Correction to 'Open science and modified funding lotteries can impede the natural selection of bad science'

Perspectives on scientific error

Theoretical arguments and empirical investigations indicate that a high proportion of published findings do not replicate and are likely false. The current position paper provides a broad perspective on scientific error, which may lead to replication failures. This broad perspective focuses on reform history and on opportunities for future reform. We organize our perspective along four main themes: institutional reform, methodological reform, statistical reform and publishing reform. For each theme, we illustrate potential errors by narrating the story of a fictional researcher during the research cycle. We discuss future opportunities for reform. The resulting agenda provides a resource to usher in an era that is marked by a research culture that is less error-prone and a scientific publication landscape with fewer spurious findings.

The credibility crisis and democratic governance: how to reform university governance to be compatible with the nature of science

To address the credibility crisis facing many disciplines, change is needed at the institutional level. Science will only function optimally if the culture by which it is governed becomes aligned with the way of thinking required in science itself. The paper suggests a series of graduated reforms to university governance, to radically reform the operation of universities. The reforms are based on existing established open democratic practices. The aim is for universities to become consistent with the flourishing of science and research more generally.

Mechanistic modeling for the masses

The generalizability crisis is compounded, or even partially caused, by a lack of specificity in psychological theories. Expanding the use of mechanistic models among psychologists is therefore important, but faces numerous hurdles. A cultural evolutionary approach can help guide and evaluate interventions to improve modeling efforts in psychology, such as developing standards and implementing them at the institutional level.

Invisible science: publication of negative research results

Abstract An important part of scientific research activities yield negative results – non-confirmatory and null data, inconclusive experiments, unexpected data. These results permeate the entire research cycle and constitute an important part of the full scientific knowledge flow generation. However, despite the acknowledgment that it is the non-confirmatory findings that result in the rejection of consolidated hypotheses that drive the progress of science, most of these investigation routes are not documented. Growing competition for resources, tenure, and impact publications induces researchers to produce “positive” results that are more likely to be published, interfering with the principles of science reproducibility and self-correction and in the scientific communication cycle. This study aims to review negative results incorporation in the traditional academic publication cycle. It also seeks to identify and systematize the main barriers that prevent researchers from publishing negative results. This exploratory study is based methodologically on the scarce literature on the subject. It confirms the initial assumption that few scientific journals accept, edit special issues or are dedicated to the publication of negative results.