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Category: Project

Description: The movement towards open and reproducible science prides itself on its grassroots and bottom-up development. However, even in these transformative times, most junior scientists will not discover the value and functional nature of transparent scientific practice before their graduate studies. This discovery is accompanied by transition costs, bad practices, and wasted time. Our project aims at placing open and reproducible scientific methods at the heart of scientific education - the first undergraduate years. To accomplish this we will establish and edit a teaching book covering not only the theoretical foundations of scientific methods for social and cognitive sciences, but also the practical skills necessary for transparent practice. It will offer standard text book knowledge accompanied by, but also presented via challenging and entertaining practical sessions in the programming environments R and Python – both of which are open source and freely available. The dynamic nature of a GitHub-based website will allow this resource to be both searchable with autonomous sections, while still including a narrative - students will be able to complete all the necessary steps for preparing, conducting and presenting scientific work. We aim at providing a standalone fully-comprehensible online book with the ability to be integrated in different teaching formats: e.g., assisting lectures, theoretical seminars, practical workshops, student-organized tutorials, or self-paced online learning. We hope this resource will change the skillsets and thinking of developing researchers early on and see such a project as essential to achieving transparent, open and reproducible scientific disciplines. You can find the complete resource here: https://smobsc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html