We issue a call for the design and conduct of experimental trials to test the effects of researchers’ adoption of Open Science (OS) research practices. OS emerged to address lapses in the transparency, quality, integrity, and reproducibility of research by proposing that investigators institute practices, such as preregistering study hypotheses, procedures, and statistical analyses, before launching their research. These practices have been greeted with enthusiasm by some parts of the scientific community, but empirical evidence of their effects relies mainly on observational studies; furthermore, questions remain about the time and effort required by these practices and their ultimate benefit to science. To assess the outcomes of OS research practices, we propose they be viewed as behavioral interventions for scientists and tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), to identify potential benefits and (unintended) harms. As this is a call to action rather than an action plan per se, we sketch out four potential trial designs to encourage further deliberation and planning. Experimental tests to document the outcomes of OS practices can provide evidence to optimize how scientists, funders, policymakers, and institutions utilize these strategies to advance scientific practice.

Ecologists, social scientists, and policymakers alike define “resilience” as the properties that allow complex systems to function in the wake of sudden shocks. While proponents treat these properties as empirical qualities that can be engineered into existence, critics have largely treated government-organized attempts to do so as consistent with the dismantling of the welfare state. This article offers an ethnographic account of a conservation policy initiative in northwest British Columbia designed to generate consensus-based quantitative indicators on salmon health. I examine how workshop organizers, emboldened by provocative metaphors of survival and systematicity, mobilize resilience discourse as a platform for social analysis, and urge other researchers to envision how their own work might allow them to transcend institutional attachments altogether. Resilience-based initiatives have wrought profound changes in experts’ everyday lives, in part by encouraging precariously employed researchers to reimagine their relationships to shrinking government institutions. In addition to naming an emergent political logic for legitimating downsizing and other organizational responses to disasters, I argue that resilience discourse provides the experts entrusted with designing these responses with new grammars for imagining the future viability of their own expertise.