Jeffrey R. Spies, PhD, is presented with a Presidential Citation for his extraordinary leadership and courage in championing openness, integrity, transparency, and reproducibility within psychological science.
A psychologist, computer scientist, and statistician, Spies is currently the principal consultant at 221B, a strategic consulting firm that combines expertise in research technology and methodology with the goal of increasing research efficiency and data sharing across higher education. In addition, Spies serves as the consulting chief technology officer at Databrary, a data sharing company that enables the safe storage and sharing of multidisciplinary data across researchers. Spies received his PhD in quantitative psychology from the University of Virginia. As a part of his dissertation, he developed the Open Science Framework (OSF)—a free, open-sourced platform for managing and sharing research.
Shortly after receiving his doctorate, Spies co-founded and served as the chief technology officer of the Center for Open Science, a non-profit technology company that has increased the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of psychological research. The OSF 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. In sum, Spies provided both vision and leadership for the open science movement within psychology. Moreover, he has played a pivotal role in restoring public faith in psychological research.