Registered Reports are a form of empirical publication in which study proposals are peer reviewed and pre-accepted before research is undertaken. By deciding which articles are published based on the question, theory and methods, Registered Reports offer a remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases. Here, we reflect on the history, progress and future prospects of the Registered Reports initiative and offer practical guidance for authors, reviewers and editors. We review early evidence that Registered Reports are working as intended, while at the same time acknowledging that they are not a universal solution for irreproducibility. We also consider how the policies and practices surrounding Registered Reports are changing, or must change in the future, to address limitations and adapt to new challenges. We conclude that Registered Reports are promoting reproducibility, transparency and self-correction across disciplines and may help reshape how society evaluates research and researchers.

Registered Reports are a form of empirical journal article in which study proposals are peer reviewed and pre-accepted before research is undertaken. By deciding which articles are published based on the question, theory, and proposed methods, Registered Reports offer a powerful remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases. Here we reflect on the history, progress and future prospects of the Registered Reports initiative, and also offer practical guidance for authors, reviewers, and editors encountering the format for the first time. While the key ingredients of pre-study review and results-blind acceptance are far from novel – and are already adopted independently in a variety of contexts – Registered Reports are the first mechanism to combine them into a mainstream policy that has won appeal with multiple stakeholders in the research process. We review early evidence that Registered Reports are working as intended, while at the same acknowledging that they are not a universal solution for irreproducibility. We also consider how the policies and practices surrounding Registered Reports are changing, or must change in future, to address limitations and adapt to new challenges. In spite of these caveats, we conclude that Registered Reports are promoting reproducibility, transparency and self-correction across a wide range of disciplines, and may help reshape how society evaluates research and researchers.

Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on embedding open and reproducible approaches into research. One essential step in accomplishing this larger goal is to embed such practices into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. However, this often requires substantial time and resources to implement. Also, while many pedagogical resources are regularly developed for this purpose, they are not often openly and actively shared with the wider community. The creation and public sharing of open educational resources is useful for educators who wish to embed open scholarship and reproducibility into their teaching and learning. In this article, we describe and openly share a bank of teaching resources and lesson plans on the broad topics of open scholarship, open science, replication, and reproducibility that can be integrated into taught courses, to support educators and instructors. These resources were created as part of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) hackathon at the 2021 Annual Conference, and we detail this collaborative process in the article. By sharing these open pedagogical resources, we aim to reduce the labour required to develop and implement open scholarship content to further the open scholarship and open educational materials movement.

In this Registered Report, we assessed the utility of the affective priming paradigm (APP) as an indirect measure of food attitudes and related choice behaviour in two separate cohorts. Participants undertook a speeded evaluative categorization task in which target words were preceded by food primes that differed in terms of affective congruence with the target, explicit liking (most liked or least liked), and healthiness (healthy or unhealthy). Non-food priming effects were tested as a manipulation check, and the relationship between food priming effects and impulsive choice behaviour was also investigated using a binary food choice task. As predicted, priming effects were observed for both healthy and unhealthy foods, but there was no difference in the magnitude of these effects. This may suggest that the paradigm is most sensitive to affective, but not cognitive, components of attitudes (i.e., healthiness), but alternative theoretical explanations and implications of this finding are discussed. Food and nonfood priming effects were observed in both reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER) data, but contrary to expectations, we found no association between food RT priming effects and choice behaviour. All findings from confirmatory analyses regarding RT and ER priming effects, and the absence of the expected correlations between priming effects and impulsive food choices, were successfully replicated in the online cohort of participants. Overall, this study confirms the robustness of the APP as an indirect measure of food liking and raises questions about its applied value for research of eating behaviours.

Journals exert considerable control over letters, commentaries and online comments that criticize prior research (post-publication critique). We assessed policies (Study One) and practice (Study Two) related to post-publication critique at 15 top-ranked journals in each of 22 scientific disciplines ( N = 330 journals). Two-hundred and seven (63%) journals accepted post-publication critique and often imposed limits on length (median 1000, interquartile range (IQR) 500–1200 words) and time-to-submit (median 12, IQR 4–26 weeks). The most restrictive limits were 175 words and two weeks; some policies imposed no limits. Of 2066 randomly sampled research articles published in 2018 by journals accepting post-publication critique, 39 (1.9%, 95% confidence interval [1.4, 2.6]) were linked to at least one post-publication critique (there were 58 post-publication critiques in total). Of the 58 post-publication critiques, 44 received an author reply, of which 41 asserted that original conclusions were unchanged. Clinical Medicine had the most active culture of post-publication critique: all journals accepted post-publication critique and published the most post-publication critique overall, but also imposed the strictest limits on length (median 400, IQR 400–550 words) and time-to-submit (median 4, IQR 4–6 weeks). Our findings suggest that top-ranked academic journals often pose serious barriers to the cultivation, documentation and dissemination of post-publication critique.