Open Science Collaboration's first paper

Perspectives in Psychological Science is making history this issue by publishing a paper by a blogger under the blogger's pseudonym (reportedly the first such paper), as well as the first paper by the Open Science Collaboration (to which I am a contributor, so here's to many more!).

The issue, which is currently open access, is focused on issues of replicability. The Open Science Collaboration has a number of goals with respect to changing research practices in psychology. The main project so far has been the Reproducibility Project, which

is an open, large-scale collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychological science. So far, 72 volunteer researchers from 41 institutions have organized to openly and transparently replicate studies published in three prominent psychological journals in 2008.

This is something pretty close to my heart, which is why I am involved. As my co-author and I pointed out in "Tracking replicability as a method of post-publication open evaluation," for all the concern about replicability in psychology and other sciences, there is remarkably little systematic evidence one way or another (we did our best to thoroughly review the literature; you can check out our findings in the paper). What kinds of reforms we should put in place depend on how bad the problem is. If the problem isn't that bad -- and for all we know, it isn't -- then there is no reason to implement costly, unpleasant reforms.

You can read more about the project in the paper. There is still time for interested researchers to join the project. Just sayin'.
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Open Science Collaboration. (2012). An Open, Large-Scale, Collaborative Effort to Estimate the Reproducibility of Psychological Science Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (6), 657-660 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612462588