Furthering Open Science in Behavior Analysis: An Introduction and Tutorial for Using GitHub in Research

Open and transparent practices in scholarly research are increasingly encouraged by academic journals and funding agencies. Various elements of behavior analytic research are communicated transparently, though it is not common practice to archive study materials to support future replications. This tutorial presents a review of the Transparent and Open Practices guidelines provided by the Open Science Foundation and provides instructions on how behavior analysts can use GitHub transparency in research across multiple levels. GitHub is presented as a service that can be used to publicly archive various elements of research and is uniquely suited to research that is technical, data driven, and collaborative. The GitHub platform is reviewed, and the steps necessary to create an account, initialize repositories, archive study files, and synchronize changes to remote repositories are described in several examples. Implications of increased calls for transparency and modern statistical methods are discussed with regard to behavior analysis, and archiving platforms such as GitHub are reviewed as one means of supporting transparent research.