Please read this message from our OSC member Xenia Schmalz:
We need your support for Registered Reports!

Dear colleagues,

Many of you have probably heard of a new format for journal articles:
Registered Reports (RR). With RRs, you write a study and analysis plan, and
submit it to a journal before you collect the data. You get feedback from
the reviewers on the design of the study. If the reviewers approve of the
methods, you get conditional acceptance. This means that the study will be
published regardless of its outcome. Exploratory analyses can still be
reported, but they will be explicitly distinguished from the confirmatory
analyses relating to the original hypotheses.

The RR format is good for science, because it combats publication bias. It
is also good for us as individual researchers, because it helps us to avoid
situations where we invest time and resources into a study, only to find
out in retrospect that we overlooked some design flaw and/or that
non-significant findings are uninformative, yielding the study
unpublishable. You can find more information and answers to some FAQs about
RRs here https://cos.io/rr/.

With a group of colleagues, we would like to convince more journals to
offer RRs as a publication option, along with the traditional formats. We
have already contacted over a hundred journals editors in our respective
fields (in my case, reading research/psycholinguistics). You can see a list
of journals which have been approached and their responses here
https://osf.io/3wct2/wiki/Journal%20Responses/. A full list of journals
which offer RRs can be found here https://cos.io/rr/.

As a next step, we would like to extend the initiative. First, joining
forces with other psycholinguistics researchers who have been collecting
signatures, we would like to continue approaching psychology and
linguistics journals with a pooled list of signatories. We will base the
letters on this https://osf.io/3wct2/wiki/Journal%20Requests/ template.

Second, together with researchers from other areas and fields, we would
like to approach scientific journals with a wider audience: specifically,
we are working on a letter to PNAS. The editors have announced that PNAS
will be offering a new format, namely brief reports. While this could be an
excellent outlet for groundbreaking discoveries, we would like to suggest
to the editorial board that they also consider accepting registered
reports, which will support high-quality hypothesis-driven confirmatory
research. You can read the draft here https://osf.io/epsg2/.

Third, we are working on an open letter, which will be addressed to all
journal editors, to outline the necessity and the advantages of offering
Registered Reports. You can read the draft here https://osf.io/5shpk/.

We are currently collecting signatories. If you are willing to support this
initiative, please let me know, via this google form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rQd17z8M9sGHNOV9G1KcQGjCwewFlR_4oU4sKirHLig/edit#responses,
or directly via email (xenia.schmalz@gmail.com).

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions. Also, I would be
grateful if you could forward my request to any colleagues or mailing lists
if you think it could be of interest. Note that we're aiming for a broad
audience, so researchers from any field are welcome to sign.

Thank you very much in advance!
Kind regards,
Xenia

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