MZES Open Social Science Conference 2019: Practicing New Standards in Transparency and Reproducibility

June 20, 2018

By Justin Esarey

I received this message from Alexander Wuttke of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research and the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, announcing a new conference on Transparency and Reproducibility in the Social Sciences. This conference may be of interest to readers of The Political Methodologist!

— begin announcement —

MZES Open Social Science Conference 2019: Practicing New Standards in Transparency and Reproducibility

This conference is a forum for practicing and discussing credibility, transparency and replicability in the social sciences.

About a decade ago, John Ioannidis claimed that “most published research findings are false”. While seeming outrageous at the time, a growing body of meta-science research in the behavioral and social sciences substantiated this claim, causing uncertainty about the trustworthiness of published scientific findings. We believe that threats to the validity of published findings in the social sciences are widespread and systemic. Therefore, this conference promotes introspection about the current state of social science research and exchange on the opportunities for institutional and methodological improvement in the future.

The conference is supported by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) and will take place from 25-27 January 2019 in Mannheim, Germany.

Conference Website – twitter

Keynote speakers:

  • Jeremy Freese (Stanford University)
  • Thomas König (APSR, University of Mannheim)
  • Arthur Lupia (OSF, University of Michigan)
  • Julia Rohrer (100% CI, Leipzig University)

Participate in the conference:

  • Give a talk: We call for researchers to advance discussion, debate, literature synthesis, or methods in open social science. We welcome methodological advances, e.g., p-curve analysis, systematic reviews, pre-analysis planning, and replication. We welcome general research findings that apply best practices of open science while conducting the research – Abstract submission DL: 22 August 2018  Read more
  • MZES-GESIS Pre-Registration Challenge:  We call for researchers to participate in a competition to win funding or survey time for the most innovative and rigorous pre-registration plan for a social science study. – Abstract submission DL: 22 August 2018  Read more
  • OSSC19 Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: We call for researchers to replicate and expand a previously published cross-national macro-comparative study. The goal is to explore and develop crowdsourcing methods and generate research surpassing what a single researcher could achieve. The replication comes from the field of immigration and social policy, but we encourage social science researchers of all disciplines and levels to participate. All full participants will be co-authors on the final paper. – Registration DL: 27 July 2018   Read more
  • Participate as a guest in Mannheim during the conference or during the subsequent Open Science Workshop, offered in collaboration with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Or use the live stream online.

Organizing Committee

Nate Breznau (MZES, University of Mannheim)
Eike Mark Rinke (MZES, University of Mannheim)
Alexander Wuttke (MZES, University of Mannheim)

Conference website: http://www.open-socsci.org/
Twitter: @opensocsci
#ossc19