The $1,000,000 Pre-registration Challenge

Attention researchers! The Center for Open Science, with funding from the Arnold Foundation, is sponsoring the $1,000,000 pre-registration challenge. To raise awareness of what pre-registration is and its importance, the Center for Open Science will award $1,000 to 1,000 researchers who publish the results of pre-registered research. Prize winners will use the Open Science Framework, a free scholarly commons, to register their pre-clinical or basic research study before it is conducted and then have their work published in an eligible journal. The awards will be distributed in four waves between this summer and the end of 2018.

Pre-registration is one method of upholding important scientific practices that prevent confirmative bias through stating the hypotheses and analytic plan in advance of the data collection. Pre-registration doesn’t preclude the development and analysis of exploratory hypotheses; these can be added to the final article as potential additional investigations to be developed. Pre-registration simply makes the distinction between confirmatory, a-priori hypothesis tests and exploratory, data-led hypothesis-generating analyses more clear. Clinical trials are required to be pre-registered, but other research is not. This challenge is intended to bring awareness to pre-clinical and basic researchers of the advantages of pre-registration.

For more information about the $1,000,000 pre-registration challenge, go to cos.io/prereg or contact David Mellor at the Center for Open Science at prereg@cos.io.