On January 21^st, the Center for Open Science (COS) held a free webinar on pre-registration entitled “The What, Why, and How of Preregistration”. For those who were unable to watch, it is now posted on YouTube.

The actual presentation is about 31 minutes, followed by the presenters (Alex DeHaven and Sara Bowman) answering questions for another 25 minutes.

The presentation is a great introduction to pre-registration and is particularly strong in going through the steps of posting a pre-registration on OSF.

Some representative slides are posted below to give a flavour of the content of the presentation. The time records at the bottom of the slides indicate where during the presentations the topics are covered.

— Introduction:

– Pre-registration is most useful for “confirmatory” modes of research:

– Difference between confirmatory and exploratory research:

– Components of a pre-registration:

– OSF has seven different pre-registration templates one can choose:

– OSF also lists a number of pre-registration resources including examples:

– At the 12-minute mark, the presentation goes through a step-by-step explanation of how to write and register a pre-registration:

– The presentation focuses on the different steps associated with an OSF pre-registration, the first of the seven different options:

– The presentation also discusses how to search for other pre-registations at OSF and elsewhere:

To watch the YouTube, click here.