From the New York Times:
my colleagues and I propose a radically different publishing model: Ask journal editors and scientific peers to review study designs and analysis plans and commit to publish the results if the study is conducted and reported in a professional manner (which will be ensured by a second round of peer review).
This procedure encourages authors and reviewers to develop the strongest possible designs — including those that replicate previously published studies — and eliminates perverse incentives to find or emphasize significant results after the fact. A new scientific format called Registered Reports using this approach has already been adopted at numerous journals across the social and natural sciences.
In a new white paper, I propose that the American Political Science Association offer options for articles in a Registered Reports-style format. Researchers in other academic disciplines and scientific associations are starting to do the same.
Unfortunately, overcoming the inertia of the current system will be difficult, which is why altering the incentives created by federal science policy is so important.
The acid test, of course, is what happens when a politically incorrect but experimentally correct paper appears.
Much correct new science is incorrect politics.
Of course, it isn’t the incorrectness that makes it valuable. Rather, what makes it incorrect is the number of tenured profbots it “irrelevates,” so to speak.
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