Thanks again to everyone who came to Week 2 of the Open Science Challenge. If you haven’t made it yet, no worries, you are welcome to join us any time (but if you want me to stop emailing you, let me know).

Our next meeting will be Friday, May 18 at 2-3 pm in WGB room 4.05, where we will have a visit from Vicky Hellon from F1000 to talk about HRB Open Research.

At our last meeting, we had an excellent discussion of what makes for a good research question. I think the key points from our conversation were as follows:

1. The questions must be scientific, but exactly does this mean? I offered a bit on the Problem of Induction, Popper, and Falsification, largely just to establish that smart people can and do disagree on what science is and how it progresses. However, we all seemed to generally agree that science is about asking questions that can be addressed by empirical data.
2. We discussed the idea of novelty, contrasting false bravado and exaggeration with genuine novelty that drives scientific progress. We also discussed the relative merits of novelty and the importance of replication.
3. We talked about the importance of our research questions. I mentioned concerns that many research questions, at least in biomedical science, aren’t the ones that stakeholders and decision makers want answered. I also mentioned the role of initiatives like the JLA Priority Setting Partnerships, as well as funding bodies, in focusing our collective efforts on important questions. We also discussed impact and how the REF in the UK has affected wider perceptions of this term – and thankfully we all agreed that seeing your research in the media isn’t necessarily impact. This conversation dovetailed into shared concerns that basic and methodological research were wrongly placed at disadvantage as the potential value wasn’t as immediately apparent as say an assessment of an intervention – and so we highlighted the need to make the case for the importance of this research, rather than to assume others (reviewers/editors) understand.
4. We discussed ethics, which turned more towards a discussion of ethics around data collection (rather than scientific questions), so we agreed to pick up this topic again.
5. We also we able to identify cultural differences across the various fields we each represent.

In light of this conversation, we should now be more prepared to devise our own research questions, which we can discuss further on a newly established Slack channel.