Professor Brian Nosek
Doctor of Science
Friday 11 November 2022 - Orator: Professor Marcus Munafo
Listen to the full oration and honorary speech on Soundcloud
Deputy Vice-Chancellor
The core mission of our University – any university – is to generate knowledge, through its teaching, its research, and its other civic and wider activities. But that knowledge can only achieve its full impact on society if it is freely available.
Professor Brian Nosek, today’s honorary graduate, has been leading international efforts to promote open and transparent scholarship. He co-founded the Centre for Open Science with a mission to "increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research".
The Open Science Framework, which the Centre for Open Science launched and hosts, facilitates this openness, by allowing researchers to deposit their data, code, materials, articles and other research objects, so they can be freely accessed by anybody.
But why do we need this openness and transparency?
Some reasons are moral. Work that is publicly funded should be available to those who, ultimately, supported it – the general public. Other reasons are pragmatic. This openness allows others to re-use data and enables the more efficient dissemination of knowledge.
But openness and transparency also serve to raise quality. Brian is a social psychologist, and social psychology is a field that has experienced what has been described as a “reproducibility crisis” in recent years.
Many published findings turned out to be less robust than we would expect. When the same experiment was repeated, different results were obtained. In many fields, a hallmark of scientific findings is that they should be reproducible. If they are not, something is not right.
Brian led the pioneering Reproducibility Project: Psychology – building a vast international team of collaborators to attempt to replicate, as closely as possible, one hundred findings published in three major psychology journals.
The results were sobering – only about 40% of the findings were the same as the original studies. Since then, Brian has led the way in demonstrating the need for these large, collaborative efforts to determine just how robust our knowledge actually is.
How can transparency and openness help improve quality? Traditionally, what researchers publish in scientific journals is a summary of their work. But there is much more to the research process than that relatively short summary.
By sharing not only that final article, but also our data, analysis code, materials and so on, where possible in a public repository such as the Open Science Framework, we allow for greater and more complete scrutiny of our work.
Errors will be more likely to be identified and corrected.
So the transparency that is at the heart of the mission of the Centre for Open Science, and enabled through the Open Science Framework, will serve to raise the quality of the knowledge that we generated, and accelerate its impact on society.
That openness shows that the knowledge we generate is worthy of trust.
But Brian’s work also highlights something even more important – to all of us within academia and beyond. The importance of admitting our mistakes. Brian’s own field has undergone a revolution – from crisis to a beacon of reform.
Brian also co-founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science – a name that tells you all you need to know about its purpose. That focus on reflection and continuous improvement is a hallmark of Brian’s work.
As we face future challenges – as a university and as a society – we would do well to adopt this spirit of reflection and improvement. We can always strive to be better, and we should challenge ourselves, and each other, to be so.
Brian has helped to transform a field of scholarly enquiry and established the digital infrastructure to follow his example of transparency and openness, so that other fields can be similarly transformed.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Professor Brian Nosek as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa.