Transparency, reproducibility, and accountability have become increasingly important considerations for accelerating scientific discovery and strengthening public trust in the academic literature.

Open science is a global movement which argues that all research outputs, not just research results, should be freely accessible and consists of various practices which directly serve to achieve these goals.

Through open science practices, scholars can gain insight into every stage of the research process. This is critical as it allows others to understand exactly how the research was carried out and the decisions that have shaped it along the way.

In this article, we highlight various open science practices which strengthen transparency, reproducibility, and accountability across research.

Why is transparency important?

Transparency is one of the most fundamental principles of scholarly research. If research and the steps taken to produce it cannot be seen, the results cannot be verified or repeated, which prevents them from being completely trusted.

Therefore, transparency is a foundational requirement for research that can be both reproduced and held to account. Unsurprisingly, transparency emerges as a guiding principle for every branch of the open science ecosystem.

Here, we first explore it in relation to Open Access and open peer review.

Open Access

Open Access champions transparency by making research publications freely accessible to the entire scholarly community. It also allows articles to be downloaded and reused by others, maximising its visibility and encouraging greater impact.

By removing the paywalls that have restricted access to academic research, Open Access invites anyone to read and scrutinize essential research. This means that if a piece of Open Access research is referenced within another article, readers can view the entirety of the original article and further understand the relevance of its subsequent citation.

Open Access is also the preferred model for publicly funded research, demonstrated by the growing number of mandates across the globe. This further supports transparency, particularly in understanding how taxpayers’ money funds important scientific discovery.

Open peer review

Another open science practice that champions transparency is open peer review.

Open peer review refers to increasing the visibility of an article’s peer review process. Its adoption has grown steadily since the early 2000s and has accelerated over the past decade.

Sometimes referred to as transparent peer review, open peer review is as an umbrella term for multiple different practices, which apply openness to varying degrees:

• Open reports: The review process is made public along with the published research.
• Open identities: The identities of the author and reviewers are known to each other, and the reader.
• Open participation: The scientific community is encouraged to leave comments on research post-publication.
• Open interaction: Authors, reviewers, and other researchers are free to interact and discuss.

Open peer review supports transparency by making all aspects of the evaluation process open to everyone. Through this increased visibility to an often unseen yet fundamental part of the research lifecycle, readers can see how another scholar has engaged with a work and understood its strengths and potential limitations.

Published review reports also contribute towards a public record which supports wider debate about a paper and gives other reviewers examples to learn from.

MDPI has offered open peer review across its journal portfolio since 2018, starting with Life (ISSN 2075-1729) in 2014.

Read our article ‘How and Why MDPI Offers Open Peer Review’ to learn more.

Why is reproducibility important?

Transparency and reproducibility are closely linked. Transparency provides a window into the scientific process, which is a necessary precondition for reproducibility to be possible at all.

For a study to be fully reproducible, other scholars must be able to follow the exact steps in order to replicate it and verify its results.

Reproducibility is a key concern for many scholars, with many researchers arguing publishing is currently facing a “reproducibility crisis“. Here, scholars have acknowledged how traditional methods sections have shrunk due to journal word and page limits, leading key details to be omitted from a study’s methods.

Open methods

Open Access publishers are primed to support the inclusion of fuller, more detailed reporting of methods since they typically operate online and have fewer space restrictions. This had led to the rise in open methods which build on this by adding structured, detailed, citable outputs alongside the traditional methods section.

Open methods refers to making the protocols, procedures, and materials used in a study as detailed and publicly available as possible. Often going beyond what a standard methods section allows, including:

• Open protocols: Step-by-step accounts of an experimental procedure, published as a citable output. They can be updated and tracked over time, giving other researchers a precise and detailed record of exactly how an experiment was run.
• Standardized identifiers (RRIDs): Unique labels for specific materials, such as antibodies, cell lines, or software. They can correspond to a unique batch-type highlighting exactly what was used in a study.
• Open notebooks: Real-time, digital records of the entire research process. They show negative or inconclusive results that may otherwise be lost if recorded on paper notebooks. By showing research as it happens, they prevent scholars from making the same ‘mistakes’ twice.

