---
title: "Research transparency"
chunk: 2/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_transparency"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:17:09.728209+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== A new dimension of open science? ===
Transparency has been increasingly acknowledged as an important component of open science. Until the 2010s, definitions of open science have been mostly focused on technical access and enhanced participation and collaboration between academics and non-academics. In 2016, Liz Lyon identified transparency as a "third dimension" of open science, due to the fact that "the concept of transparency and the associated term 'reproducibility', have become increasingly important in the current interdisciplinary research environment." According to Kevin Elliott, the open science movement "encompasses a number of different initiatives aimed at somewhat different forms of transparency."
First drafted in 2014, the TOP guidelines have significantly contributed to bring transparency on the agenda of the open science movements. They aim to promote an "open research culture" and implement "strong incentives to be more transparent". They rely on eight standards, with different levels of compliance. While the standards are modular, they also aim to articulate a consistent ethos of science as "they also complement each other, in that commitment to one standard may facilitate adoption of others.".
This open science framework of transparency has been in turn coopted by leading contributors and institutions on the topic of research transparency.  After 2015, contributions from science historians underlined that there have been no significant deterioration of research quality, as past experiments and research design were not significantly better conceived and the rate of false or partially false has likely remained approximately constant for the last decades. Consequently, proponents of research transparency have come to embrace more explicitly the discourse of open science: the culture of scientific transparency becomes a new ideal to achieve rather than a fundamental principle to re-establish.
The concept of transparency has contributed to create convergences between open science and other open movements in different areas such as open data or open government. In 2015, the OECD describe transparency as a common "rationale for open science and open data".

== History ==

=== Discourse and practices of research transparency (before 1945) ===
Transparency has been a fundamental criterion of experimental research for centuries. Successful replications have become an integral part of the institutional discourse of natural sciences (then called natural philosophy) in the 17th century. An early scientific society of Florence the Accademia del Cimento adopted in 1657 the motto provando e riprovando as a call for "repeated (public) performances of experimental trials" A key member of the Accademia, the naturalist Francesco Redi described extensively of the forms and benefits of procedural experimentation, that made it possible to check for random effects, the soundness of the experiment design, or causal relationships through repeated trials Replication and the open documentation of scientific experiments has become a key component of the diffusion of scientific knowledge in society: once they attained a satisfying rate of success, experiments could be performed in a variety of social spaces such as courts, marketplaces or learned salon.
Although transparency has been early on acknowledged as a key component of science, it was not defined consistently. Most concept associated today with research transparency have arisen as terms of the art with no clear and widespread definitions. The concept of reproducibility appeared in an article on the "Methods of illuminations" first published in 1902: one of the methods examined was deemed limited regarding "reproducibility and constancy" In 2019, the National Academies underlined that the distinction between reproduction, repetition and replication has remained largely unclear and unharmonized across disciplines: "What one group means by one word, the other group means by the other word. These terms — and others, such as repeatability — have long been used in relation to the general concept of one experiment or study confirming the results of another."
Beyond this lack of formalization, there was a significant drift between the institutional and disciplinary discourse on research transparency and the reality of research work, that has persisted till the 21st century. Due to the high cost of the apparatus and the lack of incentives, most experiences were not reproduced by contemporary researchers: even a committed proponent of experimentalism like Robert Doyle had to devolve to a form of virtual experimentalism, by describing in detail a research design that has only been run once For Friedrich Steinle, the gap between the postulated virtue of transparency and the material conditions of science has never been solved: "The rare cases in which replication actually is attempted are those that either are central for theory development (e.g., by being incompatible with existing theory) or promise broad attention due to major economical perspectives. Despite the formal ideal of replicability, we do not live in a culture of replication."