[Excerpts taken from the preprint “’Because it is the Right Thing to Do’: Taking Stock of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative” by Maike Dahrendorf et al., posted at PsyArXiv Preprints]

“Although the practice of publicly sharing data and code appears relatively straightforward, it is still not the norm…In order to change the status quo and accelerate the adoption of data sharing practices, Morey et al. (2016) introduced the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative (PRO); researchers who sign PRO agree to provide a full review only for manuscripts that publicly share data and code, or else provide a clear reason why sharing is not possible.”

“Almost two years after PRO was launched we sought to take stock of the initiative by surveying signatories on their subjective experiences and opinions.”

“At the time of data collection, 449 researchers had signed the PRO initiative. We successfully retrieved the email addresses of 340 signatories…Compared to surveys on similar topics, the response rate of 37.65%…was relatively high…the final sample size was N = 127.”

“…about 40% of the respondents…indicated that data had been made available, about 30% reported to have received praise from colleagues…and about 25% indicated to have been able to provide a higher-quality review…In contrast, only a small fraction of respondents reported negative experiences…Commensurate with these experiences, 117 respondents indicated that they would sign the initiative again, whereas only 8 indicated that they would not…”

“…it is important to note that this survey only concerns the experiences of a relatively small and highly selective sample. Therefore, one cannot draw general conclusions about the effectiveness and reception of the PRO initiative. Such conclusions necessitate the involvement of researchers on the receiving end of PRO, namely editors and authors.”

To read more, click here.

For previous posts about PRO at TRN, check out here, here, here, and here.