RP:P in top ten, twice!

It’s old news but, one year on, it’s still remarkable.

Nature and Science are the world’s top two journals. Each year Nature announces it’s list of its top “Ten people who mattered this year” in research. Science lists its top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year.

A landmark Open Science event was the publication in mid-2015 of the final report of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology. We discuss it on pp. 472-473 in ITNS, and the report published in Science is here. An enterprising editor at Nature had a one day scoop by analysing some of the data (which was all open, of course) herself, and leaping into print with her own take on the project.

Would you believe, at the end of 2015, both Nature and Science included the RP:P in their top ten for the year! Nature named Brian Nosek, the leader of RP:P as a top ten person who mattered, and Science included the RP:P as a top ten breakthrough. Quite a feather in the cap of psychology!

So, the RP:P was not merely psychology getting its own house in order, but an immensely important step in improving the way science can be done–and Nature and Science recognised it as such, with implications right across science. Yay for Open Science! Be happy!Brian Nosek, dubbed by Nature as ‘the Bias Blaster’ for his leadership of the RP:P project that aimed to improve the reproducibility of research, primarily in social and cognitive psychology, but with implications much more broadly across science.