Publishing for science or science for publications? The role of open science to reduce research waste - Siegerink - 2021 - Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis - Wiley Online Library

"One of the underlying ideas of Open Science is that when scientists are open about what they are doing, and what they have been up to, double work can be prevented. For example, Prospero (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/), a registry in which authors can file their initiative to execute a systematic review and meta-analysis can indeed fulfill that role. However, Chapelle et al show that only 10 of the 20 meta-analyses were indeed preregistered. ...

Another way to reduce redundant publications is to share research before it is peer-reviewed by publishing it on a preprint server such as medRxiv.org. Although the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has popularized this practice, it is only used for a small fraction of all research output. Would further adoption of this practice be a way to further reduce research waste? The data collected by Chapelle et al suggest that the time window between “received” and “published online” was short. Preprints will only prevent double work when there is a sufficiently large window between these two timepoints during which other researchers have to decide whether or not to start a new project....

As long as the scientific enterprise incentivizes research waste and science for publications, time and resources are wasted. Open science practices cannot counteract this because they do not address the root cause...."