Over a decade ago, a crisis was unfolding in the field of psychology that had been brewing for years – a crisis of replication. One of the core tenets of the scientific process is that the results found in a study should be reproducible, meaning another scientist can conduct the same experiment with the same conditions and get the same or similar results. But many studies in psychology were coming into question, prompting a need for a solution. One of those solutions here at Stanford – pushed for by Russell Poldrack, the Albert Ray Lang Professor in Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences –  was “open science.”

Open science encapsulates practices that promote sharing and access to the products of scientific research: data, code, and publications, among others. Poldrack is the faculty director of the Stanford Data Science Center for Open and Reproducible Science (SDS-CORES) – working with Maya Mathur, associate director, and Joshua Buckholtz, director of operations. Along with Zach Chandler, the staff director for open scholarship strategy, and Francesca Vera, OpenSource@Stanford technical community manager, Poldrack spoke about the purpose and promise of open science, Stanford’s collaborative approach to these practices, and how open science is changing academia.

Open science isn’t new – but it’s evolving

Open science describes a series of practices that help people share and reproduce the scientific results in a study. In many ways, it draws from the philosophy of open source software, which is openly shared and improved by the different users and engineers who interact with it.

“Making science more transparent and reproducible was our goal because, broadly, I believe it makes science better,” said Poldrack. While he’s been working on efforts like this in neuroscience through the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience for years, a recent boom in open science practices happened just four years ago – during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zach Chandler and Francesca Vera | Eli Ramos

Chandler pointed to how scientists, in the search for a vaccine, pooled together their scientific findings and shared their data, leading to record-breaking times in developing a vaccine.

Now, open science is being more widely considered through national initiatives like the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Science (HELIOS). And government organizations like NASA have their own open science initiatives.

Chandler said, “There are mandates and regulations that are going to be taking full effect by the end of 2025 – not just at institutions like Stanford, but for all recipients of federal research funding. And I think as we get ahead of that and work on open science here, we can be not just compliant, but actually advance the sciences, too.”

‘Open’ doesn’t mean risky

Although data is more accessible and easily shared, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t measures protecting it. Plenty of sensitive data are shared that still need to adhere to HIPAA or national security standards. But open scientists are always striving for best practices – and the general guideline of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” helps with that.

Data privacy and sovereignty – the idea that individuals, organizations, and nations should have control over their data – is also increasingly a concern, especially for those who have had their data manipulated or mismanaged. Chandler, who works with other open science projects where this is a major concern, cites Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics (CARE) principles, which are two sets of principles used by the open science community that were designed to honor these concerns.

Open science isn’t just for scientists

Despite the name, open science practices can be applied across many different research domains that extend beyond the traditional sciences. Vera highlighted that the CORES Open Science Awards for 2024 covered a wide range, including Open Science Champion Robert MacCoun in the Stanford Law School, who contributed to transparent and reproducible practices; Stanford University Libraries Data Sharing Prize winner Elana Chan in civil and environmental engineering, who was recognized for her impactful data sharing and commitment to reproducibility; and the inventors of Flash Attention at Together AI (which grew out of work in computer science at Stanford), an algorithm that addresses a common problem in large language models.

Several of these awards recognize software that is used in a specific field but can span many different schools, which offers the chance for them to collaborate when there are similar applications. CORES, through its awards and its new initiative on open source software, OpenSource@Stanford, looks to bring open science practices to all forms of scholarship.

“We really think of it more as open and reproducible scholarship, rather than just science, which opens up our ability to reach other researchers,” said Poldrack.

Vera noted that their awards are granted not just to heads of departments and labs but also to students and trainees who are involved in the work – meaning that anyone who contributes can be recognized.

“There are a lot of cool projects that can fly under the radar that we get to recognize through our awards and our work,” said Vera. “It takes a lot of effort to make any project come together and there are lots of different scholars who contribute to it, from lots of different places.”

When CORES recognizes people, groups, and projects that promote best practices in open science, it helps to show others what those practices can look like and how to implement them in their own work, especially for projects that don’t often get noticed for the important work they do.

Open science at Stanford is collaborative

“Something that’s unique about CORES is that we can cater to all the schools on campus, which has allowed for honest and genuine conversations about practices in many fields,” Vera said.

Having worked in her position for about seven months, Vera has gotten the chance to see differing attitudes and cultures through different departments – and their different challenges.

For example, some fields have less precedent for data sharing and reproduction when compared to fields like psychology and astronomy, which have a long history of open science practices. But many of the schools have a chance to collaborate through CORES.

Beyond researchers, though, Vera believes people at all levels have something to contribute to open science practices.

“There’s this expectation for people to be coding or domain experts, but really, anyone can get involved,” she said.

Open source practices are changing academia

Making data or publications open source is not merely fulfilling a researcher’s or an institution’s preferences. Open source practices can make academia more transparent, more diverse, less competitive, and more collaborative. Bringing people together who might otherwise be siloed in different areas can also act as an accelerator, unlocking new discoveries in research both faster and more effectively.

“We’re not just working on a local culture shift, but also for a national agenda,” said Chandler. “We don’t want to just focus on compliance. By recognizing researchers who do a good job with open science practices, we award more inclusive science and research-driven work everywhere – especially when we have so many centers of excellence at this institution.”

And one of the most important ways to shift the culture is by focusing on data sharing and accessibility. Currently, data sharing can be challenging because data can be stored or recorded in so many different ways. It often isn’t standardized across different researchers because there aren’t formal guidelines for a field, so ensuring shareable and reproducible data means paying special attention to the dataset.

“We want to get to a place where the dataset is just as important as the article, because it recognizes the immense effort that many different people put into getting an article published,” said Chandler. “Open science is team science, and it helps create a kind of currency for up-and-coming researchers if we can recognize them through these new practices.”

Stanford’s model focuses on researchers

“What’s really different here at Stanford is that our work is driven by researchers, because so many investigators are doing this stuff from the bottom up,” said Poldrack. “The spirit of collaboration is really prominent at Stanford, and we all work together.” For example, CORES works closely with other groups on campus, such as the Stanford Program on Research Rigor & Reproducibility (SPORR), which is focused on improving research practices within the School of Medicine.

Promoting collaboration while supporting the needs of researchers means that CORES doesn’t shy away from addressing obvious risks regarding ownership or attribution of work in an open and cooperative environment.

“Open science can unintentionally exacerbate inequity in the field – for example, allowing large, well-funded groups to move quickly on data that have been shared by a smaller group,” said Poldrack. “So, there are lots of discussions around how we think about what data is collected and how the data collectors receive credit for their work.”

One way that CORES has begun to address the issue of credit is by linking its awards to a researcher’s Open Researcher and Contributor ID, or ORCID, which is a trusted way of recognizing a researcher’s work history, publications, awards, and more. To Chandler’s knowledge, among other institutions in the United States that give awards for open science practices, Stanford is the only one that ensures its awards are documented through ORCID – a practice that will hopefully change in the future as he collaborates with other organizations to build this into their awarding process.

You can join CORES and OpenSource@Stanford

Vera says that when she joined the CORES team, she thought she would be doing most of the heavy lifting when seeking out researchers to ask them to engage with OpenSource@Stanford. But instead, “people are happy to have found us,” Vera reports. “It kind of validates our existence that people are interested in joining, because connections are extremely important and can provide answers you might not otherwise have.”

Poldrack said, “We want people to get in touch with us so that we can connect them with open science practitioners in their domain. Anyone who’s interested, we’re happy to enlist them as a CORES affiliate.”

“We find that investing in community through OpenSource@Stanford is our winning strategy to do that,” Chandler said, referring to his staff that help coordinate and support open source activity through training and collaboration.

Vera added, “We acknowledge how busy researchers are and how deep into their projects they get. We’re happy to do the legwork to forge meaningful connections between them and facilitate collaboration.”

Chandler said, “There’s so many different ways to engage, and if you come to us, we’ll try to find meaningful ways to connect you.”