Increasing transparency through open science badges

Abstract

Conservation science is a multidisciplinary and collaborative discipline. This journal’s policy is to encourage transparent and open practices in science, including sharing of data, code, and survey instruments. Such practices are especially important in light of emerging, broader scientific issues, such as reproducibility of research protocols and results, wasting of research outputs and resources, and questionable data and reporting practices. Conservation Biology promotes this agenda through its transparency and openness guidelines and checklist and through the publication of registered reports. Transparency and openness have the potential to improve research design and methods, provide opportunities to validate models and statistical analyses, encourage collaboration, and increase citations (Piwowar et al. 2007). Preregistration aims to reduce selective reporting and unplanned exploratory analyses that can lead to unreliable research findings.