Description

The currency of science is publishing. Producing novel, positive and clean results maximizes the likelihood of publishing success because those are the best kind of results. There are multiple ways to produce beautiful results: 1) be a genius, 2) be lucky, 3) be patient or 4) employ flexible analytic and selective reporting practices to manufacture the desired results. In a competitive marketplace with minimal accountability, it is hard to resist 4). The result is a glut of papers that appear beautiful only because they mask their less-than-rigorous methodologies. But there is a way to stop this. Researchers must be rewarded not for their results, but for how they got them. With transparency as their chief objective, researchers won't stop aiming for beautiful papers, but when they gets them, it will be clear that they earned them. Lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m. The lecture will begin at noon.

The event is free and open to all, but please register. Parking is available for a fee in the 8th Street parking deck. If special accommodations are needed, please contact the VCU Libraries Events Office at (804) 828-0593.

Sponsors

VCU Libraries and the VCU Office of Research and Innovation present this Sanger Series lecture.

About the Speaker

Brian Nosek received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002 and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network (ISCON) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). He co-founded Project Implicit, an Internet-based multi-university collaboration of research and education about thoughts and feelings that exist outside of awareness or control. He also co-founded and directs the Center for Open Science (COS) that aims to increase openness, integrity and reproducibility of scientific research. COS is a non-profit, technology start-up with three primary activities: 1) building and maintaining the Open Science Framework that supports the research workflow and enables transparency, archiving and pre-registration; 2) building community and shifting incentives such as badges for articles to acknowledge open practices; and 3) conducting metascience such as estimating the reproducibility of scientific research by conducting large-scale, crowdsourced replication projects.

Image: Sanger Series: Improving Transparency and Reproducibility of Scientific Research, by Jeff Bland