These practices used either together or in isolation work to make research reproducible by thoroughly documenting research processes, materials, and workflows.

All research should be reproducible, especially if published in a peer-reviewed journal. So, while reproducibility doesn’t exclusively rest on open method practices, using these demonstrates a concerted effort to ensure others will be able repeat your findings.

Learn more about how open methods advance transparency and reproducibility.

Open code

Modern research increasingly depends on computer code. As a result, code used within a study has become a valuable research output and making it openly accessible has become an important part of open science.

Open code refers to research code which is publicly available for others to view and inspect. This is closely related to “open-source” code, which is shared under an open license that allows others the legal right to reuse, modify, or redistribute it. In practice, code can be open without being open source, so the license attached holds great weight.

Encouraged open code practices include:

• Organising research code.
• Tracking changes with version control platforms.
• Depositing in accessible repositories.
• Attaching an appropriate open-source license.
• Providing instructions for what the code does and how best to use it.

Open code strengthens reproducibility by exposing the exact analytical decisions behind a study’s results. This lets other scholars trace the precise steps used to reach a study’s conclusions.

This is particularly important where the code itself is central to the findings. Interestingly, research fields that require code sharing have seen reproducibility rates rise by nearly 40% compared with those that only require data sharing.

Learn more about open code.

Why is accountability important?

Openness alone isn’t enough to prevent errors within research. However, it does make them easier to identify and address. Closely linked to transparency and reproducibility, accountability promotes the integrity of published work.

It can also be directly seen through the previously mentioned practices.

Open peer review supports accountability by bolstering the transparency of review reports, thus arguably encouraging higher quality reviews on the idea that it will be viewed by others and their name may be attached to it.

Similarly, open methods and open code make researchers answerable for the accuracy and rigor of their study, since gaps or inconsistencies become visible to anyone attempting to reproduce the work.

In addition to these, registered reports are a core part of the open science movement which directly supports research accountability.

Registered reports

Registered reports are a publishing format which subjects a study’s hypothesis, methodology, and analysis plan to peer review before the research is formed and any data are collected.

Registered reports can be condensed into two main stages:

• Stage 1: Authors submit their research plan which is evaluated by reviewers based on its relevance, rigor, and soundness.
• Stage 2: The final study is peer reviewed again. Here, reviewers consider the full study and assess compliance with the original protocol.

Registered reports have particularly important implications for accountability since they work to reduce publication bias and forces researchers to stick to their original hypothesis.

This stops unethical research practices such as p-hacking, where testing continues until the desired result is achieved, or HARKing where the hypothesis is formed only after the results have been obtained.

They also work to prevent data, which is viewed as negative, from being thrown away in order to suit a specific hypothesis. Registered reports allow and encourage negative results to be published, in a structured and robust way.

MDPI introduced registered reports as an article type, enabling researchers to receive early feedback on their study rationale and methodology before data collection, thereby promoting transparency, reproducibility, and accountability.

Read MDPI’s guidelines for authors submitting a registered report.

Shared goals

Transparency, reproducibility, and accountability are mutually reinforcing rather than separate goals.

In summary, these examples have uncovered how:

• Open Access removes the barriers to reading research;
• open peer review supports the visibility of its evaluation;
• open methods and open code expose the full process behind it;
• registered reports ensure that approved approaches are followed.

Together, these open science practices create research that others can read, verify, build on, and trust.

MDPI advances open science

As a pioneering Open Access publisher for more than three decades, MDPI is committed to advancing open science and fostering positive research practices which are available to all.

In addition to the practices discussed in this article, open science advocates for open data, open educational resources, FAIR data principles, open research assessment, and more. Together, they contribute to a larger movement of ensuring high-quality research that is transparent, reproducible and held to account.

We’re dedicated to giving you all the information you need to understand Open Access. Our article All You Need to Know About Open Access covers a range of topics.