Fraud in science continues to be a highly discussed topic in the scientific community and also in mainstream media. I've always seen Open Science as a way to improve rigor in science, but can it also avoid fraud? |
I will not discuss cases of (alleged) fraud or scientific misconduct in this post, but focus on how I believe we can avoid it in the future. If you are interested in learning more about one of the major recent scandals, I recommend listening to the Freakonomics radio episode on the Gino case (see box below). Focus on the solutionScientific fraud hurts everyone. It hurts the trust in science, it hurts the scientists who build upon problematic research, and of course it hurts the people who were supposed to benefit from the research (think e.g. medical research). So how do we avoid fraud? In my opinion, Open Science can be part of the solution. If we work on setting better standards in science that promote openness, collaboration and success based on quality rather than quantity, we would get a long way already. As long as we hype single researchers, allow them to work in their ivory tower without sharing relevant details of their research, and promote based on the number of "high impact" publication, we will see scientific misconduct and fraud over and over again. Open Science: Avoiding fraud and improving rigorThe cool thing about Open Science is that it goes much beyond just avoiding fraud. Open Science is all about scientific rigor and good scientific practice. I, as and Open Science advocate, don't just advocate for openness, I advocate for better quality in research. Let me share some thoughts on how Open Science avoids fraud and improves rigor at the same time. And let me make one thing clear: Scientific rigor does not mean being right all the time, but doing your best with good intentions. We are all humans and we make mistakes. My research has been far from perfect, but I did my best and I focused on good research rather than pushing out as many papers as possible. If you are interested in avoiding fraud and promoting rigor at your institution, feel free to reach out to me. I am happy to help with training and support. In other newsdeRSE24 workshop on FAIR and Reproducible Code In my capacity as a steering board member of the German Reproducibility Network, I am currently looking for people who will join the deRSE24 conference and would be interested in supporting our workshop on FAIR and Reproducible Code. We are in particular looking for someone who can answer questions about computing environments (Docker, Virtual Machines, ...). All the best, Heidi P.S. If you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my work by leaving a tip.
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Heidi Seibold, MUCBOOK Clubhouse, Elsenheimerstr. 48, Munich, 81375 |
https://heidiseibold.com
All things open and reproducible data science.
What are good strategies to develop an Open Science Policy? Here's our opinionated guide. This post was co-created with Sander Bosch, Open Science Programme Coordinator at VU Amsterdam. At the Open Science Retreat 2024 Sander and I had a conversation about his experience in policy development. Since we believe that his experience is valuable for a lot of people out there, we decided to write down three simple rues to create an Open Science policy: Develop output policies first and combine...
Guest post: Meet Dr Elisabeth Kugler, director of Zeeks – Art for Geeks. In this post she will share her career path and how her work connects with open science now that she is an entrepreneur. I am Dr Elisabeth Kugler, director of Zeeks – Art for Geeks – a company that transforms how people think about data. We achieve this by data analysis, visualization, and communication. And our speciality is image-based data and strategies. In this article, I aim to discuss Zeeks' perspective on open...
Making your research or code project FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and reproducible can feel like a chore. But if you have access to the right templates and resources, it can be quite the simple and rewarding task. Let's make it easy for ourselves to do the right thing! So today let me share some templates for setting up #FAIR and #reproducible projects. I asked folks on social media what suggestions they had and got so many that I was not able to put them all here...