04-05 March 2024
The promise and pitfalls of preregistration meeting was held at the Royal Society in March 2024 to address the utility of preregistration by facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue about its use and goals.
Preregistration, a community-led response to the replication crisis, is the practice of publicly declaring a study’s hypotheses, methods, and analyses before conducting a research study to reduce the flexibility in analysis and interpretation that may lead to biased results. Preregistration enhances transparency, accountability and researcher engagement in a study, though it does not solve all the problems arising from questionable research practices and does not automatically lead to better research.
For a summary of this meeting and its implications, see the blog post by event attendee Dr Mandy Wigdorowitz, Open Research Community Manager, on OSC’s Unlocking Research blog. She reflects on her own practice and suggests including preregistration plans as an output for deposit on the Cambridge institutional repository, Apollo.