Promoting an Open Research Culture

Promoting an Open Research Culture, by Brian A. Nosek and a large group of co-authors, published in Science in 2015, is the peer reviewed paper that introduced the TOP Guidelines, the Transparency and Openness Promotion standards now adopted by hundreds of journals to encourage preregistration, data sharing and replication in published research. Its strength is that it is a primary policy document from the scientists who actually designed the standards, useful here wherever the atlas needs to explain what open science and preregistration standards require and why they emerged, tied directly to the source that established them rather than a secondhand paraphrase. Its limit is that it proposes and argues for a set of norms rather than reporting an empirical finding about any specific claim, so it should be cited for what rigorous, transparent research practice requires in general, never as evidence for or against a particular religious, psychological or paranormal claim discussed elsewhere in the atlas.