Comprised of experts in psychology and open science, the APA Open Science and Methodology (OSM) Committee works to inform editors on the latest initiatives and facilitate implementation of open science practices.
One of such initiatives was the implementation of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines at core APA Journals. We asked OSM about their thoughts on the TOP Guidelines and what they mean for the future of psychology.
APA and psychological science benefit by making our research more planful, accessible, transparent, reproducible, and useful for future research. More broadly, beyond improving research and the quality of APA journals, TOP also continues to grow the scientific reputation of psychology as we join and collaborate with the multidisciplinary scientific community that is also increasingly committing itself to the TOP Guidelines.
The TOP guidelines benefit researchers by improving the research process—transparently documenting research increases confidence, reduces errors, and can even save time, especially when these processes are built into the research workflow from the start. There is also extrinsic value to the researcher. Researchers will accrue a positive scientific reputation when they habitually write papers that provide more information (by sharing data sets, code, and research materials) and are more planful (through design and analysis transparency, and preregistration). Papers that share data also tend to get cited more often. Under this mindset, even when a journal following Level 1 TOP Guidelines makes data and materials sharing optional, the higher Level 2 TOP Guidelines may inspire authors to require themselves to share data and materials in their publications, whenever ethically possible.
In addition to improving the scholarship of authors, the TOP Guidelines provide an important structure for editors, editorial assistants, and reviewers to coordinate better in cultivating good scholarship and upholding the mission and regular operations of the journal. Much like a grocery list, the TOP Guidelines help ensure that all the bases of research transparency are covered by the journal (no one forgets the milk). Different journals will handle the review of the TOP Guidelines for incoming manuscripts differently, assigning TOP-related responsibilities to the reviewers, action editors, manuscript coordinators—and authors themselves.
The TOP domain called “design and analysis transparency” recommends or requires adherence to reporting standards like the Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS). The initiatives are similar philosophically, supporting transparency (e.g., the distinction of primary and secondary hypotheses and exploratory and confirmatory work)—but JARS is much more detailed and encompasses things like specific statistical analyses, reporting on various sample demographics, and discussions of types of generalizability that are not directly addressed by the more general TOP Guidelines. Likewise, preregistration can take on a variety of forms, but the particular preregistration used by an author, or recommended by a journal, may vary widely by discipline and type of research conducted.
If the journal endorses TOP, you will find detailed information on what is expected from an author in the journal's instructions to authors.
Recognizing the growing importance of and interest in open science in psychology, the APA Publications and Communications Board created the OSM Committee, comprised of experts in psychological research. Tasked with evaluating the latest open science initiatives and sharing their findings with APA editors and publishing staff, the committee plays an important role in the advancement of psychological science.
Katie Corker, PhD, chair of OSM, associate professor of quantitative, social, and personality psychology at Grand Valley State University. Dr. Corker is the past president and current executive officer of the Society for the Improvement for Psychological Science (SIPS). She is a fellow of the Midwestern Psychological Association, an associate editor for Collabra: Psychology, and serves on a variety of editorial boards. For nearly ten years, she has worked with researchers and scientific societies to improve research methods and practices in psychological research.
Lisa DeBruine, PhD, professor in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow. Dr. DeBruine’s research focuses on kinship and how social perception of morphology affects social behavior. Her interests include teaching computational skills for reproducible research, large-scale collaboration, and developing web-based resources for increasing reproducibility in data collection and stimulus generation. Dr. DeBruine is a “recommender” for PCI Registered Reportsopens in new window and an associate director of the Psychological Science Acceleratoropens in new window.