Open Research Practices

Transparency is a guiding principle for open research, along with reproducibility, rigour, and trust.

For disciplines that conduct experimental research and collect data, pre-registration is a powerful tool to demonstrate transparency. A researcher or study team can pre-register their proposed study protocols in a public registry or repository for a time-stamped record. When the authors report their results, reviewers and readers can compare the finished publication with what the authors said they were going to do in the pre-registration document to verify that they are aligned.

Dr. Hopin Lee (University of Oxford) provides an overview of pre-registration at the "Demystifying Open Science and Empowering Advocacy" workshop sponsored by the Health Research Board (HRB) in the video below.

During the workshop, Dr. Lee and his colleagues--including University of Galway researchers Dr. Elaine Toomey and Dr. Chris Noone--collected data for a paper that was subsequently published on HRB Open Research: "Exploring factors that influence the practice of Open Science by early career health researchers: a mixed methods study".

Registered Reports take things a step further than pre-registration.

Registered reports are a form of empirical publication, offered by over 300 journals, in which study proposals are peer reviewed and pre-accepted before research is undertaken. By deciding which articles are published based on the question, theory, and methods, Registered Reports offer a remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases.

Dr. Chris Chambers (University of Cardiff) introduces how the Peer Community in Registered Reports (PCI RR) platform supports registered reports in the video below.

Data notes are brief descriptions of datasets that explain the circumstances of data collection--how and why the data were collected--without including any analyses or conclusions.

Following the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability), after you have deposited your dataset in a suitable repository, you can publish a peer-reviewed data note in a journal. This peer-reviewed output will improve the findability of your dataset, which will lead to increased reuse.

For more detailed guidance, see "Demystifying Open Science in health psychology and behavioral medicine: a practical guide to Registered Reports and Data Notes" written by Dr. Elaine Toomey and Rory Coyne from the University of Galway, along with their co-authors.