Beyond an Ethos or Inflexible Checklist of Research Practices: Grounding Open Science in a Biomedical Research Ethics Framework
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The well-documented reproducibility problem facing psychological science has driven rapid growth in open science infrastructure and practices over the past decade. Despite most researchers broadly endorsing transparency as a virtue, actual practice adoption remains uneven and lags far behind the stated support. Three issues explain the value-practice gap: (1) general ethos does not motivate and guide actual practice use within context, (2) open science is often misconceived as a one-size-fits-all, all-or-nothing mandate applied agnostic to different research questions, methods, or populations, (3) insufficient attention to relational transparency relative to procedural transparency, thus inadvertently alienating psychological researchers who use qualitative and participatory methods. Currently, researchers are left without a principled framework to decide what, when, and how to implement specific practices in any given investigation. A critical step is translating the transparency ethos into a comprehensive set of ethical principles and benchmarks that can guide eventual open science practices. Drawing on Emanuel’s biomedical research ethics framework, this article maps open science practices onto eight established ethical principles. Examples are offered on how these principles and related benchmarks motivate specific, contextually appropriate practices. The systematic ethics framework offers researchers a principled basis for building local capacity to engage with open science practices.
Author: P. Priscilla Lui
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214517735