Attitudes Toward Open Science and Public Data Sharing

Abstract

Abstract. Central values of science are, among others, transparency, verifiability, replicability, and openness. The currently very prominent Open Science (OS) movement supports these values. Among its most important principles are open methodology (comprehensive and useful documentation of methods and materials used), open access to published research output, and open data (making collected data available for re-analyses). We here present a survey conducted among members of the German Psychological Society ( N = 337), in which we applied a mixed-methods approach (quantitative and qualitative data) to assess attitudes toward OS in general and toward data sharing more specifically. Attitudes toward OS were distinguished into positive expectations (“hopes”) and negative expectations (“fears”). These were un-correlated. There were generally more hopes associated with OS and data sharing than fears. Both hopes and fears were highest among early career researchers and lowest among professors. The analysis of the open answers revealed that generally positive attitudes toward data sharing (especially sharing of data related to a published article) are somewhat diminished by cost/benefit considerations. The results are discussed with respect to individual researchers’ behavior and with respect to structural changes in the research system.