Registered Reports Now! (Ecology/Evolutionary Biology)

[LisaSpitzerZPID]

• Campaign co-creator/s:

• @itchyshin
• @szymekdr
• @roseodea
• @p-pottier
• @LisaSpitzerZPID
• @CooperSmout

• Rationale: In psychology, a large number of journals have already adopted Registered Reports -- a style of publication where peer-review is conducted before data are collected and studies are provisionally accepted on the basis of the quality of their proposed study, regardless of their results (https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports?_ga=2.134659825.147208067.1606965728-527458024.1606965728). Meanwhile, in other scientific disciplines, the numbers are more limited, which makes it more difficult for these researchers to implement this open science technique. To counter this issue, the 'Registered Reports Now!' campaign contacts editors to convince them to adopt Registered Reports (see https://osf.io/3wct2/wiki/Journal%20Responses/). While some journals changed their policies, many did not answer, and there are of course also a large number of journals that were not contacted. With the present campaign, we aim at building upon 'Registered Reports Now!' by asking researchers to sign a letter which will be sent to journals that were already contacted in the 'Registered Reports Now!' campaign but didn't answer, and journals that have not been contacted before.

• Action: This campaign will ask researchers to pledge to co-sign an open letter that will be sent to editor-in-chiefs of various academic journals. The open letter will describe what are Registered Reports, their importance, and their under-prevalence in academic journals.

• Eligibility criteria: Everyone that has (co-)authored a publication before or has an academic affiliation

• Optional anonymity: yes

• Threshold: Pledges will activate when 200 signatures are collected

• Campaign expiration: no specified expiry date.

• Pledge duration: 1 year.

Note: This campaign idea has now been merged with a hackathon at the 2021 SORTEE conference, in which we will email journal editors and request they adopt the Registered Reports format. See the campaign page for more info.

[CooperSmout]

@itchyshin @szymekdr @roseodea @LisaSpitzerZPID this campaign is now live, please sign and promote widely :)

[pimarntzen]

LS - I would be happy to sign the petition that aims to accomodate 'Registered Reports' in Ecology and Evolution more widely, if I was assured about - from our side - the OBLIGATION to submit a report, irrespective of the outcome of the experiments

[CooperSmout]

Just to clarify -- by 'from our side' do you mean the journal/editorial side? If so, that's an interesting idea, to get authors to commit a priori to publishing irrespective of the outcome. I would imagine (but only guessing here) that most authors would be happy to do so, given that publications are the name of the game in academia, and that there's a citation advantage for Registered Reports.

[pimarntzen]

Dear colleague - thank you for your inquiry. I am a scientist and would indeed advocate that not only journals but also researchers should commit to publication. I think that negative results should also surface and Registered Reports may be a means to make that happen. I would guess though that most researchers are hesitant to publish negative results, because of the effort with not too many citations and they may seem to 'have been wrong'. If, however, publishers take on an obligation, why should not reseachers ? I hope this clarifies my point of view. Best wishes, Jan W. Arntzen Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden, the Netherlands

[CooperSmout]

thanks for clarifying @pimarntzen. Interesting to hear your opinion, because I would have thought the opposite: most researchers would be happy to publish their negative/null results, because every extra publication is good for the CV -- particularly if the journal has already committed to publishing the paper, which rules out painful rounds of review/rewriting/resubmission etc. IMO the main reason these findings don't get published is because (high-impact) journals don't want to publish null/negative results, which are perceived as being 'low-impact' and will detract from the journal impact factor. I've heard of many stories from researchers who have tried to publish such results, only to give up after multiple attempts and move onto more publishable papers. But in any case, I agree it would be good if there were a binding agreement on both sides, causing researchers to publish irrespective of the results. Perhaps this is something that could be built into Registered Reports in the future.

[dylangomes]

I wonder if we can assess the 'citability' of negative results - i.e. how much "lower impact" really are these results? Although it is likely difficult to force often complicated results into such discrete categorizations for such an assessment... In my opinion negative/null results are sometimes more interesting than finding the result that one expected a priori, yet I realize that many don't share this point of view.

[CooperSmout]

I seem to recall some evidence showing that there's actually a citation advantage for Registered Reports, though I can only see this preliminary preprint now that I search for it again (but it does point in the right direction): https://osf.io/5y8w7/

At the very least, there's now evidence showing that researchers hold RRs in high regard, which would fit with the tendency to cite more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01142-4