Nature to Publish Registered Reports

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Nature ’s decision to mandate peer review for all papers. It’s an appropriate time to introduce readers and authors to Registered Reports, a research-article format that Nature is offering from this week for studies designed to test whether a hypothesis is supported (see go.nature.com/3kivjh1).

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00506-2

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I do think it is a good idea to have negative results published in some form. Having Registered Reports (RR) be their own thing separate from classic published papers while also having peer review seems like a good solution. If RR’s can count towards productivity on grants then it will offer some incentive for writing the RR to begin with. It is a step above Rxiv servers. I do sometimes wonder how much time and resources are wasted repeating research others have done but have not published. It could also help polish the overall research methodology.

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Scientific publishing is in dire need of innovation. The more experiments like this better.

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Hi all, someone alerted me to this thread and I thought I’d add a comment.

If you read the Nature announcement (you have to get to the fifth paragraph), you’ll see that this is not new. At this point IMO, it’s not an innovation and it’s not an experiment – Registered Reports are about ten years old. You can read more at the Center for Open Science and at PLOS Comp Biol. PLOS ONE has been publishing RRs for three years, and the concept will grow at PLOS (PLOS Biology started a year ago).

So, kudos to Nature for joining the movement. They didn’t start it.

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Hi Steve! :slight_smile:
This is definitely not new, but it’s good to see it gaining traction.

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