Nudging science toward openness | EurekAlert! Science News

"The $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge, launched one month ago by the Center for Open Science (COS), is testing how addressing scientists' incentives can elicit new behaviors and improve the reproducibility of published research. 1,000 researchers will earn $1,000 each for publishing the results of preregistered research ... Preregistration increases the credibility of statistical tests by having scientists specify details of their research plans in advance of conducting a study. That planning produces clear confirmatory tests of research hypotheses. This is distinct from exploratory analysis in which the scientist uses data to discover new hypotheses that could then be tested later. Both methods of research are important, and preregistration clarifies which is which. 'In the complexity of doing research, it can be easy to blur the line between generating and testing hypotheses with data. The difference matters because if we are not careful, using statistical inference with exploratory analysis risks making 'discoveries' that are really just random noise in the data,' said Courtney Soderberg a statistical consultant at COS .."