Hello Ecologgers! In a time when there is increasing concern about the rigor of published research from both academic and public sectors, we owe it to our communities to take every reasonable step to increase the transparency and replicability of our research.
Preregistration specifies in advance how a study will be conducted and its data analyzed in a time stamped, read-only format. Preregistration clarifies the easy-to-blur distinction between confirmatory (hypothesis testing) research and exploratory (hypothesis generating) research. Both processes are crucial for science to advance: exploratory research finds the unexpected, and confirmatory research places the highest standard of rigor on the inferences. Unintentionally presenting exploratory research as confirmatory (by, for example, tweaking analyses as data come in) removes the inferential value of most common statistical tests. We want to initiate preregistration as a habit before every data collection effort, to simply add clarity to what (if any) a-priori hypotheses existed before seeing the data. Toward that end, the Preregistration Challenge ( https://cos.io/prereg) is a competition to reward 1,000 researchers with $1,000 prizes for publishing the results of preregistered work. Please consider starting your preregistration today for your next project, and please contact me with questions or comments. Studies must be published in journals that are taking concrete steps toward reducing the replication crisis. Currently, that list includes 700 journals (see the 20 ecology journals below). If you're a journal editor and want to see your journal on that list, please see here (https://cos.io/getlisted/) or contact me. Sincerely, David Mellor David Mellor, PhD <https://osf.io/qthsf/> Project Manager, Journal and Funder Initiatives <https://cos.io/top> Center for Open Science <https://cos.io/> (434) 352-1066, @EvoMellor <https://twitter.com/@EvoMellor>, Skype: evomellor Are you ready to take the Prereg Challenge <https://cos.io/prereg>? American Journal of Botany Applications in Plant Sciences Biotropica Collabra Conservation Biology Ecology and Evolution Ecology Letters Evolution Journal of Evolutionary Biology Movement Ecology Nature Nature Ecology & Evolution Oikos Systematic Botany The Auk: Ornithological Advances BMC Ecology PLoS ONE PLoS Biology PLoS Computational Biology PLoS Medicine
