The role of preregistration and registered reports in improving research transparency and reproducibility

Interviewer: Dr. Peter Rasmussen, thank you for joining us today. In this interview, we would like to discuss preregistration and registered reports as a framework to improve transparency and credibility in scientific research. You and your colleagues at the Editorial Board of the Journal of Experimental Physiology recently marked the first registered report in the field of physiology to have both its protocol and its results published in the same journal. Could you begin by explaining the process of preregistration and registered reporting in scientific publications? Dr. Ernst-Rasmussen: Yes, certainly. There are two steps to the process. One is preregistration and one is the registered reporting. The definition of the preregistration is that it needs to publish a detailed research plan of the study, that includes the hypothesis, the methodology, and the analysis plan. All those points that you typically report before the data collection begins. You can do that in multiple ways. There are platforms out there as we mentioned in the paper, like OSF AsPredicted, and if you're running a larger study, you can also do this at clinicaltrials.gov. As I mentioned, the components are hypothesis, design, how you collect your data, and what analysis you have planned. The idea of doing that is that then you have the possibility, later on in the whole process, to distinguish between what has been hypothesized and tested a priori and