Science | From AAAS -- Promoting an open research culture

"Promoting an open research culture Transparency, openness, and reproducibility are readily recognized as vital features of science (1, 2). When asked, most scientists embrace these features as disciplinary norms and values (3). Therefore, one might expect that these valued features would be routine in daily practice. Yet, a growing body of evidence suggests that this is not the case (4–6). A likely culprit for this disconnect is an academic reward system that does not sufficiently incentivize open practices (7). In the present reward system, emphasis on innovation may undermine practices that support verification. Too often, publication requirements (whether actual or perceived) fail to encourage transparent, open, and reproducible science (2, 4, 8, 9). For example, in a transparent science, both null results and statistically significant results are made available and help others more accurately assess the evidence base for a phenomenon. In the present culture, however, null results are published less frequently than statistically significant results (10) and are, therefore, more likely inaccessible and lost in the “file drawer” (11). The situation is a classic collective action problem. Many individual researchers lack strong incentives to be more transparent, even though the credibility of science would benefit if everyone were more transparent. Unfortunately, there is no centralized means of aligning individual and communal incentives via universal scientific policies and procedures. Universities, granting agencies, and publishers each create different incentives for researchers. With all of this complexity, nudging scientific practices toward greater openness requires complementary and coordinated efforts from all stakeholders. THE TRANSPARENCY AND OPENNESS PROMOTION GUIDELINES. The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee met at the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, in November 2014 to address one important element of the incentive systems: journals' procedures and policies for publication. The committee consisted of disciplinary leaders, journal editors, funding agency representatives, and disciplinary experts largely from the social and behavioral sciences. By developing shared standards for open practices across journals, we hope to translate scientific norms and values into concrete actions and change the current incentive structures to drive researchers' behavior toward more openness. Although there are some idiosyncratic issues by discipline, we sought to produce guidelines that focus on the commonalities across disciplines.  Standards. There are eight standards in the TOP guidelines; each moves scientific communication toward greater openness. These standards are modular, facilitating adoption in whole or in part. However, they also complement each other, in that commitment to one standard may facilitate adoption of others. Moreover, the guidelines are sensitive to barriers to openness by articulating, for example, a process for exceptions to sharing because of ethical issues, intellectual property concerns, or availability of necessary resources. The complete guidelines are available in the TOP information commons athttp://cos.io/top, along with a list of signatories that numbered 86 journals and 26 organizations as of 15 June 2015. The table provides a summary of the guidelines ..."