Open and reproducible practices in developmental psychology research: The workflow of the WomCogDev lab as an example

Abstract

The current paper presents an overview of the workflow of the Working Memory, Cognition and Development (WomCogDev) lab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as an example of how Open Science principles can be applied in a developmental psychology lab. We describe the importance and challenges of applying Open Science practices in developmental research and detail each step of our workflow from research design to dissemination. We provide examples and give emphasis to steps that typically receive little attention but that may hold promise for application in other labs (namely, project design, data collection and data analysis). Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our workflow and summarize the main takeaways for other labs. By ‘opening up’ our lab's workflow, we want to encourage other labs to incorporate the aspects that they like into their own workflows and to share their own processes for the continued benefit of others.