Open Developmental Science: An Overview and Annotated Reading List

Abstract

The increasing adoption of open science practices in the last decade has been changing the scientific landscape across fields. However, developmental science has been relatively slow in adopting open science practices. To address this issue, we followed the format of Crüwell et al., (2019) and created summaries and an annotated list of informative and actionable resources discussing ten topics in developmental science: Open science; Reproducibility and replication; Open data, materials and code; Open access; Preregistration; Registered reports; Replication; Incentives; Collaborative developmental science.This article offers researchers and students in developmental science a starting point for understanding how open science intersects with developmental science. After getting familiarized with this article, the developmental scientist should understand the core tenets of open and reproducible developmental science, and feel motivated to start applying open science practices in their workflow.

Open and reproducible practices in developmental psychology research: The workflow of the WomCogDev lab as an example

“…For brevity, we will only expand on the generalizable part of our ethical approval application, which is the requirement to define a data management plan (DMP) 5 . A plan that is increasingly required by funders, as well as ethical committees, and that has been recently encouraged explicitly for developmental psychology (Kalandadze & Hart, 2021), the DMP is meant to describe in detail the way the data will be collected, organized, stored, documented, used and shared, during the project and after the project is completed (Michener, 2015). Essential to the DMP is compliance with the FAIR principles of data management, that is, making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (Wilkinson et al, 2016).…”

“…Preregistrations and Registered Reports are cornerstones of Open Science practices, in particular for producing ‘rigorous and reproducible developmental science’ (Kalandadze & Hart, 2021, p. 12; see also Nosek et al, 2018). They allow a clear definition of hypotheses, methods, procedures and analyses before the experiment is conducted, in a freely accessible way.…”

“…Applying identity protection measures to ensure ethical approval can also hinder sharing data in an open and transparent way. Despite these issues, the quality of the results in developmental psychology can enormously benefit from Open Science practices (e.g., Gennetian et al, 2020; Gilmore & Qian, 2022; Kalandadze & Hart, 2021; Silverstein, 2020). Accordingly, it is our team's belief that incorporating Open Science practices into developmental psychology research is not only possible but can be done in a way that benefits both research and researchers.…”

Lessons Learned: A Neuroimaging Research Center’s Transition to Open and Reproducible Science

“…While there is growing recognition of the imperative of implementing these bestpractices there exits, in our opinion, a clear absence of how procedurally to accomplish this goal [11]. This potential barrier to widespread adoption of open science practices is echoed for other fields [12]. In this work, we describe lessons learned from efforts to adopt these bestpractices within the Brain Imaging Research Center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences over four years (July 2018 -May 2022).…”

Special issue on reliability of infant research

“…The brief paper ended up being nothing of the sort, and was highly engaging, thoughtful, and timely. Although developmentalists have certainly engaged with the issues associated with the replication crisis and open science movement (see Kalandadze & Hart, 2022), in some ways, the full implications of the many problems facing our science have not been appreciated widely. Byers‐Heinlein et al (2022) provide a valuable service to the field by offering a detailed accounting of the problems of reliability in infant research and—perhaps more importantly—providing clear and achievable solutions (six of them, even!…”