Launching BITSS Preprints, an interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility.

During the BITSS Annual Meeting in December 2016, several researchers approached us about launching a new Working Paper series. The reason was simple – a common challenge faced by leaders and soon-to-be-leaders in the research transparency and reproducibility movement is that their research doesn’t necessarily fit in any one journal or discipline. Not only that, but there is a lot to learn across disciplines and the sooner and more often that learning is shared, the sooner we can reach our goal of strengthening the quality of social science research and evidence used for policy-making.

In early 2017, BITSS set out to do just that – establish a one-stop-shop to see what new methods, tools, and best practices are being produced related to research transparency and reproducibility. We worked with our partners at the Center for Open Science (COS) to establish this series through the Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints. This obvious partnership allows for several benefits: (i) the papers uploaded to this series will not only be housed in the BITSS preprint series, but also searchable across all OSF Preprints; and (ii) authors will be able to link directly to their OSF project pages to increase the transparency of the published preprint.

Aligning with our own research program, BITSS Preprints will encourage publication of working papers across the social sciences that address issues related to (i) developing innovative methods to improve the transparency and credibility of research findings, (ii) developing new tools and approaches for meta-analysis, (iii) studying researcher norms and strategies to promote the practice of open science, and (iv) learning how to institutionalize and scale-up research transparency and reproducibility practices. For replication-related research, authors will need to demonstrate they have shared their replication with original study authors and original study authors have the opportunity to comment prior to publication in BITSS Preprints.

Any researchers working in this exciting space are welcome to publish in BITSS Preprints, including but not limited to BITSS leadership, Catalysts, Social Science Meta-Analysis and Research Transparency (SSMART) research grantees and recipients of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science, faculty for training events, and partner organization staff. Authors can choose to either submit their paper directly to BITSS staff for uploading or connect to their already established OSF project page. Not in our community yet but interested in publishing? Contact us!

An added benefit for authors – BITSS staff will actively promote papers in the BITSS preprints though our blog – either through BITSS-led or guest blogs – as well as other social media campaigns (Twitter, Mailchimp). This allows us to leverage the ever-growing BITSS network and community and allows BITSS to engage with the community to identify emerging research and methods that should be considered for BITSS events, such as our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Training (RT2) events and Annual Meetings.

We look forward to seeing this Preprint series expand to cover the variety of topics we care about:

• Researcher bias
• Publication bias
• P-hacking
• p-curve
• Pre-analysis plans
• Multiple hypothesis testing
• Study registration
• Trial registration
• Study protocols
• Meta-analysis
• Reproducibility
• Replication
• Researcher behavior
• Research ethics
• Data sharing
• Data publication
• Open data
• Data de-identification
• Research transparency tools
• Research transparency methods
• Quantitative research
• Qualitative research
• Journal practices (open access, results-blind review, transparency peer review, other)
• Institutionalizing transparency
• Statistical power
• Reproducible workflows

The BITSS Preprints advisory board is Edward Miguel, Garret Christensen, Kelsey Mulcahy, Temina Madon, and Jennifer Sturdy. All inquiries should be directed to ucbitss@berkeley.edu.