Scholarly Communication

Scholarly communication systems provide vital infrastructure for sharing scientific knowledge. However, incentives in publishing are not always aligned with the scientific values of openness, integrity, and reproducibility. BITSS works with journals and other stakeholders to align incentives that reward scientific rigor, transparency, and reproducibility.

Registered Reports (Pre-results Review)

Registered Reports are research articles that are peer-reviewed based on their methods and theory before the results are known. BITSS supported the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) in a pilot of this article format.

To learn more about the JDE pilot, go here. If you are a journal editor interested in bringing pre-results review to your journal, review our page with resources and services.

MetaArXiv

Preprints are open access versions of scholarly works. They can include working papers, pre-prints (ready to publish), post-prints (published, but not typeset), and other scholarly works like dissertations, reports, statistical software package tutorials, and conference proceedings. Managed by BITSS, MetaArXiv is an interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency, reproducibility, and meta-science.

Reporting Standards

Reporting Standards are explicit guidelines about the information that researchers should present when publishing or communicating their studies.

BITSS was a convening partner in the development of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, along with the Center for Open Science, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and others.

BITSS also encourages and provides training to researchers to use transparency guidelines developed for various disciplines even when publishing in journals that have not adopted them.