Pre-registration contributes to making your work more open and transparent. Pre-registration means that you place your plan, methodology , protocols in an appropriate pre-registration server. Those servers will generally give you a DOI and a time-stamp.
Pre-registration is a great way to make your project known. As stated by the Centre for Open Science, you can pre-register before you start collecting your data, after being asked to collect more data following peer-review or other feedback, before you begin analysis of an existing data set.
In all these cases, you clarify ahead of doing the work how you will conduct your analysis. This helps preserving the integrity of the research process and avoiding publication bias. It helps you plan better for your research and pin down more precisely what your methodology will be before sharing it. In the long run, this can save you time and make your work more robust. It also allows you to stake your claim to the project earlier in the process. Pre-registration servers will give you a date stamp and a DOI for your registration.
One of the most prominent platform to pre-register is the Open Science Framework. You can also find other servers, some are linked to specific subject areas like psychology or clinical studies.
You can explore examples of pre-registrations on these servers to understand better how they work and how to register your own work.
A registered report is a form of peer-reviewed publication. Publishing a registered report allows you to test the rigour and strength of your methodology ahead of the collection of data.
As with pre-regisration, it guard against the risk of publication bias and gives a more accurate picture of the research.
It guarantees the publication of the results, whether or not they are positive or negative. This helps correct the tendency of journal to publish only positive results and helps strengthen the accuracy of the scholarly record.
Registered reports happen in two stages.
Stage 1: you submit to a journal that publishes registered report your introduction, method, proposed analysis and pilot data/experiment if conducted.
After editorial scanning for suitability, this is sent to peer-reviewers. They will either accept, suggest revisions or reject the report.
If accepted, generally after some revision that strengthen your methodology, you have an in principle acceptance of publication if you conduct your research according to your outlined protocol. This does not preclude conducting additional non-registered analysis or reporting of serendipitous results.
Stage 2: Once the data has been collected and analysed, you can submit the full article with introduction and method from the previous submission alongside the results and discussion/analysis of those results. The result section can include any additional unregistered analysis conducted and serendipitous results.
This manuscript will undergo peer-review and be published if accepted.
Authors of registred reports are encouraged to share their data (See Data Management)
A registered report is a tool to enhance research integrity and ensure that rigorous methods and protocols are at the core of the research process.
For the researcher, it is a good process to ensure that the methods you intend to employ for your work are considered robust and appropriate for your research.
It also guarentees that your will be able to publish your results. Both your methods and protocols, and your results will have undergone peer-review demonstrating the value and quality of your research.
Some journals have now adopted the practice of publishing registered reports. These are listed in the participating journal lists available from the Centre for Open Science.
They list 300 journals that are publishing registered reports.
Some publishers provide a list of their journals that accept registered reports. For instance Taylor and Francis provide a list by disciplines.
A pre-print is the finished version of the article before it has undergone peer review. This is the version you can submit to the journal of your choice for publication. There is no cost to the publication of a pre-print. Using a pre-print repository or server is an opportunity to share your research at an early stage. Preprints will generally be assigned a unique identifier such as a DOI. They can be cited and can be indexed in some databases such as Google Scholar.
For some disciplines, preprints are embedded in the process of sharing research results. The first repository was ArXiv founded in 1991 by academics in physics. It now caters for physics, mathematics, economics and other subjects. Pre-prints tend to be discipline-specific, and the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories is a good place to locate those that are relevant to you.
Pre-print servers might offer the opportunity for comments and provide open peer review and comments, which can help you improve your work before submission. Some pre-print servers are starting to embed peer review in their workflow, such as Review Commons, PCI Peer Community In, Rapid Reviews, Pre-Review and Science CoLab. You can find some information on these in our blog.
Preprints are a good way to share your research as early as possible. The benefits of publishing your research earlier are that it can have an impact more quickly and you can get feedback on your work before sending it to a journal.
There are a range of preprint servers.
Some are generic, others are discipline specific.
Below are some examples of preprint servers: