Abstract
Open science has evolved into a broad field that encompasses, among others, the study of peer review, reproducibility, research evaluation, research impact, metascience, and citation analysis. It also includes the examination of career trajectories, funding dynamics, and issues related to inequality and equity in scientific practices (UNESCO 2021). In this project we focus on one particular aspect of open science: metascience. While it improves the quality of science it is also more complex than “standard” science and may be more difficult to communicate to the public. However, as it is the state of the art in modern scientific methods, it is important to learn about the perception of metascience in the general population. This study aims to get first insights of this contemporary issue by evaluating the perception of scientific findings of a metascience study (in this case a “many-labs” study) and a representative single-team study. While we predict that there will be more trust for the metascience study we try to disentangle how much of this increased trust is due to increased number of observations and what can be attributed to the coordinated metascience project. These insights should depict a starting point to understand the notion of metascience in the general population and form a basis for potential causal studies on the topic.