Open Research across Disciplines

How the principles of open research can be applied to your discipline

Criminology

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Case Studies

Pending

Examples of open research practices

Open Data: Matthew Ashby has been involved in multiple projects over the years aimed at facilitating and enabling open access to crime data for researchers, students, and the public. The Crime Open Database (CODE) compiles crime data recorded in 21 out of the 50 largest cities in the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Austin, making it openly available through the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/zyaqn/). In 2023, he also launched ‘crimemappingdata’, an R package containing multiple datasets for analysing geographic variations in crime (see https://pkgs.lesscrime.info/crimemappingdata), including crime data recorded in Global South countries such as Mexico, Czechia, Colombia, or Malaysia.

 Open Methods: Stijn Ruiter, Samuel Langton, Tim Verlaan, and other researchers at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) utilise preregistrations in their daily research activities. A preregistration document outlines your research plan in advance of conducting the study itself (See UKRN primer on pre-registration). Preregistration documents have been used by the NSCR team for confirmatory hypothesis testing (e.g., https://osf.io/ex7ga) but also scoping reviews (e.g., https://osf.io/8qack) and exploratory descriptive studies (https://osf.io/vhsq5).

 Open Methods: In 2019, Iain Brennan and Jacki Tapley set out to estimate the effect of police domestic abuse awareness training on arrests for coercive and controlling behaviour. Prior to collecting data, the team pre-registered their hypotheses on OSF (https://osf.io/vx789/) along with power simulations, their proposed data collection methods and their statistical analysis plan. The data was collected via Freedom of Information requests to all police forces in England and Wales, and made available on the project’s OSF site. The code underlying the subsequent analysis was also added to the OSF site. The study manuscript, including a detailed description of the deviation from the original statistical analysis plan was published on SocArxiv (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/d428k) and later published in Policing & Society (https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2020.1862838).

 Open Outputs: CrimRxiv is the leading global open-access hub in Criminology, promoting the exchange of knowledge among criminological scholars worldwide. Established in 2020, CrimRxiv has played a crucial role in encouraging the publication of postprints, versions of record, working papers, and preprints through its dedicated online repository (https://www.crimrxiv.com/). As the first and only open-access repository exclusively focused on criminology, CrimRxiv is dedicated to improving research transparency and accountability, thereby aiding evidence-based decision-making across government, nonprofit, and industry sectors. CrimRxiv aims to foster a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive research environment in criminology. CrimRxiv was first launched by Prof Scott Jacques at Georgia State University, and has recently found its new home at The University of Manchester. 

Resources

General Resources

Framing the problem:

Open Methods

R packages to analyse crime data:

How-to guides published by the European Network for Open Criminology:

 Open Data

Open Outputs

Journals offering registered reports:

Framing the problem:

Open Education

Open training materials for quantitative crime data analysis:

These pages are adapted and extended from: Farran, E. K., Silverstein, P., Ameen, A. A., Misheva, I., & Gilmore, C. (2020, December 15). Open Research: Examples of good practice, and resources across disciplines  (2026 edition). https://osf.io/preprints/osf/3r8hb_v2