Guest article by Yves Van Vaerenbergh, Simon Hazée, and Thijs Zwienenberg.
Open science has become an essential part of how research across disciplines is conducted, communicated, and evaluated. At its core, open science is about creating more transparency and openness about the research that is reported.
In our recent Journal of Service Research paper, Open Science: A Review of Its Effectiveness and Implications for Service Research, we reviewed evidence on the effectiveness of open science practices and analyzed how widely they are being adopted in our field. You can download the paper here.
Since the paper was published, we have been encouraged to see researchers in our community, including ourselves, experiment with ways of bringing these ideas to life.
At the same time, we have also encountered some misconceptions about open science, such as the belief that it is limited to open access or that it is difficult, if not impossible, to attain.
In this blog post, we want to highlight four concrete tips that you can implement in your activities as a service researcher. Each represents a step toward making service research more transparent and impactful.
1. Begin with Small Steps
Adopting a full open science workflow can be seen an overwhelming goal to achieve. It doesn’t have to be like that. Dividing your overall goal into smaller sub-goals makes achieving goals much more manageable and realistic.
The same goes for adopting open science practices. Start with small, easy to do actions such as justifying sample size calculations, specifying whether your study is exploratory or confirmatory, or simply reporting all your survey measurements ad verbum can help a long way in familiarizing yourself with open science practices.
We encourage colleagues to use the transparency and openness checklist included in the appendix of our paper. You’ll find that many of the steps are actually quite small and easy to implement.
Based on our experiences as associate editors and reviewers, we often see requests for greater transparency and openness from the entire review team. By using the checklist in our paper, you can not only anticipate and avoid such comments, potentially saving you a lot of work during the revision process.
2. Include a Transparency and Openness Statement in Your Paper
After starting with these small steps, one of the easiest but most effective ways to strengthen transparency is to explicitly declare it. Adding a short Transparency and Openness Statement just before you introduce your studies can help outline which open science practices you followed in your research. For example, you can share whether you shared data and analysis scripts, or made study materials publicly available.
As an example, we wrote the following in one of our papers:
By including such a statement, you provide readers and reviewers with clarity about the rigor of your process and normalize transparency in our field. When others see these statements appear more frequently, they too become motivated to adopt them. Even if you cannot make everything fully available (due to confidentiality or ethical constraints), articulating your choices adds value.
3. Use the Open Science Checklist in the Review Process
We originally designed the transparency and openness checklist for authors, but quickly discovered that it works just as well for reviewers.
When reviewing manuscripts, the checklist provides a simple way to evaluate whether a paper has been reported in a transparent manner. Are the sampling methods clearly described? Are materials accessible? Are analyses explained in detail? Instead of leaving transparency as an implicit criterion, the checklist makes it explicit.
The transparency checklist is a helpful guide, and leaves sufficient room for flexibility. What matters depends on your research goals, design, and context.
We ourselves have begun using the checklist in reviews and noticed that it not only improves the quality of feedback but also makes expectations clearer for authors. It made our lives a bit easier and more efficient. What’s not to like?!
4. Facilitate Workshops on Open Science
Finally, we call on those pursuing open science, or aiming to integrate it into their research groups, to start facilitating workshops on the topic.
We were happy to hear that some service researchers already used our paper in workshops with PhD students and faculty members. These workshops can revolve around the questionable research practices (QRPs) that we listed in our paper. For example, QRPs such as selective reporting, “p-hacking,” or HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known) may not always be intentional but can nonetheless undermine the credibility of research.
In the workshops, participants can be invited to reflect on one QRP they have encountered—either in their own work, in the literature, or during peer review. Together, they can discuss how open science practices (e.g., preregistration, sharing materials, providing open data) could help address these challenges.
According to the researchers who spoke with us, these sessions were eye-opening. PhD students in particular value the chance to think about transparency and openness early in their careers, while faculty members appreciate the structured conversation about how to integrate open science into research and supervision.
Looking Ahead
Open science can sometimes feel abstract or overwhelming, but the examples above show that it doesn’t have to be. By taking small steps adding transparency statements to papers, hosting workshops, and using a checklist in the review process, each of us can contribute to making service research more open and trustworthy.
Small practices like these accumulate. Over time, they can reshape the norms of our community, which can help us move from a culture where transparency is optional to one where it is simply expected. Ultimately, that benefits everyone: researchers, practitioners, and the public who rely on our findings.
About the authors
Yves Van Vaerenbergh
Professor of Marketing at KU Leuven, Belgium,
Associate Editor at Journal of Service Research
Simon Hazée
Associate Professor of Marketing at UC Louvain, Belgium
Thijs Zwienenberg
Assistant Professor of Innovation Management at TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands
