What is a BITSS Catalyst?

BITSS Catalysts are academic faculty, graduate students, and other researchers across the quantitative social sciences—including economics, political science, and psychology— who are energized to improve standards of transparency, reproducibility, and ethics in research through infrastructure development, training, and advocacy.  While the past decade has seen exciting advancements in the adoption and effective use of open science tools, we have a long way to go before transparency and reproducibility are the norm. The goal of this program is to connect and empower individuals to make changes in their own classrooms, institutions, and networks, thereby catalyzing large-scale and durable change.

How does one become a BITSS Catalyst?

If you identify as a champion of research transparency, reproducibility and ethics in your quantitative social science discipline, we invite you to apply to become a BITSS Catalyst. Please tell us about your background, expertise, and interest in joining the network using this form. There is no cost to applying, and no requirements associated with being a Catalyst—other than modeling a high standard of transparency, reproducibility and ethics in your own research and workflow (see details below).

Why become a BITSS Catalyst?

By becoming a BITSS Catalyst, you will join a community of like-minded researchers who are working to drive more transparent, reproducible, and ethical social science research. 

You’ll be kept up to date on the latest training opportunities, events, news, and research related to research transparency, reproducibility, and the metasciences. 

You will also be invited to apply to periodic BITSS Catalyst Grant Competitions, through which you can access funding to develop and disseminate open science tools, train faculty and students on the use of these tools, and advocate for policy change within research and policy institutions, governments, journals, and funding agencies.

BITSS can also help to amplify your research and advocacy efforts through our website, blog, newsletter, and social media outreach.

What does BITSS expect of our Catalysts?

We expect Catalysts to demonstrate a commitment to transparent, reproducible, rigorous, and ethical research through their teaching and workflows. Examples of commitment to transparency may include, but are not limited to: 

  • Training students/colleagues on research transparency and reproducibility 
  • Integrating research transparency topics into existing curricula/courses, seminars, and workshops
  • Conducting meta-research
  • Pre-registering your studies
  • Writing and publishing Pre-Analysis Plans
  • Conducting computational reproductions, ideally logging them in the Social Science Reproduction Platform!
  • Making your study materials, data, and code publicly available
  • Advocating for better standards and policies around transparency, reproducibility, and ethics in research

BITSS Catalysts’ profiles, along with their stated goals, will be posted on the BITSS website. Catalysts will meet with BITSS staff either in person or over Zoom to identify how BITSS can best support their efforts and brainstorm possibilities for collaboration. Periodically, BITSS Catalysts may be asked to review and provide input on BITSS resources, develop and share course materials with the network, and provide input/feedback on ongoing and new BITSS activities. Finally, we ask that all Catalysts fill out an annual survey designed to help us capture the collective research practices and impact of our Catalyst network.

Meet the Catalysts!

BITSS is supporting 160+ academics and research practitioners working at 100+ institutions in 30+ countries (across six continents) as leaders in the open science movement. Learn more in the Catalyst database which includes profiles searchable by institution, discipline, and open science expertise and services.

Catalyst Training Grants

BITSS offers grants to Catalysts to develop and deliver training in the form of workshops, conferences, short courses, or university-level curriculum development.

We currently do not have any open calls for funding. Please check back later this year!