SESSION 2
Mosaik II
11:45 - 12:30
Title: Learning from effective carrots and sticks
more context: people coming from different institutions - how to incentivize people to do OS?
Moderator(s): Ben Black (ZALF)
Participants:
Arne (Federal Institute of Risk Assessment), agriculture, stick approach
Anna Au, Ph.D. candidate, library associated, carrots approach
Agnieszka, publication management, ZALF, carrots
Nadja, BA,
Susann Auer, biologist & OS trainer, TU Dresden, no incentives (:
Jana Rumler, formerly ZALF/Museum für Naturkunde, now IGB (since 2023), perspective on Leibniz Association’s Science Supporting Infrastructure
Ben Black, previously researcher, ZALF
Ian Wolff, Brandenburg, HNE Eberswalde, some sticks
Vinodh Ilangovan, PhD neuroscience, knowledge graphs, TIB, more sticks?
Stefan Skupien, Berlin University Alliance, sticks and carrots/incentives and research about improving the incentivizing system
Maaike Duine, Open Research Office Berlin, sticks and carrots
Notes:
Leibniz is carroty
Carrot is hypothetical, stick comes from journals
Institutional comptetion but there are no winners from this.
We thinking in analogies and stories but these don’t result in benefits.
Univerisites in the Berlin Alliance are at very different points in achieving/promoting Open Science, Charitie is a front-runner.
Sticks are not appreciated by social science researchers in general.
Anna: definitions of Open Science at institutions determine what carrots and sticks are.
At TIB they operate on the assumption/utopia vision that everyone is doing Open Science but Open Science doesn’t take place in a vacuum and hence services often don’t meet the needs of scientists. High impact journals still take precedence of truly Open Science publishing (Prestige > Openness).
Sticks could be career incentives, eg in publishing to get recognition
Sticks in a Federal Insitutions: There are gaps in the law and people are searching for this. Upto and including the head of org. (Link to §12 of federal egovernmant law: (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/egovg/__12.html)
Follow up question: Is it regulated by employment contract? Answer: Yes.
Follow up question: What is the incentive to seek out gaps to not publish data? Answer: It takes time to publish data. Fear of making mistakes visible to others. People are stil striving for perfection.
Way forward: Changing error culture - many datasets have mistakes, people are afraid that others see their mistakes, change culture towards accepting that these honest errors happen and can be fixed by community
“All models are wrong and some models are useful.”
Positive publication bias still persists = negative results are not reported on
‘Start publishing anything anywhere’ might be important just to get people started so that data is at least published.
Labelling your research as ‘Open Science’
Are the Berlin University Alliance working on incentive strcutures? It is a section in the application process for tenure track positions. But it is not a ‘hard’ criteria. Challenge because the search committee for positions are so secretive that they cannot give feedback on participants anwsers.
Do we need criteria for this Open Science component of applications?
We need more insights into different research cultures: Psychology is fairly well known but what about egyptology?
In academia: too small a number of people have too much control.
in theory there are incentives and expectations that people do OS, but in reality there are no compliance checks/quality control after projects have been funded if they really followed through with the OS things they promised in proposals
sticks: funder mandates
The burden from the top-down sticks still falls on early career researchers i..e it is just extra work put on their desk.
Maybe we need to slow down science to improve documentation.
The question of public funding -> Public outputs could be a new questions.
Reproducibility for Everyone: Giving workshops to researchers to make their work reproducibile. After 5 years of workshops, new team leaders are actually implementing the practices in the groups/labs. Example: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5720653/replication-crisis-games-abel-brodeur
measure quality of science needs to be done! Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information https://barcelona-declaration.org/ Leiden Metrics are trying to own the evaluation.
Wrap-Up (few bullet points for reporting):
- on institutional level we see often stick approach but it seems to not work, carrots as way to inspire people how to do it right
- would be good to have more time for good quality science and documentation