The Feminist WonderLab Collective: An ECR space to support feminist practices and Open Scholarship

Dr Zlatomira Ilchovska, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Psychology

Email: zlatomira.ilchovska@york.ac.uk

Website: https://zgilchovska.github.io/

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6682-9952

https://x.com/zlatiilchovska

An international ECR-led feminist research group called Feminist Wonder Lab was founded after a hackathon meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science in 2022. The group meets at least monthly to discuss feminist issues in psychological science and to work on projects that promote Open Scholarship values and the role of underrepresented researchers in the discipline. The group’s mission is 'to promote equity and justice for all people in the academy'. The group recognises that particular identities are privileged and made superior in the academy and seeks to be part of the changes that are underway to support ‘systemically underprivileged groups in academic institutions’. The group considers feminist ‘scholar-activism’ and open research as critical strategies to achieve its mission and has produced several open access project outputs including preprints, conference contributions and a glossary and checklist of feminist practices in psychological science. 

The Feminist WonderLab Collective is an international ECR-lead feminist research group, founded after a hackathon meeting on “Feminist ways of doing science” of SIPS (https://improvingpsych.org/ ) in 2022. The group meets at least once a month to discuss feminist issues in psychological science and work on projects that promote not just Open Scholarship (OS) values, but also the role of underrepresented researchers in the psychological sciences. Although small, the Collective has diverse members around the world and partners with other OS organisations, such as ABRIR (https://abrirpsy.org/ ), SIPS and FORRT (https://forrt.org ).  

I am part of the Collective since its beginning in 2022, and we have currently completed our first output: “Incorporating feminist practices into (psychological) science - the why, the what and the how” (accepted in Collabra, see box below for the open preprint version). In this work, we created a resource for scientists and academics of all career stages and levels of knowledge on how to apply feminist OS values in their individual work and foster them at the level of their institution – because part of OS is higher inclusion of diverse research and pedagogical perspectives and moving away from the Global North’s worldview of OS (Albornoz & Chan, 2018 at Power and Inequality in Open Science Discourses; Dutta et al., 2021 at Decolonizing Open Science: Southern Interventions). In addition, we devised the first to our knowledge feminist OS glossary, suited both for people with established feminist worldviews, as well as those not working on traditionally feminist topics. 

The Collective’s current project work in progress is led by me and concerns the barriers and challenges people around the world face in the academia before obtaining a permanent “assistant professor” (or its correspondence for the specific country) position, with an attempt to present these outside of the Global-North dominant focus. This work builds upon Rahal et al. (2023, at Quality research needs good working conditions who provide an overview of the international applicability of the core values of good working conditions in academia, and also my own work on Chuan-Peng et al.’s (2025) “Open science in the Developing World: A collection of practical guides for researchers in developing countries”, demonstrating the barriers and solutions of the Global South towards OS. Some of the challenges that I talk about in my research I have also personally experienced, as a researcher coming from the Global South, particularly the lack of wider networks with the Global North and the lack of resources and materials on OS in general. However, my work with the Collective and other partners such as FORRT, SIPS and PSA (https://psysciacc.org/ ) has aimed at creating and translating research output and pedagogical materials for the Global South, providing a foundation for future developments. 

The work with the Collective has given me a thorough learning experience on understanding wider inclusion and feminist values in OS. It also inspired me to generate new ideas of how to improve my work and my academic community. For instance, I have started a collaboration with a Brazilian institution, to create by their request and need, an OS workshop material applicable for their unique cultural and national context. Most importantly, the in-depth discussions with the Collective members have brought diverse viewpoints and helped me understand my strengths and position in the Global North context where I am working. I previously also embeded feminist values in my teaching, as a module lead on a Quantitative Research Methods course, where all materials and tasks were designed with an OS outlook (e.g., tasks on OS practices, pre-registrations, and informational resources on the benefits of good scientific practices, to name a few), and students were encouraged to think about the feminist aspects of their research projects. I continue to abide by OS values in my current module in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience, and my research work.

• Preprint version of the manuscript "Incorporating feminist practices into psychological science - the why, the what and the how" (Hartmann et al., 2023): https://osf.io/preprints/osf/2rcuz_v1 (Supplementary at: https://osf.io/gtxh6/ )

• Dr. Hartmann's recorded presentation of the Collective and its work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDHbmCbUE1w

• Preprint version of the manuscript "Open Science in the Developing World: A Collection of Practical Guides for Researchers in Developing Countries" (Chuan-Peng et al., 2025): https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7ubk2_v1  

One of the Hartmann et al. (2023) manuscript's authors (G.H.) position was funded within the Post-DocTrack Programme of the University of Graz. Another author's (H.H.) position was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Duisburg - Essen for the submission of our first manuscript. No other funding or support has been obtained by the Feminist WonderLab Collective members for the Collective's projects.

Except where otherwise noted copyright in this work belongs to the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License