Thu 14 May 2020 7:39PM
Pre-registration & Earth Science?
Hi everyone, I'm the Open Science & subject liaison to Earth Sciences at UC Berkeley. Preregistrations have become an important part of research projects in other fields I deal with. I'm curious to hear if anyone has a sense if this practice is coming for Earth Science (or maybe physical science more broadly)? Most preregistration repos and templates are designed with social science in mind. I could imagine EarthArXiv becoming a home for these types of docs, though as I said, I don't have a sense of how much preregistering hypotheses and/or research plans is migrating from field to field. Thanks for your thoughts!
Victor Venema · Mon 1 Jun 2020 12:38AM
I am not aware of an study using pre-registration in climatology. So if we find more I would be interested.
However, with a group I am working on one. In the ISTI we are generating a dataset that will be used to test data processing tools. We wanted to write a paper about how the dataset is generated and one on how the processing tools will be assessed. Reading this question I realize that this would be a pre-registration of the analysis. In this case the pre-registration would not be blind, as would be normally the case, and we mainly do it so that the other participants know how they will be judged, not to get complaints afterwards that the analysis was not fair for a specific tool.
Pre-registering climate studies will be hard. On the one hand, in climatology you normally already know how the data will look, even if you gather new data for a more precise estimate, how the climate changes is known. On the other hand the analysis tends to be unique. As the data is not particularly new, you tend to make a paper worthwhile by doing new types of analysis and then it is hard to know in advance what to expect and accurately write up how you will do this.
If EarthArXiv would do blind pre-registrations, we would need a mechanism to upload a document that will be published later at a fixed date (or earlier if the authors want). But maybe we best leave this to COS, especially as long as pre-registrations are rare.
Such a mechanism would also be handy in case of embargoes. Then someone could upload their post-print when the article is accepted and it would be automatically made public when the embargo of the publisher ends. Being able to do this when publishing and not having to do this one year later by hand likely increases the number of uploads.