CyberSightings

In the Spotlight

Cyberpsychology is a fascinating field of research. Yet, it requires a lot of financial resources for its advancement. As an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, the implementation of a cyberpsychology study often involves the collaboration of several scientific disciplines outside psychology, such as experts in human–computer interaction, software developers, data scientists, and engineers. Further, an increasing number of cyberpsychology studies consist of clinical trials, which can last several months (or even years) and involve a significant investment of economic resources. On the other side, finding adequate fundings is becoming the most pressing challenge for most cyberpsychologists. This is due to several factors. First, governments' university funding has fallen dramatically in most countries, and the trend for the next years is not encouraging. Second, competition for grants is very high, and it is likely to remain so. A third—and perhaps less obvious—factor is that cyberpsychology research tends to attract less funding than other allied disciplines such as medicine do. Given this situation, what can be done to allow cyberpsychologists to keep furthering their research? A possible strategy is to improve “lateral thinking” and find a way to optimize costs. This can be done, for example, by taking advantage of free, open-source software/service/tools to support the different phases of the research process—design, implementation, collaboration, monitoring, data analysis, reporting, and so on. These open-source tools are not only free, but sometimes even more powerful than existing proprietary software and services are. For example, a fairly comprehensive set of free office productivity tools can be found online. These include word processors, spreadsheets (e.g., the OpenOffice suite; www.openoffice.org/), slide presentations, graphic programs (e.g., Gimp; www.gimp.org/). As far as the implementation of laboratory experiments is concerned, several software platforms are available for programming psychological studies. For example, PsychoPy (www.psychopy.org/) is a user-friendly open-source application that allows the presentation of stimuli and collection of data for a wide range of neuroscience, psychology, and psychophysics experiments. For the analysis of data, possible alternatives to commercial statistical packages include the R language for statistical computing (www.r-project.org/), a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics (coupled with R-Commander or Rstudio for those who are not comfortable with line-command interfaces). And when it is time to write a paper, free tools exist designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation, such as the popular program LaTeX (www.latex-project.org/), which can be used in combination to reference manager software such as JabRef (http://jabref.sourceforge.net/).

Needless to say, the most expensive budget item in a research plan remains personnel costs. However, I think that by having a look at the many free scientific tools, resources, and services that are available, it might be possible to reduce the costs significantly. At the same time, this approach offers the opportunity to support the growth of the open source community in our discipline.

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