Many journal articles cannot be accessed by everyone – including researchers – because academic publishing has become a for-profit enterprise where researchers or their institutions have to pay fees in order to view the contents. This is problematic because it creates disadvantages for institutions and their researchers who cannot pay the expensive fees, which slows down the scientific process. This creates gaps between institutions within one country, but is also a world-wide problem which impairs research especially in developing countries. Additionally, research and researchers are often funded by governments and funding agencies which ultimately get their money from tax-payers. Thus, the tax-payer pays twice: For the research itself and for the access of publications by other researchers. To tackle these problems, Open Access has become more common: Publicly funded research should be published in a way that is accessible for everyone, for free.
Research over the last years has shown that undisclosed flexibility in study design and data analysis can greatly influence results and distort interpretations of hypotheses. Knowledge which was thought to be established was questioned and found to be not replicating in an unexpected number of instances. In an ongoing process, several ideas are discussed and implemented to increase transparency and make new results more credible and verifiable. The most prominent are Preregistration (specify hypotheses and analysis strategies before data collection to ensure that hypotheses and analyses do not ground in current data), Registered Reports (write a proposal including hypotheses and data analyses plans and get acceptance of a journal prior to data collection to reduce the occurrence of false positive results due to publication pressure of positive results), Open Code and Open Materials (publish code and materials from your experiments and data analyses to let other researchers reproduce your work easily), and Open Data (publish your data to facilitate reproducibility, meta-analyses, and reuse of your data). You can find more information and materials to get you started on our Resources page.
Academia is not just a loose connection of individual researchers but a system which governs interactions between its members. Thus, there needs to be change on a systemic level instead of exclusively at the level of individuals and personal responsibility. Policies with regards to teaching, funding, hiring, and promotion policies must be changed to implement new and better practices. Together, they are supposed to make better science the norm.
