Beth Baribault, cognitive sciences graduate student, has been named a recipient of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science. Awarded by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) which strives to shift the research community’s practices toward more open and transparent research, the $10,000 prize recognizes academics from across the world and throughout all disciplines who demonstrate clear and well-documented data and research.

Baribault’s prize comes from the Emerging Researchers category. As a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, her research focuses on the development of new computational tools for analyzing behavioral data in a Bayesian framework. In conducting her research, she has made every effort to maintain transparency. And while the topic of transparent research is not without its critics, Baribault believes that it is in the best interest of science.

“I decided early on in gradate school to maintain as high a level of transparency as possible in all of my research projects,” she says. “I've preregistered all data collections, and have made materials, data, and analysis code from all projects available online.  I elected to do this because I believe it is best practice for psychological research.”

She hopes that by adhering to open science guidelines on both the research process and publishing side, that she and other like-minded researchers will influence other academics to follow suit, and hopefully make transparent research practices the norm. 

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