Facilitating open access in the
behavioral sciences
1 Département de psychologie,
Université de Montréal, C. P. 6128, succ. Centre-Ville, Montreal, Quebec, H3C 3J7, Canada, Email: roxane.de.la.sablonniere@umontreal
In most
fields of natural science and technology, such as physics, biology, environmental
science and astronomy, significant improvements have been
made in recent years in terms of open access. Open access reinforces scientific
inquiry, encourages diversity of analysis, and strongly promotes new research
by allowing researchers to study questions that were not initially planned.
With open access, researchers from all over the world are encouraged to share
and to use data. Although there are clear benefits to open access, there is one
field where it remains problematic and uncommon: the behavioral sciences. Because the behavioral sciences involve human
participants, the protection of privacy and concern for confidentiality take
priority over open access. Indeed, before collecting data, all researchers
conducting research that involves human participants must seek the approval of
an ethics committee for their project. When a project is approved, the usual
norm among behavioral scientists is to include a consent form specifying that
only the researcher and his/her assistants will have access to the data, making
it impossible to have open access. We argue that it is possible to move toward
open access in behavioral science and we will show how this can be done. Based
on a well-known technique in social psychology, the foot
in the door principle, we will propose concrete steps to achieve
open access in fields where this norm has not yet been developed.