Transparency

I am a member of the Peer Reviewers Openness (PRO) Initiative. The Pro Initiative is based on the idea that reviewers have the power to get journals to become more transparent. In particular, they encourage reviewers to request data and code from the journal when they are asked to review a manuscript.

[This blog is based on the article “ Replication studies in economics—How many and which papers are chosen for replication, and why?” by Frank Mueller-Langer, Benedikt Fecher, Dietmar Harhoff, and Gert Wagner, published in the journal Research Policy] Academia is facing a quality challenge: The global scientific output doubles every nine years while the number of retractions and instances of misconduct is increasing.

The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences ( BITSS) was formed in late 2012 after a meeting in Berkeley that led to the publication of an article in Science on ways to increase transparency and improve reproducibility in research across the social sciences. BITSS is part of Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action ( CEGA), and is led by development economist Edward Miguel and advised by a group of leaders in transparent research from economics, psychology, political science, and public health.

Societies invest in scientific studies to better understand the world and attempt to harness such improved understanding to address pressing societal problems. Published research, however, can be useful for theory or application only if it is …

We have created a curated scientific resource navigator called ARIADNE that will guide researchers in the field of life sciences, especially those at the beginning of their career, through the process of conducting a transparent and reproducible …

Real-world evidence (RWE) studies are increasingly used to inform policy and clinical decisions. However, there remain concerns about the credibility and reproducibility of RWE studies. While there is universal agreement on the critical importance of …

How do psychologists determine what is true and what is false about human behavior, affect, and cognition? The question encompasses more than we can know from a single study or even a single research paper, and the issues run deeper than just …

Objectives: To examine the effect on peer review of asking reviewers to have their identity revealed to the authors of the paper. Design: Randomised trial. Consecutive eligible papers were sent to two reviewers who were randomised to have their …

Across disciplines, researchers increasingly recognize that open science and reproducible research practices may accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to …

Knowledge is essential to saving lives and improving wellbeing. The term open science has been applied to improving the transparency of knowledge generation, but open science also has the potential to address many of the problems of inequity, …