Where does BRIC fit?

Our vision for BRIC (the Behavioral Research Innovation Center)—its current contributions and its strategic future—fulfills a distinct and essential role in the social and behavioral research software ecosystem. It is a center of innovation in research methods. One of our specialties is creating software to collect and produce novel digital traces responsibly and reliably. Our projects integrate these valuable new types of data into other social science methods, including surveys, observations, experiments, and interviews. We aim to make these innovations easier to discover, implement, and extend - not just our own contributions, but open-source contributions from developers and labs across the social and behavioral sciences.

Open-sourcing the code underlying a research project is essential, but often not sufficient to allow a new researcher to adopt and build upon this work. High-quality documentation is an often overlooked step, which can bring a project up to the level where a few researcher/coders can use and contribute to the project. Supporting new researchers by answering questions and providing resources is often beyond the time constraints of the faculty members who initially developed the project (or the grad student who wrote the code), and this type of support is beyond the remit of research support units in universities. Thus, innovations can fall into disuse after the initial project is completed. Filling this gap that causes underutilized innovations is a core part of BRIC's mission.

We have contributed to fields from physical and mental health to economics to communication studies. The needs across fields may look quite different on the surface, but they require much of the same underlying computational infrastructure and best practices. BRIC leverages our perspective across research fields so that advancements and solutions are shared across domains and researchers (and research funders) don't waste time and financial resources recreating tools that already exist, and re-encountering the same avoidable pitfalls as their predecessors.

One way we characterize our vision for BRIC is inspired by 18F.

18F was a digital services consulting group within the federal government. We helped other government agencies fix technology problems and save money by making smarter technology investments. We The Builders

18F was a part of the U.S. government, but also cross-agency. BRIC is part of the nonprofit research community with a broad perspective of technology across fields. 18F could take a holistic perspective on what would save resources (time and money) to strengthen the government in fulfilling its mission. We aim to replicate this model within academic and public interest social research. With increasing constraints on research funding, BRIC's role in providing open, robust solutions becomes more critical. Open collaboration prevents redundant efforts—the costly 'reinventing the wheel'—and repetitive overcoming of technical challenges.

Other organizations that we take inspiration from include university-connected organizations such as the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. These institutions are known for their academic rigor and work across universities. Both were founded to provide vital infrastructure for survey research in the mid-20th century. NORC conducts methodological research in addition to its client work and high-quality research panels; similarly, we aspire to improve and advance methodology at BRIC. ICPSR pioneered open data and archival practices and has trained many leading survey methodologists through its summer program. We aspire to continue and further open practices as well as to equip and train future computational researchers. While BRIC is a new organization, we aim to become an integral piece of the computational methods landscape of the social sciences through research, rigorous products and approaches, and as advisors, coaches, and educators across institutions.

BRIC is strategically positioned to strengthen the current social and behavioral research ecosystem. Where individual labs may lack resources for complex software development or where potentially cross-disciplinary tools are unrecognized, BRIC provides robust, open-source solutions and methodological advances. Our work directly addresses the growing need for shared infrastructure in advanced computational methods. We invite potential partners to join us in building this essential resource, ensuring that social and behavioral science remains at the forefront of discovery and effectively addresses society's most pressing challenges.