Improving openness, rigour and reproducibility in research is less a technical challenge and more a social challenge. Current practice is sustained by dysfunctional incentives that prioritise publication over accuracy and privacy over transparency. The consequence is unnecessary inefficiency in research progress.

Successful culture change requires coordinated policy, incentive and normative changes across stakeholders to improve research credibility and accelerate progress. Some stakeholder groups and disciplines are making more progress than others. We can change the system, but if we do not act collectively we will fail. Let’s not fail.

Brian Nosek is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, and Co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science, which is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide.

Professor Nosek led the Reproducibility Project (published in Science in 2015), in which he and 269 co-authors repeated psychology studies published in 98 academic papers, to test whether they would independently reproduce the studies’ results. While 97 per cent of the original studies led to statistically significant results, only 36 per cent of the replications produced significant results, casting doubt on the robustness of research findings in psychology and in academic research more broadly.

This event is hosted by UCL in partnership with the UK Reproducibility Network.