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Open Science and Research Integrity Policy

We believe that science, practiced properly, is transparent, participatory and inclusive. For us, Open Science (also known as open scholarship or open research) is better science, a way to address systemic issues in research such as poor reproducibility, questionable research practices and lack of accessibility. This includes aspects such as FAIR Data and Materials to allow other researchers to rerun analyses (i.e. analytical reproducibility), Open Methodology (in general) and pre-registration (in particular), to help with issues such as p-hacking, HARKing, and publication bias and Open Access to distribute research outputs without barriers.

Hence, we as a group are committed to upholding the following principles in our research work and outputs:

  • We will work openly, collaboratively and to the most inclusive standards possible. This includes striving for gender parity and diversity on all projects, where possible.
  • Research data should be considered a public good, rather than the ‘property’ of individual researchers. Hence, unless there are compelling reasons not to, data sharing will be our default approach. We will re-use data from others wherever possible. Data of finished projects will always be made Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
  • We will implement effective Data Management Plans for all projects to ensure effective research data management and enable later data-sharing.
  • Code we create will be distributed with Free and Open Source licenses. Documentation will be distributed with Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
  • Confirmatory, hypothesis-driven experiments will be pre-registered to define hypotheses, outcome variables, predictor variables and analysis plan at the beginning of the study. Exploratory research or post-hoc analyses will always be explicitly labelled as such.
  • We will endeavour to reach out beyond our own networks, and especially to share our work with non-specialist audiences as much as possible, via social media and public engagement. We will favour participatory approaches and always be open to dialogue and collaboration with others.
  • All work presented at conferences, including talks and posters, will be made publicly available simultaneously with events, or if this is not possible, as soon as possible afterwards, via open repositories such as Zenodo.
  • Studies will be published as preprints (at the latest) upon submission for publication.
  • All publications will be Open Access (usually CC BY, but CC BY-ND will also be considered especially for humanities and social sciences work), either by publishing in OA journals or archiving author-accepted manuscripts immediately upon acceptance or publication.
  • Authorship will be strictly according to contributions (no ‘gift’ or ‘ghost’ authorship) and author contributions shall be clearly stated for each publication (e.g., via the CREDIT taxonomy).
  • Whenever errors are spotted, open and honest communication will help to take the appropriate steps to correct them. This includes ‘loss of confidence’ statements and retractions where needed.
  • In line with DORA, we will avoid referring to journal based indicators in our criteria for hiring and in representing our successes.