Open Science Award 2024
This year’s open science award of the Univeristy of Lübeck goes to Dr. Léon Franzen for his project on a best practice guideline for running behavioural studies in neuroscience and psychology successfully online. The Translational Psychiatry Lab congratulates him on this fantastic achievement, which showcases the interdisciplinary approach and team effort to his science.
The award-winning project has been open source and access from day one on, as first ideas for this best practice guideline were collected online during the COVID-19 pandemic via Twitter. Together with his former student Nathan Gagné, he has shaped these ideas into a comprehensive guideline to support inexperienced as well as experienced behavioural researchers with their implementation of studies online. The work also covers new technological developments, such as webcam-based eye-tracking at home.
Besides the focus on behavioural neuroscience and psychology, this guideline has already been cited 35 times – with many of these citations coming from other disciplines and during the pre-print stage. This underlines how open access can ficilitate scientific progress within, but more importantly, across the sometimes narrow boundaries of a field.
The award program is intended to honor projects that help to make Open Science better known and promote it. We thank the selection committee of the Open Science Initiative at the University of Lübeck for their vote for Léon Franzen’s project.