Increasing reproducibility through the co-creation of interventions that support a transparent and trustworthy research ecosystem

TRUSTparency starts from the assumption that what scientists need to trust is that the Mertonian process of organised scepticism can operate, allowing scientific knowledge to self-correct efficiently. By extending this assumption we argue that scientists and all other research stakeholders should be open to adopt innovative interventions, to the extent that they can trust that these are developed, deployed, assessed, and corrected transparently and collaboratively. TRUSTparency’s core guiding principle clearly reflects the above argument, specifically by advocating for a maximally informed, context-sensitive, collaborative, democratic, and transparent approach to facilitating the development of interventions that enhance reproducibility by Research Performing Organisations, Research Funding Organisations, learned societies, and publishers. These types of institutions will be empowered to develop their own policy guidelines in the form of a Reproducibility Promotion Plan (RPP), which will be a sequence of concrete steps to transfer the practices that promote reproducibility to their everyday work and to monitor their effectiveness with mechanisms customised to their specific needs. The co-development activities of the project will be based, with the concerted engagement of the project’s Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB), which is composed, among others, of 10 national Reproducibility Networks (RNs). The SAB will actively participate in the three-stage co-development plan of the project’s interventions: (a) development, (b) pilot testing by 9 institutions, and (c) validation-finalisation. The project's co-creation activities will be applied in tandem with a wide and structured discussion facilitated by the highly innovative comCensus platform. From day one, TRUSTparency will establish a Reproducibility Community and invite all stakeholders with stakes in fostering reproducibility to join through an open call distributed via the professional networks.