Drifting into the world of open science and reproducibility by Dr Gavin Buckingham

About the speaker

Gavin Buckingham was awarded his PhD in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen in 2008. Following the completion of his PhD, he moved to Canada to take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada working with Prof Mel Goodale. His work here mostly focused on how we perceive weight and interact with objects in the world around us. In January 2013, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Psychology Department at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Three years later he joined the Department Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter, where he is currently a senior lecturer and leads the Object Interaction Lab.

About the talk

I am going to talk about my perspectives on open science and reproducibility from the (slightly unusual) perspective of not being a significant part of the open science ecosystem. I have not developed any reproducibility initiatives. I have not devoted my career to improving science. I do not force my trainees to do things ‘my way’. But, since taking up a permanent position, I have been making small tangible steps toward improving my scientific practices. In this talk, I’ll give my reflections on how these many incremental changes to my research practices have improved the quality of my work which, hopefully, will be of interest to other scientists hoping to move in the right direction, but unsure where best to start.