Introduction

Psychological science is at a crossroads. Practices once deemed rigorous now appear to lead to non-replicable findings. The ensuing “credibility crisis” (Vazire, 2018) has led to a period of intense scrutiny, mostly among North American and European scientists, of problems in science and how to fix those problems. These initiatives aim to increase the accessibility of science, provide free digital and intellectual infrastructure to support rigorous science, develop practices that lead to credible evidence, and make science more collaborative. Despite the ferment inspired by the credibility crisis, the innovations inspired by this crisis have spread unevenly, especially in lower-resource countries where research capacity is relatively low. Nor have activists in the credibility crisis grappled substantially with problems that affect the credibility of psychological research, but not via poor replicability, such as the overreliance on convenience samples (Arnett, 2009; Henrich et al., 2010; Tiokhin et al., 2019) and the limited applicability of psychology to applied problems (Premachandra & Lewis, 2022).

Alongside this transition in psychology, African science is at a crossroads of its own. In the wake of the devastation wrought by colonialism, African nations have struggled to build the infrastructure and institutions necessary to support a happier, healthier, and more educated population. International organizations such as the UN also increasingly recognize African development as a broadly important goal; with 17% of the world’s population that should increase to 42% by century’s end (Roser et al., 2013), the world cannot realize important trans-national goals, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals), without engaging Africa. Research and post-secondary education can assist with this development through conducting robust research to help with evidence-based policy, building human capital, and assisting with technological catch-up (Atickem et al., 2019; Bloom et al., 2014).

Yet acquiring higher education and conducting research in Africa have lagged due to problems that include low funding, inadequate infrastructure, and political instability (Kumwenda et al., 2017; Nabyonga-Orem et al., 2020; Nsamenang, 2007; Ojiji, 2015). These education and research challenges are reflected in the slow development and poor impact of psychology, a research field that Cameroonian psychologist Bame Nsamenang (2007) described as “nascent” in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see Ibrahim, 2011, for similar arguments about the Arab world). While psychology is not strong in Africa, neighboring disciplines such as public health, development economics are gaining traction, especially applied behavioral science (Hallsworth, 2023). For instance, WHO organized a regional workshop in Eastern Africa adopting a Training of Trainers model to build participants’ capacity in theories, methods, approaches and evidence in behavioral insights (World Health Organization, 2022).

Development communities, scientific research institutions, and research psychologists globally, especially those in Africa, have the huge challenge of educating and conducting research to inform policies and provide more psychological services to the African people. We believe that there is synergy between the credibility revolution in psychology and this goal. This synergy occurs because of the credibility revolution’s emphasis on building free, accessible, and credible processes and tools to improve all parts of the research process (see Korbmacher et al., 2023 for further discussion). These processes and tools have the potential to accelerate the development of the human capital and infrastructure necessary to build stronger, more vibrant research communities throughout the continent (Mwangi et al., 2021; Onie, 2020; UNESCO, 2021).

If the credibility revolution’s newly-developed processes and credibility-enhancing tools are applied to concrete problems that accelerate human development, psychology could even reach a goal it has long aspired to, namely using its research to directly assist in solving big social problems such as corruption and fraud, social and economic inequalities, and ethnic conflicts. Psychology also stands to benefit from stronger psychology research communities in Africa; not only because these stronger communities could lead the research initiatives that help make psychological findings more generalizable to Africans, but also because such communities could push psychology to study issues currently outside its mainstream.

We attempt to build bridges between the credibility revolution and the movement to increase human development in Africa. This piece thus serves dual audiences. For readers more familiar with the credibility revolution, it describes the current state of African psychology research and how decision-makers in these world regions can facilitate the spread of open science practices in Africa. For readers more familiar with African psychology, it provides an overview of the credibility revolution and how the new open science innovations that developed in response to the credibility crisis can support credible and accessible research.

