Gorilla LogoHome

Gorilla Open Materials

Made for the research community, by the research community.

We are thrilled to launch Gorilla Open Materials, which provides access to materials made for the research community, by the research community.

What is it?

In a nutshell, Open Materials is an open-access repository within Gorilla where you can publish your experiments, tasks and questionnaires. This will enable other users to:

  1. Experience your study protocol
  2. Inspect the configuration settings of your protocol, tasks and questionnaires
  3. Clone your study protocol, tasks and questionnaires for their own research

Gorilla Open Materials is our contribution to Open Science on the Gorilla platform. Researchers across the world will be able to view, inspect and clone the published experiments, tasks and questionnaires of other researchers.

We’re doing this to increase the transparency, accessibility and reproducibility of published research. As the repository grows, we hope it will also allow researchers to build on what has gone before without needing to reinvent the wheel.

How can Gorilla Open Materials help you?

Imagine reading the methods section of a paper.

While accurate, it’s often hard to truly visualize the study from the participants point of view. Minor details of the protocol are sometimes omitted from the description. And sometimes only a subset of the stimuli is shown.

Gorilla Open Materials gives you clarity. You can:

  • Have a go and experience the protocol for yourself
  • Inspect the configuration settings for the study
  • See and download all the stimuli

Imagine reading a paper and thinking “That’s great, but I wonder what would happen if I ran the experiment with this additional manipulation?”

Currently you’d either have to recreate the task yourself or contact the author for copies of their files. Worst case scenario, their PhD student has moved on and some of the files are lost to a hard drive somewhere. Or they used different software from the one at your department and you can’t access it. Or maybe it’s a different version of the same software.

Gorilla Open Materials saves you time. You can:

  • Simply click a link in their paper and try the protocol for yourself
  • Clone their materials into your own project as a starting point for your replication or extension

Remember, it’s free to sign up to Gorilla, and you can collect data locally at no cost to yourself. So, there isn’t the same barrier to entry as with other software.

Imagine setting up a study that needs the best possible tasks for a range of psychological constructs.

Historically, creating a task battery requires gathering materials from many different sources and replicating each of the necessary tasks. But, you can’t be sure that you’ve replicated all the usability elements of the original task. For instance, practice trials or visual design. Additionally, researchers have to make trade-offs between using a task with appropriate measure of reliability and validity, against the practicalities of replicating it in-house or buying it in.

Gorilla Open Materials promotes rigorous and replicable research.

  • Over time, we hope Gorilla Open Materials will become a shared open-access repository where you can find a wide range of both existing and new tasks and questionnaires that can be cloned and modified for your own research.
  • As researchers publish standardised tests with norms and established psychometrics properties in Gorilla Open Materials, the international research community will enjoy access to these tests at no additional cost. Made for the research community, by the research community.

Key Features

Available Now

  • Corresponding Author
  • Description
  • License level
  • How to cite your material
  • References for any source material
  • Screenshots
  • Previewing (without an account)
  • Cloning (with an account)
  • Configuration inspecting (with an account)
  • Privacy Settings
  • Collaboration
  • Version Control

Coming Soon

  • DOIs for questionnaires, tasks and experiments
  • More advanced search functionality.
  • Add funtionality for official and user-generated tags to materials for easier searching.
  • Configuration inspecting (without an account)
  • Version selection from within Gorilla Open Materials
  • Task manipulation selection from with Gorilla Open Materials
  • We’ll also be reaching out to OSF, PsyArxiv and other Open Science repositories to see how materials created in Gorilla can be shown and previewed on their side.

See Gorilla Open Materials in Action

The Gorilla Open Materials Repository was launched on Tuesday 16th April 2019.

The following materials have been published for you to see our new service in action.

How do I get started?

Check out our How To: Open Materials guide to find out how to publish your materials.

Feedback

If you have any feedback or ideas of how to make Gorilla Open Materials even better, please get in touch.

Thank you!

As always, our new features would not be nearly as useful or fully featured without input from our generous users and advisers. A huge thank you from us to:

Daniel C Richardson, Jenni Rodd, Suzanna Forwood, Eva Poort, Kyle Jasmin, Delia Furhmann, Alex Irvine