How peer reviewers might hold the key to making science more transparent | Pete Etchells | Science | The Guardian

" ... While the theoretical case for open science is easy to make, practically getting scientists to make those changes is less trivial. Over the past few years, initiatives such as the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines, Open Science Foundation badges, and study preregistration have been developed to encourage scientists to adopt open practices. These drives have been very successful in driving top-down change, by encouraging journals to adopt new policies and practices. But what about bottom-up approaches to the problem of promoting open science? On Wednesday, a new paper published in Royal Society Open Science argued for a new, grassroots approach to this problem, by putting the power back into the hands of scientists at the coalface of research, by changing the way that we think about the peer review process (full disclosure: both myself and fellow Head Quarters blogger Chris Chambers are co-authors on the paper). The Peer Reviewers’ Openness (PRO) Initiative is, at its core, a simple pledge: scientists who sign up to the initiative agree that, from January 1 2017, will not offer to comprehensively review, or recommend the publication of, any scientific research papers for which the data, materials and analysis code are not publicly available, or for which there is no clear reason as to why these things are not available. To date, over 200 scientists have signed the pledge ..."