The registered reports revolution Lessons in cultural reform

摘要

On 12 November 2012, as my train sped towards London, I received one of the most important emails of my life. The message cordially informed me that the publisher of Cortex, a scientific journal that I had recently joined as an editor, had approved our request to launch a new type of article called a registered report. The registered report format was unlike anything most journals had seen before. A month earlier I had written an open letter to my fellow editors arguing that to prevent publication bias and various forms of reporting bias, we should accept research articles before authors do their research. If the theory, proposed methods and analysis plans were judged sound then the journal would accept the paper in advance, putting an end to the suppression of negative results (or indeed any kind of result), and instead making editorial decisions based on the quality and rigour of the science (see box, page 25).