The research landscape in Africa

Africa is an enormously diverse continent, home to 1.3 billion people from speaking over 1000 languages across 54 countries. The amount of ethnic diversity in Africa is also high: in sub-Saharan Africa (the region that excludes Africa’s North coast), there are about 35% more ethnic groups per country than any other world region (Fearon, 2003, Table 1). Finally, African nations are each subject to their own unique political circumstances, which deeply impact government support for research and higher education. These factors complicate any attempt to clearly summarize Africa’s research landscape.

What does unite the African continent is a shared history of subjugation to colonizing powers. Several decades of colonial regimes and economic resource exploitation by colonizing powers (Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2020) left a legacy of political and economic instability that has obstructed the development of strong academic research institutions (Nsamenang, 2007). In the post-colonial period of the 1960s, the United Nations made a concerted push for the newly-independent African nations to establish systems of secondary and tertiary education. In the 1970s, these priorities shifted to universal primary education, with tertiary education being largely neglected (Bloom et al., 2014).

University-housed research communities in most regions of Africa suffered (Bloom et al., 2014), stymied by high workloads, poor IT infrastructure and an unstable power supply, burdensome administrative requirements, inadequate funding, and corruption (Atickem et al., 2019; Nsamenang, 2007; Ojiji, 2015) that limits what is achievable for researchers and research institutions in Africa (Rahal et al., 2023). Particularly telling are those of psychology and behavioral science, which are relatively young, poorly funded, and emphasize more on directly contributing to economic development rather than research scholarship (see Mughogho et al., 2023; Kenmoe, 2022 for context).

Today, the political situations in most African countries have stabilized and most economies are growing, sometimes quite rapidly (Young, 2012). Higher education is following suit: enrolment in tertiary education in Africa grew by 170% between 1999 and 2002 (ICEF Monitor, 2015). In Malawi for example, there are efforts to improve higher education enrolment (Sharra, 2023). Some international efforts are also attempting to fund and lead policy-informed multidisciplinary research and capacity-building programs to improve the scholarly ecosystem across Africa to meet human needs. To mention a few, the World Bank’s Zanzibar Improving Quality of Basic Education Project (https://projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/project-detail/P178157) aims “to improve teaching competencies and learning outcomes and reduce the gender gap in transition rates within basic education in Tanzania.” In another example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/places/africa) has a global education program, in which they engage with a variety of partners, including local and sub-national governments, to build capacity in the education sector. In addition to these large, well-funded organizations, smaller organizations are also attempting to build capacity in Africa’s scholarly ecosystem. For example, the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA; https://cega.berkeley.edu/), a global network of researchers, has a “Global Networks” program aimed at supporting the scholarly ecosystem in low- and middle-income countries, especially those in Africa.

Despite this growth and efforts, an enormous gap in research capacity persists (Atickem et al., 2019; Musau, 2017). To understand the scale of this gap, consider that higher economic output reflects, in part, an expansion in the available goods and services available to the average person. The average GDP per capita in the United States was $54,225, about 15 times the value of $3,467 for sub-Saharan Africa (Roser, 2013). To make this difference concrete, our US-based readers might imagine that you have a pool of $2,000 for a particular research project but everything about that research – from participant recruitment costs, to data analysis software, to publishing charges, to fees for review by Institutional Review Boards – costs 15 times what you currently pay for it. Moreover, due to poor institutional resources, the $2,000 might need to come out of your own personal funds, where it must compete with the money needed to cover your basic living expenses (Atickem et al., 2019).

In this context, it is no wonder that discussions of “building research capacity” in Africa often prioritize research areas such as psychology and behavioral science that can directly resolve concrete problems for Africans, such as maternal health, poverty, and infectious diseases (Nordling, 2018; The World Bank Group & Elsevier, 2014). Small wonder, as well, that African researchers tend to prioritize and study applied rather than basic research (Hountondji, 1990). Psychology may need to demonstrate its direct applicability to African human development problems and to maximize the benefits of the scholarly ecosystem on the continent if it wishes to attract the attention of talented prospective African researchers and funders respectively.

