Open Science Framework: Meeting Researchers Where They Are | The Signal

"In order to motivate researchers to establish more transparent and open scientific practices, the COS created the $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge, one thousand awards of $1,000 each, which offers researchers the opportunity to earn $1,000 by clearly outlining and describing their research plan and methods in the OSF before beginning their research.

Additionally they have identified and established relationships with a large number of respected journals in a variety of disciplines that have demonstrated a commitment to transparency and reproducibility. Publishing a researcher’s  preregistration alongside the article(s) from the study allows readers, reviewers and publishers a chance to not only see the data but also to examine the methodology behind the research and see what changed over the course of the research process.

This transparency helps prevent practices like p-hacking and HARKing, which negatively impact the integrity of scientific results. This is not to imply that the methods and data must stay exactly consistent with the researcher’s initial plans; instead, anything that did change over the course of the research must be outlined and accounted for in the final article(s).

Essentially, the OSF aims to lower the barriers faced by researchers interested in increasing the openness and transparency of their research practices and outputs. Flexibility of settings and structure allow each project administrator to control if, when and how their work becomes open. With all the conversations and momentum around open science and Open Access, the OSF aims to fill the clear need in the scholarly communication ecosystem for a public good to support this work, which may prove vital to the integrity and understanding of modern research."