This Transparency Checklist was created by 63 editors and open science advocates to help authors report various transparency-related aspects of the research reported in a manuscript. The checklist presents a consensus-based solution to a difficult task: identifying the most important steps needed for achieving transparent research in these fields. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript and/or post to a public repository.
The main benefits of the checklist:
- The checklist can help authors improve the transparency of their work before submission.
- Disclosed checklist responses can help editors, reviewers, and readers gain insight into the transparency of the submitted studies.
We are hoping that all researchers, journals, and institutions will consider using this tool. For example, authors of primary data analyses could voluntarily use the tool and include a link to the report it produces in the manuscript.
Preliminary assessments indicate that it generally takes authors only a few minutes to complete the report (except in cases in which questions posed by the app lead authors to take steps to improve the transparency of the manuscript).
The manuscript, just published at Nature Human Behaviour, summarizes the current version of this tool, a shiny app. You can take it for a test drive here: http://www.shinyapps.org/apps/TransparencyChecklist/