Open Science in Applied Linguistics: A Preliminary Survey

The first official step toward Open Science (OS) in Applied Linguistics (AL) was arguably the establishment of IRIS, a discipline-specific data and instrument repository, back in 2011 (Marsden et al., 2016). Since then, there have been active efforts to improve methodological rigour and research quality (e.g., Gass et al., 2021; Plonsky, 2014; Plonsky et al., 2020), as well as initiatives to enhance research transparency, reproducibility and accessibility, such as Registered Reports at Language Learning (Marsden, Morgan-Short, et al., 2018) and the Open Accessible Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS) initiative (Marsden, Alferink, et al., 2018). Nevertheless, little is known regarding how AL researchers currently perceive and practise OS. High uncertainty remains regarding researchers’ beliefs and engagement in OS (Christensen et al., 2020). We argue that to better inform the initiatives led by active proponents of OS in AL, the voices of ordinary researchers (e.g., who may not be active proponents of OS) must be understood and taken into account. To the best of our knowledge, only one survey of such nature has been conducted in the field of AL (cited in Marsden, 2019) and more efforts are still needed to better understand the current status of applied linguists’ perception and practice of OS. As a step in that direction, we conducted a preliminary survey targeting applied linguists, covering topics such as OS attitudes, OS practices and perceived barriers to OS practices.