The credibility revolution in North America and Europe

In  2011, a well-regarded social psychologist, Daryl Bem, published an unusual article in the world’s top social psychology journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This article was unusual because of its central claim: that undergraduate students who he had recruited from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA could be affected by events that hadn’t yet occurred (Bem, 2011). In other words, these undergraduates could sense future events. What’s more, Bem applied experimental design and statistical methods that met or exceeded social psychology’s standards of rigor at that time. This left one of two possible explanations: either everything we knew about physics was wrong or those methods were not as rigorous as they seemed (see Francis, 2012; Schimmack, 2012; Shrout & Rodgers, 2018).

This realization spurred a trend of large replication studies designed to examine the credibility of past findings. These replication studies took a protocol that had been previously used to claim a particular discovery, then recruited new participants with that protocol – often a much greater number than the original paper achieved. The replicators were able to achieve these large sample sizes by forming very large collaborations across many labs, thereby allowing them to investigate a past finding with much greater precision than was feasible for any lab on its own (Forscher et al., 2022). The findings of these collaborative replication studies were worrying; across 77 large replication studies, 43 reported statistically significant results in the same direction as the original, with effect sizes that were only 53% as large as the original (Nosek et al., 2021). Although there is no consensus about what the replication rate of psychological research ought to be, it is at least clear that current methods and practices led to a literature that substantially overstated the evidence behind many findings (Spellman, 2015; Vazire, 2017). The task, then, was to identify problems that undermine research credibility and identify practices to fix those problems.

The result was an explosion of research on practices to improve the credibility of psychology research. Most of these practices focus on bringing something into the open that was previously hard to access. For this reason, we call them “open science practices”, though this broad label obscures major differences in goals and motivations (Fecher & Friesike, 2014). We believe these practices have the potential to improve many aspects of psychological research. However, much of the focus of the credibility revolution has been on addressing the problem that kicked off the revolution, namely poor replicability of findings. For this reason, the innovations of the credibility revolution have yet to be fully applied to problems outside replicability. Most replication studies, for example, focus on the replication of low-cost studies that can be completed online with convenience samples drawn from college classrooms or platforms like mTurk (Gervais, 2021). This feature means that, even if the credibility of the evidence improves as a result of the new replication studies, the findings still have limited applicability to large swathes of humanity and their problems.

How open science practices can contribute to human development

Although the open science practices used in psychology’s credibility revolution have largely been applied to improve research credibility via better replicability, they can in principle be applied to address a broad range of problems in a broad range of topics. Herein lies the potential for cross-fertilization between the US and Europe’s “credibility revolution” and efforts to expand human development in Africa. We discuss some of the relevant tools that can help improve African research accessibility, evidence quality, and infrastructures. By no means are the tools mentioned exhaustive as credibility revolutionists continue to advance these tools.

This potential exists because, although the open science practices are both domain-general and varied, they all aim to open many different aspects of the research process. For the purposes of this article, we separate the practices into four groups according to the goal they aim to achieve. Initiatives to increase research accessibility allow researchers to freely share and access written research articles. Initiatives to provide infrastructure aim to provide free resources to make the research process easier. Initiatives to improve credibility aim to improve the quality of research evidence. Finally, community initiatives aim to build communities to accomplish specific, often open-science-related goals.

The accessibility initiatives will perhaps be most familiar to an African audience. These initiatives note that, after research is published as an article in a scientific journal, the publisher takes the article copyright and locks the article behind a paywall. From the perspective of promoting research credibility, these paywalls are a problem because they restrict access to information that is needed to inspect evidence credibility. However, paywalls are also a problem from an equity perspective because they restrict the access of the very people who might most benefit from scientific knowledge and innovation.

