tl;dr: Open science practices themselves don't make a study interesting. They are essential prerequisites whose absence can undermine a study's value.
There's a tension in discussions of open science, one that is also mirrored in my own research. What I really care about are the big questions of cognitive science: what makes people smart? how does language emerge? how do children develop? But in practice I spend quite a bit of my time doing meta-research on reproducibility and replicability. I often hear critics of open science – focusing on replication, but also other practices – objecting that open science advocates are making science more boring and decreasing the focus on theoretical progress (e.g., Locke, Strobe & Strack). The thing is, I don't completely disagree. Open science is not inherently interesting.
Sometimes someone will tell me about a study and start the description by saying that it's pre-registered, with open materials and data. My initial response is "ho hum." I don't really care if a study is preregistered – unless I care about the study itself and suspect p-hacking. Then the only thing that can rescue the study is preregistration. Otherwise, I don't care about the study any more; I'm just frustrated by the wasted opportunity.
So here's the thing: Although being open can't make your study interesting, the failure to pursue open science practices can undermine the value of a study. This post is an attempt to justify this idea by giving an informal Bayesian analysis of what makes a study interesting and why transparency and openness is then the key to maximizing study value.
