Safeguarding Open Science from exploitative practices | PLOS Medicine

"Open research and data transparency are a bulwark against unethical activities, but can also introduce integrity risks. As with all public goods, freely available data can be exploited, and here we set out the case for the use of safeguarding practices....

We suggest that unrestricted open access will continue to compromise trust in research using exploited assets, and that safeguarding measures will only be truly effective with better disclosure processes (for example, disclosing variations to approved research questions) and publication checks. The latter could include de-registering applications that show signs of significant hypothesis drift and an increased focus on whether data have been obtained legitimately, in line with Committee on Publishing Ethics guidance on authorised data use [12]. These safeguards would not be incompatible with Open Science, but would protect open practices and maintain the ethical and scientific benefits; without such changes to reassert the balance between Open Science and research integrity, our expectation is that the credibility of research based on open access data sources will continue to decline."