Most Africans will be familiar with one solution to this problem (Huang et al., 2020): a journal business model that allows the article to be accessed for free, as long as the submitting author pays an “article processing fee” to the journal. Under these open access business models, the journal keeps the article copyright but the journal imposes an additional fee on article submitters. Unfortunately, open access business models are not ideal for article authors at low-resource institutions. This is because the business model shifts the costs of maintaining digital versions of an article onto authors, who may not be able to pay this fee if they are at an institution with low financial resources. Some open access journals can even be “predatory” in the sense that they provide publications to researchers in exchange for a fee while doing little to ensure that their published papers have scientific merit (Mouton & Valentine, 2017; Xia et al., 2015). Not all open access journals are predatory in this sense; journals are “predatory” only if they are strictly money-making enterprises that provide little to no quality control, with the result that they allow the publication of pseudo-scientific or nonsense articles because the authors of these articles nevertheless paid a publication fee.

Beyond open access journals, the credibility revolution has popularized some additional initiatives that are not journal-focused. Many of these initiatives focus on increasing the accessibility of a version of the article where authors keep the copyright: the version just after article acceptance, but before the journal does any formatting or copy-editing of the accepted article, often called the preprint (for a comprehensive guide, see Moshontz et al., 2021). Authors have the right to share this version of the article. Thus, a variety of websites have sprung up to host this version of the article, such as PsyArXiv and AfricArXiv. These websites also assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to the articles they host, which allow the preprints to be indexed by databases, such as the database maintained by Google Scholar. Journals often have special policies that govern how they handle preprints; authors should consult those policies before they post preprints to these servers. The Sherpa database provides a searchable database of those policies (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/).

One final accessibility initiative deserves mention. The article database Sci-Hub provides access to the published versions of articles (post copy-editing and journal formatting) entirely for free. However, the use of Sci-Hub is illegal in most countries. Thus, we cannot recommend the use of this service – particularly for African researchers, whose libraries may not be able to afford the expensive fees that most journals charge.

The infrastructure initiatives aim to make a certain aspect of the research process easier by providing free infrastructure to enhance the research process. For example, the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io) is a general-purpose website created and maintained by the Center for Open Science that allows researchers to archive and post their research materials, data, analysis scripts, and other research artefacts. At any time, a researcher may choose to make these materials public, in which case they may be accessed by others for free. This can benefit both researchers who access the open materials, because they can re-use the materials and can help improve processes and workflow for their own research, and the researcher who shares their materials, because their reputation and credibility are enhanced (Ebersole et al., 2016). In addition to the general-purpose Open Science Framework, there are many specialty initiatives that focus on allowing the free sharing of one type of research product, such as research code (Github; https://github.com/) or research data (Dataverse; https://dataverse.org/).

This category also includes many free and open source computing languages designed to facilitate research computing. This includes the PsychoPy language, a language to facilitate the programming of psychology experiments (e.g., reaction to expressions, reaction time), and R, a language to facilitate the analysis of research data. These computing languages often take time to learn, but there is no financial cost to using them. In addition, a great deal of tutorial materials exist for learning these languages. For a tutorial for PsychoPy, see https://www.psychopy.org/coder/tutorial1.html; for a tutorial for R, download the free R-based programming environment, RStudio, and see https://r4ds.had.co.nz/.

The credibility initiatives consist of workflows and policy frameworks that help ensure research findings are transparent and credible. The most prominent of these are Registered Reports, a framework for a research article format in which authors submit research protocols that are peer reviewed before any data collection occurs. If the protocol is deemed sufficiently rigorous during the peer review process, it gains “in principle acceptance”: as long as the researchers follow the protocol during the collection and analysis of data, the paper is accepted, regardless of how the data turn out. This policy framework helps protect against the selective publication of positive results, a practice that is prevalent in the social sciences and that undermines the credibility of entire research fields (Scheel et al., 2020). Many journals already support the Registered Report format, and their number continues to grow; for a list, see https://cos.io/rr.

