Transforming Institutional Culture with PIE CHART: Policies, Infrastructure, and Education to CHAmpion Rigor and Transparency

How to change institutional culture to favor rigor and transparency in neurosciences is a wicked problem based upon local and national norms and behaviors that tend to favor quantity over quality, novelty over replication, and journal prestige over article quality. The long-term goal of this project is to develop sustainable models for changing scientific culture within institutions that conduct neurosciences research. The objective of this project is to use the Center for Open Science’s Strategy for Culture Change framework to develop a series of testable interventions on two scales at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, departmental and institutional, that can be used by other departments and institutions to influence culture to support rigorous, transparent neurosciences and health sciences research. The central hypothesis is that interventions designed to make rigorous and transparent research possible, easy, normative, rewarding, and required will spur a shift to valuing and engaging in transparent, rigorous practices as a default behavior over time. The rationale behind this proposal is that current policies, infrastructure, and education, both within the Department of Neurosciences and the campus as a whole, do not support, incentivize, or reward rigor and transparency in research. Changing policies and incentives, developing and institutionalizing new infrastructure supports, and creating education for researchers at all career levels on both departmental and institutional levels is likely to have greater success than implementing only top-down or bottom-up changes. The project has three specific aims: 1) Incentivize rigorous and transparent neuroscience research through changes to departmental and institutional policies; 2) Develop sustainable infrastructure to improve the rigor and transparency of Department of Neurosciences and Center for Brain Recovery and Repair’s research by adding personnel and technologies to support data curation/sharing, statistical design/analysis, and collaboration; and 3) Develop a suite of educational offerings designed to build skills, knowledge, and awareness for rigorous, transparent neuroscience across all levels of experience, from graduate students to established research faculty. We will work towards these aims through an innovative partnership between the Department of Neurosciences and the Health Sciences Library & Informatics Center in order to combine expertise and develop both local and institution-wide interventions. The proposed project is significant because it has the potential to scale within the University and to serve as a model for other institutions and neurosciences research departments nationally. In addition to outcomes that will demonstrate the adoption of transparent, rigorous research practices in the Department and University, it will provide openly available educational resources and policy templates for re-use and adaptation and shareable lessons for other departments, institutions, and units that wish to change their own culture to emphasize the importance of rigorous, transparent neurosciences and health sciences research. Project Number: 1RC2NS138557-01A1 | Fiscal Year: 2025 | NIH Institute/Center: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) | Principal Investigator: Melissa Rethlefsen | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO HEALTH SCIS CTR, ALBUQUERQUE, NM | Award Amount: $873,290 | Activity Code: RC2 | Study Section: Special Emphasis Panel[ZNS1 SRB-D (32)] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11219003