-telling over truth, and an…

New Open Access, Editable Book on Open Science

“Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing”, a new editable book by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike. Modern information and communication technologies, together with a cultural upheaval within the research community, have profoundly changed research in nearly every aspect. Ranging from sharing and discussing ideas…

Research Transparency Landscape

A landscape of funder data access policies and other resources, by Stephanie Wykstra. New technology makes sharing research outputs– not just publications but also raw data, code, software, even lab notebooks – easier than ever before. The benefits from more open science are widely acknowledged. Yet there is still room for improvement:…