Open Scholarship Survey: Data on Education Researchers' Open Science Attitudes and Behaviors

• In Event: Building a Culture of Open Science in the Education Community: Data on Adoption and a Platform for Change

Abstract

In contemporary science, there is a great deal of discussion around open scholarship, also known as open science or open research. Social change is beginning to be made in policies and practice relating to open scholarship, but how can we track and promote this change? The Open Scholarship Survey (OSS) is a standard, modular assessment that aims to assess researchers’ attitudes, behaviors, and opinions about open scholarship behaviors such as sharing data and materials; conducting replication, robustness, and reproduction studies; preregistering studies; sharing preprints; and publishing null results. Responses to the OSS build a compelling database of information that can be used to inform policy-making efforts by journals, funders, and institutions for promoting open scholarship. Standard items in the OSS also serve to facilitate aggregate and comparative analyses across multiple waves of survey administration and among different research communities that have participated in the OSS.
Designed and administered using Qualtrics, the OSS is divided into different modules corresponding to different open scholarship behaviors of interest. For each of these modules, participants answer various questions tapping into their personal attitudes, past behavior, and perceptions of norms in their field. Funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), we gathered participants among researchers who are listed as the corresponding author of a peer-reviewed education research publication published within the last year at the time of recruitment. For this first wave of the OSS, we sent recruitment emails to 9,200 email addresses, from which a total of 1,044 responses were recorded. To assess change in attitudes and behaviors over time, we plan to recruit the same participants who took the baseline survey this year, in addition to researchers who did not participate in previous waves of the study.
Overall, we observed that attitudes towards open scholarship are generally favorable. Respondents’ perceptions of their field show an underestimation of their community’s positivity toward open scholarship. However, we observed variation across modules, which we intend to unpack in the presentation. The survey also allowed us to identify limitations and obstacles that should be tackled in policy initiatives and tracked for improvement in future waves. As we conduct the next waves of the OSS in the following years, we anticipate even richer data that can help us understand the culture and norms around research practice in the STEM education research community.

Author

• Krystal Hahn, Center for Open Science