Psychometric evaluation of a German version of the Muscularity-Oriented Eating Test (MOET) in men and women.

Open science practices are increasingly gaining traction. While there is no single definition of open science, it is mainly understood as an umbrella term for practices that make research more accessible and more transparent. Common practices include sharing data, materials, or code, the pre‐registration of planned analyses, and making research results available as preprints and open‐access publications (Center for Open Science, ). There are proposals to use open science practices as professional recruitment and promotion criteria in psychology (Schönbrodt et al. ; Gärtner et al. ; Fink‐Lamotte ). However, various aspects of open science are particularly important and should be implemented more specifically in clinical psychology. Despite a relatively long history of pre‐registration of clinical trials, other aspects of open science are less commonly used. For example, data provision on open science platforms is rather the exception than the norm (Tackett et al. ). Both methodological aspects (e.g., small or unstructured datasets or qualitative data) as well as data sensitivity are obstacles to using open science practices in clinical psychology (Walsh et al. ). However, these obstacles make it even more important to implement open science practices so that these sensitive data, which are often only available in small quantities and require high levels of effort to gather, can be optimally used to contribute to a better understanding of mental health (Walsh et al. ). This commentary argues that open science practices are particularly crucial for clinical psychology, where data are often scarce, heterogeneous, and ethically sensitive. We outline the specific opportunities and barriers for adopting open practices in this field. Furthermore, this commentary illustrates to scientists in clinical psychology, at all career stages, how the use of open science practices benefits or may benefit clinical psychological science and practice. This can be, for example, by increasing the robustness and quality of research findings and the cost‐effectiveness of using resources, by stimulating innovation, and eventually by progress in improving evidence‐based treatments across age groups and mental health conditions. Furthermore, we discuss how calls for increased implementation of open science practices in psychology research can be reconciled with some of the challenges, concerns, and conflicts that can arise concerning open science practices in clinical psychology. We hope to inspire other researchers to make greater use of open science practices. While this article aims to convey and discuss a stance on open science practices in clinical psychology, it is not intended to serve as a concrete guide to implementing them. A separate manuscript will be created for this purpose, outlining the step‐by‐step implementation of open science practices in more detail elsewhere (Salazar Kämpf et al. ). Several of the arguments outlined in this article will be familiar to psychology researchers who are well‐versed in open science practices and may not seem novel or specific to clinical psychology. However, the relatively slow uptake of open science practices by many clinical researchers suggests that they believe these general points are somehow not applicable to the clinical field. Hence, while this article does consider some “special cases” more specific to clinical psychology, it also covers some of the broader principles; clinical researchers need to hear that these principles are equally applicable to their work, too, even if their implementation sometimes requires special considerations.