• Dr Charlotte Pennington’s book A Student's Guide to Open Science: Using the Replication Crisis to Reform Psychology was published in 2023
• It explains how ‘open science’ practices can help solve challenges of replication and reproducibility in research
• The British Psychological Society’s award recognises the book’s significant impact on the learning and teaching of psychology

A book written by Aston University psychologist Dr Charlotte Pennington, A Student's Guide to Open Science: Using the Replication Crisis to Reform Psychology, has won the 2024 British Psychological Society (BPS) Textbook Award.

The Textbook Award is given to “an instructional text or manual on one area of psychological knowledge or on psychology more generally for the specific purpose of contributing to a course of psychological study that has made a significant impact on the learning and teaching of psychology.”

Dr Pennington wrote A Student's Guide to Open Science, published in 2023, with the aim of providing students and researchers with a comprehensive how-to guide to implementing open science practices to enhance research transparency.

In recent years, psychology has found itself amid a so-called ‘replication crisis’, with researchers struggling to reproduce results from several classic studies. Open science is a movement aimed at making scientific research, data, and dissemination accessible to all, and includes a range of practices that aim to make research papers and their underlying materials and data freely available. Dr Pennington not only explains these open science practices, but also teaches students how to implement them in their research training.

The book received rave reviews on publication, with expert reviewers praising it as “important”, “essential” and “timely”, and saying that it “should be on the reading list for all university science degrees and on all library bookshelves”.

Dr Pennington, a senior lecturer in Aston University School of Psychology, said:

“This award not only represents a ‘win’ for me but, more importantly, a ‘win’ for open science.

“Educators have adopted this book as essential reading for their undergraduate and postgraduate provision, and it’s great to see the topic of open science featuring more heavily in the higher education curriculum. It’s also fantastic to see that open science now features in the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education or QAA, ,benchmark statement and the revised BPS accreditation standards for our discipline, so I’m excited to see how this develops.

“Students have emailed me to say that the book’s content has provided the ‘missing pieces’ to what they are taught and has unearthed the ‘hidden curriculum’ around research, such as peer review and the role of journals. Being told that book has ’inspired students – who represent the grassroots of our discipline – makes me very optimistic about psychology’s future.”

Richard Stephens, deputy chair of the BPS Research Board, said:

“I want to congratulate this year's winners on their exceptional books. Writing and publishing a book is no easy feat and our awards recognise and celebrate the winning authors' achievements.

“From academic texts for budding psychologists to books aimed at making psychological concepts accessible for the general public, this year's winners showcase the variety and depth that exists in psychology publishing.”