About us

Advocating for the integration of open and reproducible science into higher education

In a nutshell, FORRT is a Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training which is advancing research transparency, reproducibility, rigor, and ethics through pedagogical reform and meta-scientific research.

FORRT provides a pedagogical infrastructure and open educational resources designed to support the teaching and mentoring of open and reproducible science. FORRT strives to (a) raise awareness of the pedagogical implications of open and reproducible science and its associated challenges (i.e., curricular reform, epistemological uncertainty, methods of education); (b) respond to calls to consider open scholarship as inclusive scholarship; (c) advocate for the opening and formal recognition of teaching and mentoring materials to facilitate access, discovery, and learning to those who otherwise would be educationally disenfranchised.

Here’s a 5 minutes introduction to FORRT

What are FORRT’s goals?

Build, together with educators, a pathway towards the incremental adoption of open scholarship practices into higher education
Generate a conversation about the ethics and social impact of a higher education pedagogy that emphasizes openness, epistemic uncertainty and research credibility
Promote a reflection about the perceived importance of different academic activities and advocate for greater recognition of educational resources

Want to learn more about us?

Our community has published meta-scientific peer-reviewed papers & policies (and we also have ongoing manuscripts being written) so please consider reading our award-winning scholarship at the FORRT’s Publications page.

If you’re looking for open educational resources, please take a look at our Educational Nexus and our FORRT Pedagogies.

For more information about our goals and values, read our Mission Statement, Code of Conduct, and our quest towards Principled Teaching and Mentoring.

If you’re looking for information about who we are or our organizational structure, take a look the teams that compose FORRT, the institutions and initiatives with which we are partners, and our community members.

Would you like to get involved more with FORRT? Check out our getting involved page!

Would you like to help us be or do better? Give us (anonymous) feedback in our feedback page.

➡️ Expand to learn even more ⬇️

The problem

Recently, the scientific community took steps to reflect a widespread awareness of, and call for, improved practices ushering in the “credibility revolution” including higher standards of evidence, preregistration, direct replication, transparency, and openness.
Structurally, three pillars were proposed to carry social sciences towards academic utopia: opening scientific communication, restructuring incentives and practices, and collaborative and crowdsourced science.

However, ongoing attempts have neglected an essential aspect of the academic machinery: students. And indeed, current norms for the teaching and mentoring in higher education are rooted in the obsolete practices of bygone eras. Improving transparency and rigor of science is the responsibility of all who engage in it.

The solution

In our view, a scientific utopia has a fourth pillar, whose principal goal is to familiarize higher education students, who are future consumers of science and may become knowledge producers, with the intricacies of the process of science.
We believe the teaching and mentoring of reproducible and open research practices is the clearest indicator of the degree to which institutions and/or departments embody principles of credible science.
This demonstration goes beyond paying lip service to best practices, and ensures that students are trained to engage in the best available scientific practices.

FORRT is designed by, and envisioned for, educators who wish to integrate typical discipline content with open and reproducible science tenets.

FORRT supports this endeavor through a three-pronged approach:

Provide educators a comprehensive but straightforward framework to teach and mentor open and reproducible science as well as qualify and quantify the degree of open and reproducible research practices in their teaching and mentoring.

FORRT’s clusters
FORRT’s self-assessment tool

Equipping educators with high quality pedagogical tools on open and reproducible science practices to facilitate its integration into curricula and educators’ teaching mentoring, and research practices.

FORRT’s Educational Nexus
FORRT’s Pedagogies

Modifying the academic incentive structure regarding teaching and mentoring through recognition and commendations of excellent teaching and mentoring; foster social justice through the opening and democratization of scientific-educational resources to those who otherwise would be educationally disenfranchised; and building a community with existing educational initiatives and strengthening our missions, identify and reduce redundancies, and streamline the advancement of open educational practices.

FORRT’s Toward Social Justice in Academia initiatives
FORRT’s Neurodiversity Team
FORRT’s Educators’ Corner
FORRT’s Publications
FORRT’s Institutional Partnerships

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History

This project was initiated at the 2018 meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science in the “Teaching replicable and reproducible science” hackathon led by Kristen Lane and Heather Urry. The initial framework was developed in a subsequent working group consisting of: Flávio Azevedo, Sam Parsons, Carl Michael Galang, Kristin Lane, Lisa DeBruine, Benjamin Le, Donald Tellinghuisen, and Madeline Harms (we apologise if we have missed anybody - please let us know). If you are interested in learning about how FORRT developed and matured, our first website is still online. Fun fact, FORRT was ‘born’ in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Sunday, June 24th, 2018, at approximately 4pm local time.

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