Our BABCP journals have for some time been supportive of open science in its various forms. We are now taking the next steps towards this in terms of our policies and practices. For some things we are transitioning to the changes (but would encourage our contributors to embrace these as early as possible), and in others we are implementing things straight away. This is part of the global shift to open practices in science, and has many benefits and few, if any, drawbacks. See for example http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/portals-and-platforms/goap/open-science-movement/
One of the main drivers for open science has been the recent ‘reproducibility crisis’, which crystallised long-standing concerns about a range of biases within and across research publication. Open science and research transparency will provide the means to reduce the impact of such biases, and can reasonably be considered to be a paradigm change. There are benefits beyond dealing with problems, however.
McKiernan et al. (Reference McKiernan, Bourne, Brown, Buck, Kenall, Lin, McDougall, Nosek, Ram, Soderberg, Spies, Thaney, Updegrove, Woo and Yarkoni2016) for example suggest that ‘open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities’. This is, of course, from a researcher-focused perspective. The BABCP and the Journal Editors take the view that open and transparent research practices will have the greatest long-term impact on service users both directly and indirectly through more accurate reporting and interpretation of research and its applications by CBT practitioners. So what are the practical changes we are implementing in partnership with our publisher, Cambridge University Press?
Research Transparency Policy
We believe that that research articles should contain sufficient information to allow other researchers to understand and replicate findings. We have therefore implemented a Research Transparency Policy to make, where possible, evidence, data, code and other materials that underpin their findings openly available to readers. We are encouraging authors to comply with this policy which is now in place, with the aim of making this a mandatory policy by January 2022.
Where to share research materials
We are recommending that authors share their materials in a dedicated repository appropriate to the materials and the journals’ research output. Authors are free to pick the repository that they see fit, such as such as those offered by Open Science Framework, Dataverse, Dryad, the Qualitative Data Repository or Zenodo (for example).
How is this being implemented?
BCP and tCBT authors will be asked to supply a Data Availability Statement at article submission stage. This is a brief statement about whether the authors of an article have made the evidence supporting their findings available, and if so, where readers may access it. To retain author anonymity during the peer review process, the Data Availability Statement should be placed on the Title Page of the submission. In addition, we ask that authors state in their cover letter whether they have made their data publicly available, and confirm the inclusion of the Data Availability Statement. If the authors are not making their data publicly available, we ask them to state the reason why in their cover letter.
Professor Paul Salkovskis and Dr Richard Thwaites, December 2020
More information on data availability statements can be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/open-data/data-availability-statements
The Journals’ Research Transparency Policy can be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-and-cognitive-psychotherapy/information/research-transparency
If anyone needs any further information or guidance on this, please contact the Journals’ Managing Editor, Steph Curnow, at journals.office@babcp.com
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