BRC research awarded prize for openness

The Center for Open Science has awarded a $1,000 prize to NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) researchers, for publishing the results of their pre-registered clinical trial on memory-focused cognitive therapy as a potential treatment for cocaine use disorder.

The prize was awarded to John Marsden, Professor of Addiction Psychology and Camille Goetz, PhD student, for their BRC-funded paper ‘Memory-Focused Cognitive Therapy for Cocaine Use Disorder: Theory, Procedures and Preliminary Evidence From an External Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial’, published in EBioMedicine.

The Center for Open Science is a non-profit technology organisation based in Charlottesville, Virginia with a mission to "increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research”.

Under the COS banner, researchers can pre-register exploratory or confirmatory research hypotheses by specifying the plan in advance. 

Commenting on the prize, Professor John Marsden said: “We were absolutely delighted to be awarded a $1,000 prize by the Center for Open Science. We pre-registered the analysis of our pilot RCT trial of a novel cognitive therapy for cocaine use disorder - funded by the NIHR Maudsley BRC - on their Open Science Framework (OSF) website.

“The COS then compared our pre-registered analysis plan (our defined outcome measures and how we planned to analyse and report the research) with our published protocol and subsequent published results. As part of their drive to encourage the publication of preregistered trials they have generously awarded us this prize.

“The open science movement is really gaining traction now, as a global effort to promote quality science and reproducible research findings. Pre-registration requires the researcher – on a completely voluntary basis – to specify in advance their testable hypotheses, specific outcome measures, a summary of their analysis methods and how their results will be presented.

“Most of us publish protocols for our studies, and this is really just an additional public-facing commitment, but one that editors and peer reviewers are increasingly interested to see. There is some great symmetry here, because we will add this sum to the fieldwork costs of Camille Goetz’s BRC-funded PhD and our intern Kami will also be registering her own analysis plan on the Open Science Framework in the coming weeks.”


Tags: Clinical disorders and health behaviours - Staff News - Substance use and harms -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 18 Jan 2019, 09:00 AM


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