Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A psychology paper depositing all 200 stimulus images on OSF with a CC-BY licence.
- Is an instance
An education trial depositing the full intervention manual on a public repository.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A figure of example stimuli in the paper without the underlying set.
- Not an instance
A code release alone.
Editorial commentary
Open materials is the practice of publicly releasing the non-data, non-code materials a study depended on — experimental stimuli, survey and interview instruments, intervention manuals, coding schemes, training materials — so that another researcher can actually re-implement the procedure rather than only inspect its data or results. What counts as “materials” is field-specific: in experimental psychology it is typically the stimulus set and instruction text presented to participants; in an education trial it is the intervention manual and any fidelity checklist; in chemistry it can mean full synthesis procedures and reagent provenance beyond what a methods section summarises in prose.
Open materials is one of three practices originally recognised together by the Open Science Framework's Open Practice Badges, alongside open data and pre-registration. The three are complementary rather than substitutes for one another: a study can release its data without its materials (leaving other researchers unable to run the same procedure on new participants), release its materials without its data (leaving the original results unverifiable), or, ideally, do both.
Why it is distinct from open code and open data
Materials are what was administered to generate data — the instrument, protocol, or stimulus — not the data itself (see open data) and not the software used to analyse it afterward (see open code). A figure in a paper showing a handful of example stimuli, or a methods-section description of a procedure in prose, does not count as open materials: the standard requires the actual, complete, reusable instrument, typically deposited alongside a licence (commonly CC-BY) that states how others may reuse it. Journals implementing the TOP Guidelines' Research Materials Transparency standard require, at higher levels, that materials be deposited in a trusted repository and cited, not merely described.
References
- Kidwell et al., 'Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency' (PLOS Biology, 2016).
Also known as
shared materials · open stimuli
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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