Friday, May 21, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT

Organizer: VSS Student-Postdoc Advisory Committee
Moderator: Björn Jörges, York University
Speakers: Geoffrey Aguirre, Janine Bijsterbosch, Christopher Donkin, Alex Holcombe, and Russell A. Poldrack

Open Science has become an important part of the scientific landscape. Researchers are adopting open practices such as preregistrations and registered reports, open access, and the use of open source software, journals make data and code sharing more and more a desired or even required feature of research publications, and funders are increasingly evaluating the applicants’ open science track records along with their scientific proposals. It is therefore more important than ever for all scientists, and particularly for Early Career Researchers, to be able to navigate the Open Science space. For this reason, the Student Postdoc Committee has organized Conversations on Open Science as a means to introduce the VSS community to the basics of Open Science and some current debates.

Conversations on Open Science will start out with a short overview of the most important open practices. The speakers then delve deeper into two topics: preregistration and code and data sharing. We have invited two speakers for each topic: one of them argues in favor, while the other argues against, provides some nuance, or points out limitations. Both parties will first explain their respective perspectives, followed by a joint presentation in which some synthesis or common ground will be reached.

Geoffrey Aguirre

University of Pennsylvania

Geoffrey Aguirre is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has studied the human visual system using functional MRI for nearly twenty-five years, often combining brain imaging with complementary measures of perception and retinal structure. During his career he has contributed to the analytic and inferential foundation of neuroimaging studies. In recent years has worked to adopt and advocate for open-science tools, principally as a means to improve his own research. Contact Geoffrey at .

Janine Bijsterbosch

Washington University School of Medicine

Janine Bijsterbosch has worked in brain imaging since 2007. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Computational Imaging section of the Department of Radiology at Washington University in St Louis. The Personomics Lab headed by Dr. Bijsterbosch aims to understand how brain connectivity patterns differ from one person to the next, by studying the “personalized connectome”. Using big data resources such as the Human Connectome Project and UK Biobank, the Personomics Lab adopts cutting edge analysis techniques to study functional connectivity networks and their role in behavior, performance, mental health, disease risk, treatment response, and physiology. Dr. Bijsterbosch is Chair-Elect of the Open Science special interest group as part of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. In addition, Dr. Bijsterbosch wrote a textbook on functional connectivity analyses, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Contact Janine at .

Christopher Donkin

UNSW Sydney

Christopher Donkin is a cognitive psychologist at UNSW Sydney. His work tends to rely on a mix of computational modelling and experiments. He is interested in decision-making, memory, models, and metascience. While agreeing that open science is of utmost importance, many long series of conversations with Aba Szollosi about how knowledge is created has led to disagreement around the purported benefits of preregistration. Though the content of the talk will be specific to preregistration, the background knowledge underlying these arguments is more carefully laid out here.  Contact Chris at .

Alex Holcombe

University of Sydney

Alex Holcombe studies how humans perceive and process visual signals over time, in domains such as motion, position perception, and attentional tracking. Outside of the lab, he has been active in various open science initiatives. He is an associate editor at the journal Meta-psychology and he co-founded the Registered Replication Report article format at Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2014, co-founded the Association for Psychological Science journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science in 2018, and served on the founding advisory boards of the preprint server PsyArxiv and the journal PLOS ONE. Contact Alex at .

Russell A. Poldrack

Stanford University

Russell A. Poldrack is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Department of Psychology and Professor (by courtesy) of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience. His research uses neuroimaging to understand the brain systems underlying decision making and executive function. His lab is also engaged in the development of neuroinformatics tools to help improve the reproducibility and transparency of neuroscience, including the Openneuro.org and Neurovault.org data sharing projects and the Cognitive Atlas ontology. Contact Russ at .

Björn Jörges

York University

Björn Jörges studies the role of prediction for visual perception, as well as visuo-vestibular integration for the perception of object motion and self-motion. Beyond these topics, he also aspires to make science better, i.e., more diverse, more transparent and more robust. After finishing his PhD in Barcelona on the role of a strong earth gravity prior for perception and action, he started a Postdoc in the Multisensory Integration Lab at York University, where he currently investigates how the perception of self-motion changes in response to microgravity. Contact Björn at .