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 ..."