Brian Nosek - Speaking Engagements

Brian Nosek is available for speaking engagements about open science/reproducibility or implicit bias. To schedule Brian for open science related engagements, please contact Dawne at the Center for Open Science, dawne@cos.io. To schedule Brian for implicit bias related engagements, please contact Project Implicit at services@projectimplicit.net.

TOPIC AREA 1: Open Science and Reproducibility

Through a non-profit, Center for Open Science, Brian Nosek delivers lectures about improving openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. Sessions are adapted and appropriate for researchers, publishers, funders, societies, and other groups that have a stake in scholarly research. Prior sessions are listed in Brian's vita. Examples of abstracts for such sessions include:

Improving Openness and Reproducibility in Research.

The currency of academic science is publishing. Producing novel, positive, and clean results maximizes the likelihood of publishing success because those are the best kind of results. There are multiple ways to produce such results: (1) be a genius, (2) be lucky, (3) be patient, or (4) employ flexible analytic and selective reporting practices to manufacture beauty. In a competitive marketplace with minimal accountability, it is hard to avoid (4). But, there is a way. With results, beauty is contingent on what is known about their origin. With methodology, if it looks beautiful, it is beautiful. The only way to be rewarded for something other than the results is to make transparent how they were obtained. With openness, I will not stop aiming for beautiful papers, but when I get them, it will be clear that I earned them.

Crowdsourcing Science.

The standard contributor model in science is vertically integrated. Resources are centralized to an individual or small team that conducts the entire research process: idea, design, collection, analysis, and report. This approach makes it easy to assign credit, but it is inefficient in capitalizing on specialized expertise, it produces a lot of small science, and it is exclusive. A complementary model is horizontally distributed. Crowdsourcing modularizes and distributes the research process across many contributors. This approach leverages expertise, enables big science, and is more inclusive. I will illustrate value of crowdsourcing in the context of a metascience effort investigating reproducibility of psychological research.

An Open Scholarly Commons for Advancing Science.

The Center for Open Science (COS; http://cos.io/) develops entirely free, open-source software and provides free services to researchers and stakeholders in the research process to improve openness and reproducibility of research. COS maintains the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/), a free, open scholarly commons. OSF is an application framework connecting services across the research lifecycle and facilitates preregistration, project management, and archiving and sharing of data, protocols, and code. Coupled with supporting public good infrastructure, COS is addressing incentives to improve the alignment between researcher behaviors with the scholarly values of transparency and reproducibility.

TOPIC AREA 2: Implicit Bias

Conscious experience provides an immediate, compelling, and incomplete account of the mind. Much of perception, thinking, and action occurs outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. Because of that, judgment and action can be unintentionally influenced by factors that we do not recognize, and may not value.

Through a non-profit, Project Implicit, Brian Nosek delivers lectures and education on implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, biases in decision-making, leadership, and barriers to innovation. The education may increase audience members' motivation and efficacy for taking action, and provides direction for next steps to pursue personal and organizational innovation and change. Sessions draw on the latest scientific evidence and translates basic science into implications for organizational practice. Sessions are customized to the organization's business sector and goals.

Sessions can be delivered to senior leadership, managers, or individual contributors and is adaptable to regional, national or international audiences. Nosek has conducted sessions with groups across a variety of sectors - corporate (senior leadership, HR, managers, and individual contributors), education, finance, government, law, medicine and health, military, and public policy both domestically (U.S.) and internationally. Illustrative examples of audiences and organizations are available in Nosek's curriculum vitae .

The most common initial engagement is a keynote presentation at a large meeting or an intensive 2-3 hour workshop. The typical session includes three components - experiential demonstrations of how thoughts and feelings operate outside of conscious awareness or conscious control, introduction and demonstration of implicit biases, and discussion of implications for personal and organizational practices. The latter portions are customized for the sector and particular organizational goals. A lecture format is more appropriate for large meetings (150-5,000 attendees) and is usually 60-90 minutes with time for Q-and-A. A workshop format is more appropriate for smaller groups (5-200 attendees) and is usually 2-3 hours with substantial discussion.