TRUSTparency is a three-year Horizon Europe project dedicated to the application of an informed, context-sensitive, collaborative, democratic, and transparent approach that will facilitate the development of interventions that increase reproducibility of research results.
The key standpoints of this project are:
- Sound science and policymaking require trust in the Process.
- Transparency is the basis of trust.
- Inclusivity and (disciplinary) diversity are key to good intervention design and policymaking.
Objectives
- Create a state-of-the-art knowledge base on existing interventions on increasing reproducibility and map disparities in the level of attention paid to reproducibility across types of institutions, KPMs (Knowledge Production Modes), and countries.
- Establish specific cooperation measures and coordinated efforts across diverse types of institutions, KPMs, and countries in Europe and beyond.
- Co-develop a structured collection of practices that increase reproducibility and modular training materials adapted to the needs of RPOs (Research Performing Organisations), RFO
’s (Research Funding Organisations), and publishers. - Co-develop guidelines for RPPs (Reproducibility Promotion Plan), including policy guidelines and monitoring mechanisms adapted to the needs of RPOs, RFOs, and publishers.
- Create a Reproducibility Community as a central platform to boost communication, facilitate recruitment, and promote exploitation of TRUSTparency’s outputs.
Core Deliverables
- A State-of-the-Art collection of existing interventions that, demonstrably, promote reproducibility
- Training materials for reproducibility and for the RPPs
- RPPs for PROs, RFOs, and publishers
- Framework to map epistemological disparities
- Strategies and instruments to identify and engage end user communities
Outcomes
We anticipate that TRUSTparency’s outputs will have the following oucomes:
- Facilitated development, implementation and monitoring of interventions in research organisations that increase the reproducibility of scientific results;
- More collaboration, joint actions by stakeholders, and mutual learning, notably between national reproducibility networks, to increase reproducibility of scientific results;
- Greater alignment of policies and reduction in disparities between research organizations and between countries in terms of their attention to reproducibility of scientific results;
- Facilitated development and implementation of training programmes and awareness raising.
Background
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 (RPOs), Research Funding Organisations (RFOs), learned societies, and publishers.
TRUSTparency’s interventions will be designed not to act as static, irrelevant, and burdensome red tape, but rather as an adaptable plan of action that will facilitate RPOs, RFOs, learned societies, and publishers to promote reproducibility. Specifically, these types of institutions will be empowered to develop their own policy guidelines in the form of an action plan, the Reproducibility Promotion Plan (RPP), inspired by the TIER2 (tier2-project.eu/) and SOPs4RI (sops4ri.eu/) projects, 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. A set of training materials, the modular structure of which are inspired by the ROSiE (rosie-project.eu) project training materials, will provide guidance to the implementation of TRUSTparency interventions.
