Psychology and Law, Meet Open Science

Abstract

As the field of psychology and law begins to embrace more transparent and accessible science, many questions arise about what open science actually is and how to do it. In this chapter, we contextualize this reform by examining fundamental concerns about psychological research—irreproducibility and replication failures, false-positive errors, and questionable research practices—that threaten its validity and credibility. Next, we turn to psychology’s response by reviewing the concept of open science and explaining how to implement specific practices—preregistration, registered reports, open materials/data/code, and open access publishing—designed to make research more transparent and accessible. We conclude by weighing the implications of open science for the field of psychology and law, specifically with respect to how we conduct and evaluate research, as well as how we train the next generation of psychological scientists and share scientific findings in applied settings.

Further action toward valid science in Law and Human Behavior: Requiring open data, analytic code, and research materials.

“…Adopting further open science practices in Law and Human Behavior will require patience, persistence, and planning on behalf of authors, reviewers, and editors. The field of psychology and law has unique limitations that we all must account for, such as working with vulnerable populations (e.g., patients, people with prior criminal justice and legal system involvement, children, survivors of crime, undocumented immigrants) and identifiable data (e.g., forensic files, criminal records, police reports, video recordings) that may present obstacles for publicly sharing data (McAuliff et al, in press). Moreover, the decision to share data and research materials does not rest solely with researchers—participants should have the opportunity to evaluate the potential risks involved and must explicitly provide permission to share their data.…”

“…We also acknowledge that making data and analytic code openly available can be more difficult than providing research materials because the former must be transformed into a shareable format (McAuliff et al, in press). Researchers must clearly label and describe data variables and analytic code in a way that people who are not directly involved in the research can understand and use.…”