Read on Twitter
So @tage_rai, editor at Science, is digging in. Fine. He claims the whole open science movement was started by one billionaire with a shady agenda. I think this deserves some pushback. https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1305104273727000581
I understand some of you might be a bit worried about speaking out against the person who will handle your next submission to Science – but since I am not planning to submit anything to a journal that continues to be a part of the problem, it’s not an issue for me.
First, even the piece he links to says that the reproducibility project had started before the Arnold foundation reached out. Would it have been completed without that funding? Probably, but maybe a few years later. Many other large scale large replication projects are completed.
Open science initiatives had sprung up everywhere in 2011. I was a first year post-doc, and started a Dutch forum to initiate discussions about “Improvements in Social Psychological Science”. Many of you did something similar. This was grass-roots.
I was giving lectures to journalists about the importance of replicability in 2013 – 2 years before the RP:P was done. Because we didn’t need the Arnold Foundation’s money to realize there was a problem.
Not only had people been writing about this for half a century around 2011, we now had the internet to communicate about this. All of a sudden, that crazy person at your department who always brought up power seemed less crazy as we heard every department had one of those people.
By the time the results of the Reproducibility Project came out, we had already learned how difficult it was to replicate findings. The special issue in Social Psychology (with call for papers in 2012) on preregistered replications came out in 2014 and lead to enough discussion.
If you happen to live in a country with a reasonable government, you realize that some countries were sensible enough to see the importance of open science. In the Netherlands, Science in Transition started in 2013: https://scienceintransition.nl/ .
The 2016 Amsterdam call for Open Science https://www.government.nl/documents/reports/2016/04/04/amsterdam-call-for-action-on-open-science outlined a clear agenda to promoting open science. Why? Because everyone by then agreed this was a good thing.
The impact of the Arnold Foundation on all of these developments? It is difficult to quantify, but I am going to round it off to absolutely 0. But maybe you do not want to focus on Open Science, but zoom in. How about discussions about replicability and trustworthiness?
On my blog, I have a post on a paper (in Dutch) by van Bergen from 1963. If you think any of the criticism now are new, you might want to read it: https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2014/05/replications-van-bergen-1963.html To say discussions about replicability are nothing new is an understatement.
These discussions have been with us since forever (see Babbage, 1830: https://twitter.com/lakens/status/923560581747167233?s=20). So how did they finally lead to change? What happen? Was it a single billionaire who sneakily paid us all to promote better science?
I recommend reading @BobbiePoPS excellent personal history: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691615609918 Read it, and check off the things mentioned in there funded by the Arnold Foundation. It was written a month after the Reproducibility Project, so that is one. What else? My guess: nothing.
So, yeah, if you want to live in a world where editors of Science sling opinions on Twitter that argue “we got 100s of millions of dollars from one guy to start the movement up till 5 years ago”, by all means. But that’s not my world.
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