Open Science in Developing Countries

What is this project?

Open Science in the Developing World is a completed, large-scale international collaboration led and supported by FORRT that culminated in a peer-reviewed publication in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS).

The project responds to a central tension in the open science movement:
while open science is often presented as universally beneficial, its dominant tools, incentives, and norms have largely been designed by and for researchers in well-resourced, Global North contexts.

This initiative reframes open science as something that must be context-sensitive, adaptable, and equity-oriented, particularly for researchers working in developing countries and other resource-constrained environments.

Contributors

• 49 contributors will cover Open Science related topic from perspective of 12 developing countries.

Progress

• Open call for contributors.

• Identified topic leads.

• Drafts for each topic.

• First draft of the whole paper.

• Re-structure the first draft of the whole paper.

• Final preprint of the paper is available here.

• Final Publication is available here.

Key Publications (2025)

The preprint can be found here (osf.io/7ubk2), and final publication: here.

Download the supplementary material here.

Hu, C.-P., Xu, Z., Lazić, A., Bhattacharya, P., Seda, L., Hossain, S., Jeftić, A., Özdoğru, A. A., Amaral, O. B., Miljković, N., Ilchovska, Z. G., Lazarevic, L. B., Wu, H., Bao, S., Ghodke, N., Moreau, D., Elsherif, M., C., C., Ghai, S., … Azevedo, F. (2025). Open Science in the Developing World: A Collection of Practical Guides for Researchers in Developing Countries. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 8(3), 25152459251357565. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251357565

What does the paper do?

Rather than offering abstract principles, the paper delivers a practical, action-oriented roadmap for engaging with open science under real-world constraints.

It explicitly acknowledges structural barriers such as:

• limited funding and infrastructure
• language and access asymmetries
• metric-driven academic incentives
• unequal visibility and leadership opportunities

and responds with concrete strategies that researchers can adopt immediately, without requiring institutional privilege or substantial financial resources.

The Four-Level Engagement Framework

The paper introduces a four-level guide for engaging with open science at one’s own pace:

1. Foundation

Using free and open resources to support rigorous research practices
(e.g., OSF, GitHub, Zenodo, preprints, open educational materials).

2. Growth

Adopting low-cost, high-impact practices such as:

• open data and materials (where appropriate)
• preregistration and registered reports
• free and open-source software (e.g., R, JASP, Jamovi)

3. Community

Contributing to open science through:

• translations
• data collection in underrepresented contexts
• peer review, mentoring, and training
• participation in grassroots networks

4. Leadership

Building and leading local or regional open-science communities, shaping norms, incentives, and research culture from within.

This structure explicitly rejects a “one-size-fits-all” model of open science and emphasizes agency, sustainability, and local relevance.

Educational & Practical Resources

Beyond the main article, the project provides an extensive set of open, reusable resources, including:

• curated lists of open-access repositories in developing countries
• guidance on ethical reuse of open data, code, and materials
• inventories of free and open-source software and hardware
• open training materials for statistics, methods, and meta-research
• step-by-step guidance for contributing to and leading open-science initiatives

These materials are designed for:

• early-career researchers
• educators and trainers
• community organizers
• researchers operating outside elite institutional ecosystems

They align closely with FORRT’s broader mission to democratize access to research training and epistemic participation.

Why this matters for FORRT

This project exemplifies several core FORRT principles:

• Equity before compliance: open science should reduce, not reproduce, inequality
• Training as infrastructure: education and mentorship are foundational to reform
• Community over extraction: meaningful inclusion requires leadership, not tokenism
• Pluralism in practice: open science must adapt to diverse epistemic and material contexts

The paper also directly informs FORRT’s ongoing work on:

• global open-science education
• citational justice
• inclusive big-team science
• community-led governance models

Conference Presentations

• 2025-06-27 | SIPS 2025, Budapest, Hungary
  Unconference: “A Collection of Practical Guides for Adopting Open Science Practices in Resource-Limited Settings”

• 2024-06-10 | SIPS 2024, Nairobi, Kenya
  Hackathon: “Promoting Open Science in Developing Countries: A Practical Guide”

• 2023-10-23 | Big Team Science Conference 2023 (online) | Featured Panel #24. See program here.

Learn more & get involved

• Publication: https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251357565
• Preprint & materials: https://osf.io/7ubk2
• FORRT: https://forrt.org
• FORRT Educational Nexus: https://forrt.org/nexus/

If you are interested in adapting, translating, teaching, or extending these materials in your own context, we invite you to connect with the FORRT community.

Contact Us

For more information, please contact Dr. Hu Chuan-Peng ( hcp4715@hotmail.com), School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China and info@forrt.org.