Brian Nosek, PhD, is presented with a Presidential Citation for his extraordinary leadership and courage in championing openness, integrity, transparency, and reproducibility within psychological science.
A social-cognitive psychologist, Nosek is a professor at the University of Virginia and the executive director of the Center for Open Science. He has spent most of his career studying implicit cognition—the thoughts and feelings that exist outside of conscious awareness. His research has included foundational work on the Implicit Association Test. Beyond his work on implicit cognition, Nosek is being recognized for his leadership in moving the field of psychology toward greater reproducibility. Beginning with the publication, “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science” published in Science, Nosek and his team highlighted the importance of open science and increased the awareness of reproducibility issues within the field of psychological science. Shortly thereafter, he co-founded the Center for Open Science.
The Open Science Framework or OSF, the centerpiece of Nosek’s work at the Center for Open Science, now has over half a million users worldwide and over 100,000 studies have been registered in their repository. The existence of OSF has catalyzed transparent research in psychology and beyond, with more than 2.6 million files as of 2021 representing scientific data, materials, and analysis codes being shared. Nosek’s leadership created substantial momentum within the open science movement in psychological science. After the creation of the OSF, the Psychological Science Accelerator (a global network of rigorous, generalizable, and inclusive research collaboration) was founded, PsyArXiv (a preprint service for psychology, now hosting over 25,000 open access manuscripts) was created, and the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (rigorous standards facilitating transparency in scientific publications) have been adopted in academic journals.