Increasing transparency through open science badges

"Authors who adopt transparent practices for an article in Conservation Biology are now able to select from 3 open science badges: open data, open materials, and preregistration. Badges appear on published articles as visible recognition and highlight these efforts to the research community. There is an emerging body of literature regarding the influences of badges, for example, an increased number of articles with open data (Kidwell et al 2016) and increased rate of data sharing (Rowhani‐Farid et al. 2018). However, in another study, Rowhani‐Farid et al. (2020) found that badges did not “noticeably motivate” researchers to share data. Badges, as far as we know, are the only data‐sharing incentive that has been tested empirically (Rowhani‐Farid et al. 2017).

Rates of data and code sharing are typically low (Herold 2015; Roche et al 2015; Archmiller et al 2020; Culina et al 2020). Since 2016, we have asked authors of contributed papers, reviews, method papers, practice and policy papers, and research notes to tell us whether they “provided complete machine and human‐readable data and computer code in Supporting Information or on a public archive.” Authors of 31% of these articles published in Conservation Biology said they shared their data or code, and all authors provide human‐survey instruments in Supporting Information or via a citation or online link (i.e., shared materials)...."