Embracing Transparency: A Study of Open Science Practices Among Early Career HCI Researchers

TL;DR

This study explores early-career HCI researchers' perceptions of open science, identifying barriers like lack of incentives and cultural resistance, and suggests conference-level changes to promote transparency in the field.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the perceptions and barriers faced by early-career HCI researchers regarding open science practices through qualitative interviews.

Findings

Barriers include lack of incentives, cultural resistance, and privacy concerns.

Small conference changes could influence community norms.

Recommendations to promote transparency and openness.

Abstract

Many fields of science, including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), have heightened introspection in the wake of concerns around reproducibility and replicability of published findings. Notably, in recent years the HCI community has worked to implement policy changes and mainstream open science practices. Our work investigates early-career HCI researchers' perceptions of open science and engagement with best practices through 18 semi-structured interviews. Our findings highlight key barriers to the widespread adoption of data and materials sharing, and preregistration, namely: lack of clear incentives; cultural resistance; limited training; time constraints; concerns about intellectual property; and data privacy issues. We observe that small changes at major conferences like CHI could meaningfully impact community norms. We offer recommendations to address these barriers and to promote transparency and openness in HCI. While these findings provide valuable and interesting insights about the open science practices by early career HCI researchers, their applicability is limited to the USA only. The interview study relies on self-reported data; therefore, it can be subject to biases like recall bias. Future studies will include the scope to expand HCI researchers from different levels of experience and different countries, allowing for more justifiable examples.