Attitudes Toward Open Science Practices Among German Psychologists

The wide adoption of Open Science (OS) practices is influencing psychological science positively by increasing openness, transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. Researchers are encouraged to openly share their data, materials, and reproducible code, and to pre-register their hypotheses, design, sample size, and analysis plans whenever possible. On the one hand, these OS practices incur objective and/or perceived benefits, thereby raising hopes among researchers. On the other hand, these practices may also incur objective and/or perceived costs, thereby potentially inducing worries, especially among early career researchers. To investigate researchers’ attitudes toward the application of OS practices in their research and teaching, we conducted a survey among members of the German Psychological Society (N = 596) in 2021. Across status groups, researchers agreed that psychological science generally profits from the application of OS practices and that OS practices will become commonplace in the future. Furthermore, researchers indicated increased trust in studies adopting OS practices. However, researchers of all status groups reported to mainly have experience with pre-registration but less or even no experience with other OS practices. Researchers, especially those early in their career, believed to profit from OS, but also reported worries of making errors, especially when it comes to openly sharing analysis scripts. We discuss the current state of OS implementation and propose interventions to facilitate the broader adoption of OS practices, thereby supporting the career progression of early career researchers.