A second type of credibility initiative is websites for pre-registering a study protocol. Essentially, a researcher prepares the first part of a Registered Report and archives the protocol on one of these websites prior to running the study. This pre-written protocol allows outside researchers to evaluate the match between the protocol and the final article and check whether deviations from protocol are justified. Under a mode of science that prioritizes falsifying pre-specified predictions, preregistration increases the credibility of the final evidence (Kaplan & Irvin, 2015; Lakens, 2019). Preregistration does not necessarily involve any formal peer review of the written protocols and is not tied to any specific journal. Thus, unlike a Registered Report, a researcher who preregisters one of their studies is not limited in their choice of journals.

Finally, the community initiatives aim to build communities to accomplish specific goals. A few of these initiatives are aimed at increasing social connections between members. One of these is ReproducibiliTea, a platform for setting up journal clubs at your own institution. However, some of these networks are more focused on completing very large, often international, collaborative projects. These “big team science” initiatives (Forscher et al., 2022) play a central role in “scaling up” the amount of resources that are invested into replication studies so that claims can be carefully examined. However, big team science can also deploy large numbers of people on a new study of central importance. For example, one prominent big team science organization, the Psychological Science Accelerator, initiated a project to investigate the psychological aspects of COVID-19 (Buchanan et al, 2023). By pooling resources across the large collective, this project was able to recruit over 47,000 participants from 110 countries, using materials in 44 languages for three primary research studies. Big team science organizations also exist for infancy research (the ManyBabies initiative; Byers-Heinlein et al., 2020) and for teaching undergraduates the research process via replication studies (the Collaborative Replication and Education Project or CREP (Wagge, Baciu, et al., 2019; Wagge, Brandt, et al., 2019). Readers will find a variety of materials useful for integrating the CREP model of replication research into undergraduate classes, including links to tutorial videos subtitled in a variety of African languages, at https://osf.io/4v5yg/. Also, the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) initiative provides teaching materials (available at https://osf.io/th254/) to help advance and educate researchers/students on research transparency, replicability, openness, and reproducibility.

As of yet, big team science organizations do not have a strong presence of African researchers. For example, as of 2022, only about 2.07% of the membership of the Psychological Science Accelerator was from Africa (Kijilian et al., 2022). We believe this lack of African members represents both a gap and an opportunity: a gap because these organizations need a stronger African presence if they are to be truly international. An opportunity for example offered by the Advancing Big-team Reproducible Science through Increased Representation (ABRIR) to build big-team science in the Global South via regional hubs (https://abrirpsy.org/about/abrir-hubs/) because African researchers who join these organizations can become integrated into broad networks dedicated to impactful research.

Broadening the open science tent in Africa

Even though we believe open science practices can facilitate the development of the capacity to conduct research in Africa, they are not themselves sufficient due to lingering barriers to African research capacity. Fully addressing these barriers will require concerted effort on multiple fronts from the many stakeholders, African and non-African, that comprise the scientific ecosystem. Here we describe some of these steps these stakeholders can take to facilitate and enhance the impact of the open science practices from the previous section. Our suggested steps fall into four categories: resources, training, research tools, and ethics (see Table 2).

 Note. U = Universities; S = Scientific Societies; F = Funders; J = Journals; R = Researchers.

The first category of barriers, a lack of financial and non-financial resources, is the primary barrier to additional research infrastructure that is mitigated by the use of open science practices. This is because open science practices tend to emphasize the use of free or open-source tools to make up for the lack of pre-existing infrastructure. Yet these open science practices cannot by themselves compensate for the resource restrictions that many African scientists face. For example, many African scientists lack reliable internet, which is a prerequisite for using most of the open science resources we previously described; thus, internet grants can make the use of free open science tools more feasible. In the era of online conferences, these grants can also greatly facilitate the participation of African scientists in the global academic commons. Restricted research funding means that, for many African scientists, even small grants can be instrumental for completing research projects – as long as these grants are not saddled with burdensome accounting restrictions that make the money too much of a hassle to be worth using. Although we have emphasized the use of preprint servers rather than open access journals, those journals that do use an open access model can address resource-related barriers by providing automatic waivers (with few bureaucratic barriers) of article processing charges to researchers from low-income countries (Nabyonga-Orem et al., 2020). Finally, resources should go to existing initiatives that are on the continent, which are numerous but often lack resources. These initiatives include among others, the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa; https://www.tcc-africa.org/) that advocates for Global North-South higher level engagement on open science policy, builds open infrastructure for data access and sharing, and provides effective communication skills to improve scholarly output and visibility. LIBSENSE (https://libsense.ren.africa/en/) is a collaborative initiative of African research and education networks led by the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN, https://wacren.net/en/), and regional African research and education networks (ASREN, https://asrenorg.net/ ; UbuntuNet Alliance, https://ubuntunet.net/) to advance open science and open access practices in Africa. African Reproducibility Network (The AREN team, 2023; https://africanrn.org/) is a “continent-wide reproducibility network to improve and advocate for open science practices and research reproducibility across Africa.”

