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ManyBabies is an international research consortium founded in 2015 to address outstanding theoretical and methodological questions about the nature of early development and how it is studied across disciplines. In line with the big team science movement, the initiative aims to test hypotheses about infant development that individual labs could perhaps never adequately test.

To this end, the consortium carries out large-scale collaborative research projects, implementing best research practices. In particular, ManyBabies is committed to open science practices and ensures that all study materials are available and accessible to all with minimal barriers. For example, all studies are pre-registered, are published as registered reports and upload their research materials to public repositories.

To date, ManyBabies has initiated six major empirical studies and three major methodological studies. These studies cover a variety of topics central to developmental science, such as infant-directed speech, theory of mind, rule learning, social evaluation and infant-looking preference.

ManyBabies aims to democratize developmental research: it does not require participating researchers to have access to a laboratory to contribute to a project. In line with ManyBabies principles¡ªtransparency, collective governance, inclusivity and diversity, ethical research and respect¡ªanyone interested in developmental research is welcome to contribute to ongoing projects, including contributions to study design, stimulus creation, data analysis and project organization. ManyBabies strives to build a cumulative developmental science based on the open research model and democratic and inclusive international collaboration, thus constituting an unprecedented initiative to foster the transparency and reproducibility of developmental research.

Currently, more than 650 collaborators from 269 institutions in 50 countries participate in the consortium. The growth of ManyBabies has made it possible to carry out new research projects. Future goals of the consortium encompass expanding projects to include new populations (e.g., more ages and atypical populations) and researchers from different geographic areas¡ªespecially under-resourced ones, creating teaching and training modules and helping to build infrastructure and resources.

The successful implementation of the different projects has proven that the ManyBabies research model is viable and beneficial for advancing developmental knowledge. For example, thanks to the collaboration of 69 laboratories from 16 countries, the ManyBabies 1 project replicated a robust finding from developmental literature: infants' preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech. This project led to a highly cited publication with 149 authors (60 citations since its publication in March 2020, top 1% of the academic field of Psychiatry/Psychology according to Web of Science,Altmetric Attention Score of 216, top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric) and several spin-off projects.

Contributed by Heidi Baumgartner, ManyBabies.