GoKawiilOpen-science advocate Brian Nosek is involved in an effort to assess whether the replicability of social-science results can be predicted.Credit: Center for Open Science
As a graduate student in psychology, Brian Nosek co-founded Project Implicit, a non-profit organization that uses fast-response online tests to look for hints of gender, racial and other biases in the unconscious associations people make between words. The Implicit Association Tests hosted by this project have been taken tens of millions of times since they were introduced in 1998, and are widely referenced across social-psychology research, pop culture and corporate training.
Nosek, now at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has since become a pioneer in the field of open science, where he has applied his psychological expertise to examine the gap between the values of science and its practice. In 2013, he co-founded the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS) in Charlottesville to address this gap in a practical way.
Building trust in scientific evidence
His work has not been without controversy. In 2024, he co-wrote a paper that tested a method for improving replicability (J. Protzko et al. Nature Hum. Behav. 8, 311–319; 2024). It was retracted after critics pointed out false claims about the preregistration of the studies in the paper — a situation that Nosek described at the time as a “screw-up”.
This week, Nosek and colleagues are releasing the results of a project called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE). The effort examined whether social-science papers hold up to reanalysis, either when using the same data or in fresh studies, and whether replicability can be predicted. Nature talked to Nosek about his work and what can be done to improve the practice of research.
What is the main gap that you see between scientific values and practice?
All researchers would say that, of course, transparency is important for science. I need to be able to interrogate your findings; you need to be able to interrogate mine. But the way in which science is structured doesn’t reward transparency. Publication is the currency of advancement, and decisions governing publication are largely about the outcomes that researchers produce, not about rigour, transparency or reproducibility.
Bias is ever-present — that’s what we have learnt from Project Implicit. The purpose of transparency is to help expose when bias occurs, and to give occasion to correct it.
How does the Center for Open Science attempt to close that gap?
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