Pre-registration of research plans, pre-prints and open peer review
Intro
Depositing your study design in a repository or pre-registering it with a journal is a way of holding yourself to the highest standards of research integrity, while potentially attracting future collaborators. Pre-prints quickly allow your peers to engage with key ideas and findings from your work. ‘Open’ peer review aims for greater transparency, accountability and inclusivity in the vital peer review process.
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Pre-registration of your research plan
Pre-registration of your research plan
Preregistration is the practice of making the plan or protocol of your research project available online, before collecting data. It is a way of holding yourself to the highest standards of research integrity, while at the same time ensuring that your work will be reproducible in the future.
By uploading your study design to a repository, you are making a clear statement of the study’s aims and objectives – no moving the goalposts!
Making your plan open also increases the possibility of attracting future collaborators, while publicly identifying questions or phenomena as those you are researching, possibly avoiding duplication of effort.
By indicating in advance whether you are intending to either generate or test a hypothesis (studies can confuse the two) you avoid methodological difficulties and make an ethically valuable statement.
Pre-registering a hypothesis:
- shows what was being tested
- prevents accusations of 'data juggling'
- helps confirm ethical practice
- increases the likelihood of the study being published even if it disproves a theory
You can now pre-register your research plans through the UWL Repository. When uploading a new Item (find out more on our making your published papers and books Open Access page) select ‘Report’ from the ‘Type’ options. You can then select the 'Report' option ‘Pre-registration’. Examples of pre-registrations can be found on the OSF website (Center for Open Science's 'Open Science Framework').
For more information on pre-registration, visit the Center for Open Science website, ASPredicted website and Public Library of Science (PLoS) website.
Registered reports
Registered Reports are research plans that are peer reviewed through journal submission and then published. The report’s acceptance is the basis of an agreement to publish an article reporting on the results of the study if the researchers have followed the reviewed and accepted plan.
Registered reports are an attempt to make sure that high-quality research is published, even if results are not eye-catching or don’t support existing theories but are nevertheless important to the completeness of the research evidence. PLoS ONE is an example of a journal that publishes registered reports.
This practice is becoming more widespread, and you may find that your preferred journal now offers this option with a relevant section in the submission guidelines. Detailed further information has been produced by Taylor and Francis , Wiley, and Sage amongst other publishers.
Open peer review
Open peer review
Peer review is the process in which submitted works are scrutinised by other researchers who have a significant reputation in the same field. Reviewers give feedback on how the paper can be improved or whether the paper should be published at all, so that ideally only papers that are well-written and structured and research that is ethical, competent and meaningful are published.
Traditionally, to allow freedom to comment honestly, reviewers' identities are not disclosed to the authors and their reports are seen only by the journal editor. There has been criticism of this process because it can be slow, open to bias and open to abuse. For instance, unconventional views, methodologies and research findings that seem to contradict the currently accepted view can be prone to reviews that are unfair and peremptory.
Open peer review aims for greater transparency, accountability and inclusivity. It differs from conventional peer review in certain significant ways:
- Authors and reviewers are made aware of each other's identities
- Reports from reviewers are published with the article
- The wider academic community can contribute
There are several open peer review models in which some of these processes are present but not others. For example, a reviewer’s reports are published alongside the article, but the reviewers are not named.
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Advantages of open peer review
Possible advantages of open peer review:
- Revealing identities of authors and reviewers increases transparency
- It may stimulate direct discussion between authors and reviewers
- Publicly visible reviews encourage a tendency to be balanced and constructive
The number of potential reviewers and number of reviews a paper may receive is potentially larger. This could therefore result in the following:
- Increasing the speed of review
- Providing more opportunity for errors and inconsistencies to be identified
- Greater consistency and reduction in bias
- Where reviews are visible, reviewers can get credit for their reviewing work and can cite and link to their reviews if they wish to
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Disadvantages of open peer review
Possible disadvantages of open peer review:
- Reviewers may be less critical if the reviews are public
- Reviewers may fear retaliation if they give an unfavourable review, and their identity is visible. For example, an early career researcher may not wish to review a senior researchers work
Pre-prints - get feedback and stake a claim
Pre-prints are versions of articles which are made available before they are peer-reviewed and published. They are the ‘first complete draft’ of the paper – a presentation of research outcomes in a still raw form.
- For a useful overview visit the 2019 JISC report
It would be useful if this first draft could receive feedback before any attempt to have it published. It would also be useful if other researchers were aware of the study before what is often the long process of publication. You can obtain feedback on your pre-print if you upload it onto a pre-print server.
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Why you should consider publishing a pre-print
There are several advantages to publishing a pre-print:
- A pre-print allows you to quickly allows your peers to engage with key ideas and findings from your work without waiting for the peer review and publication processes which can be slow.
- Having your pre-print in the public domain increases dissemination of your work and raises your profile.
- You establish priority - there is a public record of your research findings, including a timestamp.
- A pre-print gives you a citable output which you can refer to in grant applications if there has yet to be a published output.
- You may get feedback on your work which will help you to improve it before submitting it for publication.
- Negative results can be harder to publish. A pre-print may be a way to make these available.
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Pre-print servers
Pre-print servers are often dedicated to articles in a specific discipline or group of disciplines. Examples of pre-print servers include:
- arXiv – physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics
- bioArXiv – biology
- MedArXiv – health sciences
- PsyArXiv – psychological sciences
To find pre-prints in PubMed, type "preprint[pt]" in the search bar.
PubPeer is an ‘online Journal club’ that allows you to search for pre-prints and leave reviews and comments.
Some publishers post pre-prints as part of their publication processes either to an existing pre-print server or to a publisher-owned platform. There are also publisher-owned platforms that authors can post to, e.g. SSRN.
There is now a Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories. This directory gives useful information about each repository, including whether peer review is available.
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Check before posting
Making pre-prints publicly available for comment is common practice in some disciplines, such as the physical sciences, but not in others. Even within disciplines, the policies of journals may vary – some having no problem with a paper which had a previously uploaded pre-print, while some might refuse to publish or look less kindly on it. It is very important to check a potential publisher's policies and practices before making your work available as a pre-print.
You will usually be asked to choose one of the Creative Commons Licenses for your pre-print. Make sure the licence you choose fits with the journal’s polices. Remember that making a pre-print available means they become a permanent part of the scholarly record. Seek advice if you are unsure whether to post a pre-print.
Get in touch
Open Research team
Get in touch with Dr Marc Forster from the Open Research team for help and advice at open.research@uwl.ac.uk.
Library team
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