Three weeks ago, I wrote about the fact that I think that it would be great if we could have a journal on peer-reviewed datasets (along with data being accessible).
It seems I am not alone thinking this. Jelte Wicherts, a psychologist/statistician atTilburg University has just started the Journal of Open Psychology data .
Jelte writes:
“The Journal of Open Psychology Data (JOPD) features peer reviewed data papers describing psychology datasets with high reuse potential.
This morning, an official enquiry into the scientific conduct of professor Mart Bax concluded that he had committed large-scale scientific fraud over a period of 15 years. Mart Bax is a now-retired professor of political anthropology at the Free University Amsterdam. In 2012 a journalist first accused him of fraud, and this spring, the Volkskrant, one of the big newspapers in the Netherlands reported they were not able to find any of the informants Mart Bax had used in his studies.
Social scientists (and psychology in particular) have in recent years had somethings of a bad press, both in- and outside academia. To give some examples:
- There is a sense among some people that social science provides little societal or economical value. - Controversy over research findings within social science: for example the findings of Bem et al. about the existence of precognition , or the estimation of the number of casualties in Iraq war (2003-2007).
I was pointed to an interview with two Harvard professors, one of them my (former) idol Gary King, talking about the need for open access publishing. I’m re-posting it here as a reminder to myself, and to anyone from the social sciences (or survey methods), that we should be more open about what we do and write. Too often, papers take years to appear in print-journals, and even then, these articles probably don’t make it to those people without subscriptions to all the main publishers.