Barriers related to training refer to the fact that, even though open science practices often rely on freely-accessible infrastructure, using this infrastructure requires specialist training. At first, some of this training may need to come from North American and European sources due to the better-developed open science cultures and infrastructures in these world regions. However, we believe training activities should emphasize establishing grassroots reservoirs of knowledge and skills in Africa so that, eventually, most training comes from local rather than foreign sources. Thus, in addition to activities such as African-focused workshops, training activities should emphasize train-the-trainer programs and Africa-based “open science labs” that serve as training centers for open science practices. Local African educational institutions should incorporate open science content in research methods courses for more enduring benefits and improvements of these practices. We should also encourage and learn from existing initiatives to advance capacity in open science practices and tools in Africa such as Eider Africa (https://eiderafricaltd.org/), an organization that trains African  researchers via mentorship initiatives.

A third category of barriers are those related to research tools that may not be adapted for African realities. For example, most research tools are designed and implemented in English. Although many people in African countries speak English, Africa is highly multi-lingual. Translating these research tools to other languages using the services of professional translators or at a minimum (because translation software could be language-limited or inaccurate), automatic translation software such as that provided by DeepL or Google Translate, is therefore one way to ensure that more Africans are able to use these research tools. A more sustainable approach to producing African-friendly research tools is to facilitate cooperation between the developers and local users to factor in African dynamics when creating these tools.

However, the research tool barriers are not merely linguistic. Existing measures of psychological processes may not even be applicable in a specific African culture. Such measures may need extensive cultural adaptation, and the target psychological process may not even exist at all. Facilitating such time-consuming measurement work will also require a comprehensive database of psychological measures, their adaptations, and evidence about their validity in different cultures. In addition, some psychological processes may exist in Africa that have no clear equivalents in North America or Europe. Hence co-designing measures rather than validating measures designed in one population for another could produce more generalizable measures. Descriptive, qualitative, and exploratory approaches that actively involve African researchers at all stages are necessary to identify and understand these processes in their original context. This descriptive work contrasts with approaches that take North American and European as a baseline against which African psychology is compared.

Even more radically, psychology as it is currently constituted may simply study topics that are uninteresting or irrelevant to stakeholders in Africa. To make the case that psychology research is worth the investment of Africa’s limited education funds, psychology may need to put a more central focus on studying problems directly relevant to Africa’s ongoing concerns (Lakati & Masibo, 2023). This may mean focusing on solving practical problems, such as those related to maternal and mental health issues, road accidents, and the transmission of infectious disease.

Trans-national benchmarks such as the UNESCO’s Operational Strategy for Priority Africa 2022-2029 (UNESCO, 2023) which aligns with our advocacy for enhancing open science practices and credibility enhancing-tools for research and development in Africa may provide a useful guide for the sorts of topics that can directly assist with African development. This UNESCO strategy focuses on African-driven strategy intervention to strengthen higher education, improve digital skills and competencies and build capacity to increase research, innovation and technology production via effective networking, open science and best research practices. There are country-level African priorities, such as Kenya’s reproductive health research priority 2022-2027 (Hearty, 2022), the South African health department’s National Health Research Strategy: Research Priorities for South Africa 2021-2024 (https://www.health.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/NATIONAL-HEALTH-RESEARCH-STRATEGY-2021-2024.pdf), and the national research priorities from the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (https://www.costech.or.tz/ResearchPriorities), that  could be pivotal for attaining research credibility and human development.

