The Struggle to Make Transparency Mainstream - Initial Evidence for a Slow Uptake of Open Science Practices in PhD Theses

Open Science (OS) practices—such as data sharing, study preregistration, and transparent methods—aim to increase transparency of research. While OS practices are gaining popularity—particularly through bottom-up initiatives—their adoption rate among early-career researchers remains unclear. To investigate this, we analyzed dissertations from two German-speaking psychology departments with varying degree of OS implementation from 2018 to 2022. We manually coded N = 379 studies from k = 91 theses and surveyed former PhD students about perceived norms, attitudes, and perceived behavioral control regarding OS practices. Our findings revealed a modest increase of OS over time but no significant difference between departments with more or less-established OS practices. Additionally, attitudes and perceived control appeared to affect OS use more than perceived norms of PhD students’ surrounding. As more than a decade has passed since the replication crisis emerged, this highlights a need to intensify measures at universities to implement OS.