Fostering Transparent and Responsible Conduct of Research: what can Journals do?

Description:
Since their origin in the 17th century, publications in scientific journals have become the foundation of scholarly communication. Yet the publication process itself, duties and responsibilities of editors, and the preparation of manuscripts for submission have gone through many changes. The current drive towards study registration, sharing of protocols, manuscript pre-print, full transparency of reporting and the use of reporting guidelines, data sharing, and study replication, are seen as the future of scientific communication and methods of preventing scientific misconduct and undesirable research practices.

The goals of this project are:

1.Study the current state of publication ethics, research integrity- and transparency-related policies of scholarly Journals (by analysing instructions to authors from a representative sample of journals in the humanities, social, natural, and life sciences);


2.Study the trends and changes in publication ethics, research integrity- and transparency-related policies of scholarly Journals (by conducting a systematic review of all studies indexed in MEDLINE, Web of Science and Scopus that have analysed instructions to authors of journals);


3.Study editors’, authors’ and reviewer’ perceptions and attitudes towards topics related to transparent and responsible conduct of research (by conducting large scale surveys, focus group, web-chats and acceleration room sessions);


4.Make (evidence-based) recommendations of how publishers and journals may implement publication principles and foster the integrity and transparency of research (by summarizing the evidence of the first 3 steps of the project).