The final category of barrier, ethics, refers to ethical pitfalls that can short-circuit the development of robust psychology research communities in Africa. The dominance of North America research cultures and theories of global psychology is well-documented (IJzerman et al., 2021; Thalmayer et al., 2021). The overwhelming influence of Western-developed perspective and approach to explaining an African phenomenon does not only raise questionable applicability to Africans, but also ethical concerns. Some scholars argue that this overshadowing North American influence has hampered the development of indigenous African psychology, and hence there is a need for decolonization of African psychology (Oppong, 2022). Even North-South research partnerships create yet another problem, North-South power imbalances (Dannecker, 2022; Green, 2021; Matenga et al., 2019). These power imbalances create the risk research neo-colonization (Boshoff, 2009), in which African research partners are treated as “data collectors” for a foreign collaborator benefit and are given insufficient credit and funds for their contributions (Van der Veken et al., 2017). In neo-colonial arrangements, the party with the money dominates the research questions or scope of the research with little consideration for African interests and priorities that are needed for local impacts (Dannecker, 2022; Kok et al., 2017) .

Part of what complicates this issue is that, due in part to the highly varying levels of development across countries, different researchers may enter collaborations with wildly different expectations about what constitutes “sufficient” compensation. We believe the adoption of contributorship systems (Holcombe, 2019), in which authors explicitly document fine-grained contributions to research papers in, for example, the article author notes, can at least make visible when research colonization is occurring. As a side benefit, more robust systems of contributorship could also illuminate the problem of guest authorship by powerful researchers. Explicit collaboration agreements that lay out expected project contributions and systems of compensation ahead of time can also help align the expectations of all parties in a collaboration, thereby mitigating the risk that one party feels exploited (see Forscher et al., 2023).

A second ethical pitfall relates to an issue we mentioned previously, the existence of predatory journals that take advantage of pressures to hit publication metrics by offering publications in exchange for a fee, with little regard for the quality of the finished research. We believe these pressures to publish can be redirected into more productive avenues by leveraging the preprint servers that have developed as part of the credibility revolution’s accessibility initiatives. The preprint servers provide a place to deposit papers; one can turn these preprints into publications by developing so-called “overlay journals” that peer review and curate, at no charge, high-quality papers that fit a particular theme on a preprint server (Brown, 2010; Smith, 2000). Because overlay journals rely primarily on the IT infrastructure used to create a preprint server, their costs tend to be lower than the costs of a traditional journal. The costs to support these overlay journals should therefore be within reach of existing scientific societies. The existence of these journals should provide competitive alternatives to African authors wishing to publish their research.

A third pitfall relates to the existence of institutionalized practices that exploit African researchers, such as the misappropriation of research funds (Ojiji, 2015) or guest authorship by researchers in positions of power (Rohwer et al., 2017). These practices are certainly not restricted to Africa, but the political instability in the wake of de-colonization has entrenched such practices in some African countries (Kirya, 2019; Lawal, 2007). Such entrenched practices may require the establishment of institutional research integrity offices such as African Research Integrity Network (https://africarinetwork.wixsite.com/website) that are led by Africans but should be supported, morally and financially, by North American and European researchers. These African research integrity offices should be non-profit, independent, and internationally affiliated organizations with a mission to improve research credibility, and research fund management and performance.

Conclusion

North American and European psychology and African science are both at pivotal moments where they have the potential to make lasting improvements. This potential exists because of the credibility revolution on the one hand and the push for human development on the other. We believe these two movements can benefit each other. The credibility revolution can benefit through engaging researchers of different perspectives to solve problems that concern a greater slice of humanity. African science can benefit from open science practices that use open infrastructure and enhance research credibility. We hope both these movements take advantage of this crossroads to change themselves for the better.

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