Badges for Open Research Practices Now Available on OSF Registrations

Changing the research culture to more open, transparent, and reproducible practices is a collective action movement across the entire research system. In a coordinated systematic approach, the stakeholders, communities, researchers, and consumers need the policies, incentives, and infrastructure in place to change norms and behaviors and set new practice standards for communities. We call this the Theory of Change, where changing the research culture starts by making open science required (Policy), rewarding (Incentives), normative (Communities), easy (User experience), and possible (Infrastructure).

Using badges to signal open practice adoption is both an incentive to reward adoption of transparent behaviors, and also a norming activity that can shift communities towards adoption of open behaviors. By incorporating this into the infrastructure of OSF, research communities can further cultivate adoption of openness and transparency using badge incentives and an easy workflow.

Open science badges can now be earned directly on OSF by linking data, analytic code, materials, papers and supplemental resources to your registrations. Badges that can be earned on the OSF:

Data
The Open Data badge is awarded when digitally-shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results are publicly available.

Materials
The Open Materials badge is earned by making publicly available the components of the research methodology needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis.

Analytic Code
The Open Analytic Code badge is earned by making publicly available the analytical code needed to reproduce the reported analysis.

Papers
The Papers badge is earned when any manuscripts, preprints, post-prints, reports, or peer reviewed publications that were generated from the study are made publicly available and linked using a DOI to your registration.

Supplements
The Supplements badge is earned when any other resources that are created from a study that do not align with any of the previous items are made publicly available and linked using a DOI to your registration.

Earning these badges are as easy as linking open research resources to your registration via a DOI. Simply go to your registration, click on “Resources”, click to add your new resource, and enter the DOI for the resource. The appropriate badge or icon is displayed on your registration and in search results, making it easy for others to find the open study related resources.. You can learn more about how to link these DOI through our help guides.

Try it out! Link resources, both on and off OSF, to your registrations and make it even easier to share your research plan and materials!

Then let us know what you think! What do you like about the new workflow and how can we take it to the next level?