A brighter vision of the potential of open science for benefiting practice: A ManyOrgs Proposal

Guzzo et al. (2022), in their focal article express concerns that rewarding open science practices, particularly in scholarly publishing, may harm the practical relevance of our research. They go on to urge greater reliance on conceptual replication over direct or exact replication to verify claims in our field. Although we concur with the majority of their recommendations, their prescriptions nevertheless do not fully address the deeper issue of publication and outcome reporting bias traceable to insufficient resources. Other sciences have effectively addressed this resource problem via crowdsourcing, large-scale collaborations, and multi-site replication (both conceptual and direct). Such initiatives are a pragmatic, if challenging to implement, solution to problems that face many areas of science such as ours (e.g., ensuring sufficient statistical power, assessing the generalizability and replicability of effects, spurring the uptake of open science practices, promoting diversity and inclusivity). Here, we propose that IO psychologists create such an initiative that primarily services practice. We tentatively call this initiative ‘ManyOrgs’. We also clarify how this open science initiative complements Guzzo et al.