Another step towards effective RE/RI policies

Excerpt from the BEYOND public consultation (2/3)

From September 2023 until June 2024, various stakeholder groups were involved in the public consultation activities of BEYOND. The approach included an anonymous online survey with multiple-choice and open questions (205 participants) and semi-structured in-depth interviews (31). The information you see here is based on the learnings of the public consultation. Find the full report at Zenodo.

We asked the participants of the public consultation about how to improve the effectiveness of RE/RI policies and promote good science. The emphases were different, each forming a piece of the puzzle.

Building institutional culture:
- Safe spaces for RE/RI-related conversations
- Leadership provides example on valuing good and honest research
- Training focusing on examples of good scientific practice
- Opportunity for experience exchange both for RE/RI positions and for researchers

RE/RI regulations usability:
- Sufficient reminders on new processes
- Data stewards on board
- Streamlined ethics approval processes
- Aligned RE/RI guidelines on different levels
- Few, short, memorable: focus on the essence of the regulations

Contextual factors of attention:
- Involving all generations of researchers: the juniors might be more receptive towards training
- To reach alignment, cooperation with the policymakers at the state level is needed
- To really make a change, different research outputs should be equally valued, putting quality over quantity

Measuring the effectiveness:
- Clear consequences of RE/RI policy breaches
- Institutional transparency, e.g., yearly research misconduct reports
- Recognition of good research practices

"Wrong incentives also hinder researchers from being more transparent and being more open. So that’s a topic I'm more involved in - open science. But there is no real incentive to be open and to share data. It actually causes more work and more bureaucracy, and so researchers don’t like it."
- Reproducibility network representative