Transparency of research processes is required not only for evaluating and reproducing results, but also for research synthesis and meta-analysis from the raw data and for effective replication and extension of that work.
To improve transparency, the authors provide a consensus-based transparency checklist for behavioural and social sciences, with a special focus on confirmatory work.
The checklist content was first developed by 45 journal editors as well as 18 open-science advocates and further fine-tuned using a preregistered Delphi approach.
Using an online template, it is possible to generate a report that can be submitted with a manuscript and/or posted to a public repository, thereby helping editors, reviewers and readers gain insight into the transparency of the submitted studies.
The checklist reinforces the norm of transparency by identifying concrete actions that researchers can take to enhance transparency at all the major stages of the research process.
This approach may also be followed in other fields of science – given that this checklist is built online using R shiny, one could easily develop a similar checklist based, for example, on the new ARRIVE 2.0 recommendations.

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