Open science challenges, benefits and tips in early career and beyond

TLDR

Open science has emerged in response to widespread replication failures, offering benefits such as reputational gains and higher publication rates, but also presenting challenges—particularly for early‑career researchers—though its overall adoption is expected to improve research quality. The authors aim to outline three key benefits and three challenges of open science for early‑career researchers and to offer practical recommendations. They review three benefits and three challenges and provide suggestions from the perspective of early‑career researchers for adopting open science practices that institutions at all levels should consider. Exploratory analyses show that open registered reports increase publication likelihood for null findings, yet the benefits are offset by higher costs in flexibility, time, and incentive structure that disproportionately affect early‑career researchers.

Abstract

The movement towards open science is a consequence of seemingly pervasive failures to replicate previous research. This transition comes with great benefits but also significant challenges that are likely to affect those who carry out the research, usually early career researchers (ECRs). Here, we describe key benefits, including reputational gains, increased chances of publication, and a broader increase in the reliability of research. The increased chances of publication are supported by exploratory analyses indicating null findings are substantially more likely to be published via open registered reports in comparison to more conventional methods. These benefits are balanced by challenges that we have encountered and that involve increased costs in terms of flexibility, time, and issues with the current incentive structure, all of which seem to affect ECRs acutely. Although there are major obstacles to the early adoption of open science, overall open science practices should benefit both the ECR and improve the quality of research. We review 3 benefits and 3 challenges and provide suggestions from the perspective of ECRs for moving towards open science practices, which we believe scientists and institutions at all levels would do well to consider.