PLOS ONE Pre-registration

Pre-registration I think is an area that PLOS ONE hasn’t yet tackled, and I think it’s a really important area, especially in my area of research there’s so many different ways of analyzing your data, and you can analyze in one way, and you don’t get the result you want, you can analyze it another way, you don’t get the result you want, and so on… And if you’re doing that behind closed doors there’s no way of knowing whether or not someone’s analyzed in one way and come up with a result or analyzed it 50 ways, and not corrected for that and then published that result based on the 50th way they’ve tried to actually analyze it. By pre-registering the analysis, we’re going to do beforehand doesn’t mean you can’t do exploratory analysis after that, but it does mean that people know what you’re actually going to do before you actually do it and it means that you’ve actually had to think through that process. And there’s several archives now online where people can register what they’re going to do. Which, you know, time-stamped and all the rest of it, and there’s several journals now that are using those as a way of doing the review process.

01:09 - And I think that would be a great way for PLOS to go forwards is to start accessing those, start asking authors when they actually submit; if they’ve actually submitted to one of those websites; and then giving that to the reviewers so that they know whether or not they have actually registered and therefore whether they’ve thought through it, and whether they’ve actually done what they said they were going to do before they do it. So there’s registered reports, where you go through the whole review process; which is ‘Cortex’ that was one of the first to do that; but there you go through a whole review process and you have a bunch of reviewers that actually review that and they’ve actually said that once the paper comes in they’ll also review it at that stage, so you get this double review process. And that’s a bit restrictive because, especially with PhD students who are really trying to get through quickly or as quickly as they can, it takes a long time to go through the pre-registration part, which can take six to 12 months, and then you wanna go through the next stage as well. Where you can is the Open Science framework OSF, which is one of the websites where you can just register your report; you just put it online; and you say what you’re gonna do, just a little blurb on what you’re going to do and they have different stages for it that you just tick off, and everyone has access to that and then if you alter that at any time in the future, which you can, you’re probably going to do the experiment and realize you can do a little bit different, you just alter at that stage and keep altering it. And then the reviewer can go back and look at that, and look at when you decided to make decisions, and when you decided to change things.

And so 02:35 - they can see, yes, they were going to do that analysis so it’s completely valid. Or you do that analysis and you don’t find anything and then you do exploratory analysis, but you’ve got to publish that original analysis to show what actually happened with that and then what happened at the next stage. But there’s no restriction and it’s already set up so it’s not something that would take PLOS ONE any extra. It’s something that I do; pre-submission inquiries; for Current Biology, and they do it, so they just have a tick box which is “yes I have” or “no I haven’t” and if they tick “yes I have” then you just put the code, because you have a little marker code, in that and then when you’re reviewing it you can just look it up and you can look and see what that actually registered and when they registered it, and whether or not they registered it before they actually did it. Which is a nice way to do science and it’s an open way to do science. .