Science is competitive as well as collaborative and being first in making a discovery, or debunking a theory, is specially rewarded. However, preregistration allows excellent means of taking precautions against being scooped.   

• Preregistered studies are timestamped. This provides evidence that a research idea originated from your preregistered study. 
• Access to the preregistered research plan can be restricted (e.g., preregistration studies on COS may be embargoed for up to 4 years) allowing only those who have access/permission to view the document for that period.  

Another form of preregistration is submitting an article as a Registered Report. This relatively new publishing format that accepts publication based on the review of a study design as opposed to the completed study.  Each submission goes through two separate rounds of assessment (before and after data collection) by the same journal-assigned reviewers. This means that the study benefits from expert advice at every stage of scientific discovery – and for those worried about scooping – it provides a great alternative to preregistering a study on a repository service. 

Like all new initiatives, adopting a more open/reproducible research workflow will take some adjustment. However, as the scientific community strives to increase the transparency and reliability of research, it is important that we embrace open and reproducible research initiatives. There are now a diverse range of open/reproducible support services/tutorials/guides available to help researchers. In general, adoption of open practices is less onerous if planned for in advance. For example, if you use the Open Science Framework to manage your project, there is a simple button that allows you to make (parts of) your project openly available immediately, which does not require additional time.

There is increasing support from UK based research funders and councils for open and reproducible science practices and many are funding the development of supporting infrastructure and tools. 

In addition, the UK reproducibility network is working with funders and universities to ensure that the correct support and infrastructure for scientists is in place at research institutions. 

There are a number of data repositories that exist already and are free to use, for example the Open Science Framework or zenodo.

There are a growing number of grant-giving bodies that are funding open and reproducible science. Examples include: 

cOAlition S research funders (includes UKRI and Wellcome) are:

• Calling for open access publishing to be financed by a funding body or research institutions not individual researchers.
• Supporting the development of open access infrastructure where it is not yet available (find more information here). 

Wellcome have

• Teamed with the US NIH and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to introduce an Open Science Prize scheme that encourages and supports the development of open science tools. 
• Introduced the Open Research Fund.
• Introduced Data Re-use Prizes.
• Established the Wellcome Open Research platform for rapid publication of Wellcome-funded research

UKRI have introduced a Citizen Science Exploration Grants for projects that encourages the public to participate and contribute to the collection and analysis of research data.

The Center for Open Science is promoting the Registered Report funding model, that partners journal with funder to increase the efficiency and impact of resulting Registered Report publications.  

Examples of Replication studies based on the RR funding model:

• The Flu Lab, PLOS, and COS have partnered to promote replications and registered reports of influenza research.
• Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Movember Foundation and Science Exchange have partnered to replicate high-impact findings in prostate cancer.

Preregistration will mean that your research design is open to discussion. This means that the study can benefit from additional advice at an early stage, when it is still time to take steps to improve the design. Similarly, sharing of data/analysis/code will mean that others can see your research workflow. That is a good thing as it probably means you will triple check instead of double check your work for accidental errors prior to uploading it to a repository. And if the error is still there when uploaded then do not panic – we are human, and we all make mistakes!  

Things are changing – many funders and research councils are aware that the toxic nature of the publish or perish culture is compromising the quality of research – and are committed to change the way they evaluate research. 

• Many funders (including AMS, BBSRC, MRC, Wellcome) and institutions have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and are trialling better ways to evaluate research and researchers. 
• The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) have introduced the Incentivization Blueprint which provides funders with an approach to incentive structure that better correlates with open science practices. The AMS, NC3R and Wellcome are just some of the organisations who have committed to taking steps to implement the Incentivization Blueprint. 
• There is much focus on open science and reproducibility in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) guidelines.

Absolutely - the scientists who generated the shared materials should be acknowledged. There is quite a bit of evidence that Open Science practices help to promote and disseminate your work more widely (eLife 2016. Point of View: How open science helps researchers succeed. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16800). 

It is not always appropriate to share data openly, for example if the data could be used to identify human participants in a study (i.e, personally-identifiable data). You might want to think about data access procedures that will allow you to have some control over who accesses the data and for what purpose, to reduce the risk of data misuse (for an example, see the CamCAN Data Use Agreement).  

Anyone who uses your data should tell you in advance and acknowledge you. There is still a need for rules of good conduct to be established.  In case of misuse of shared data, you must speak out. In addition, it is likely that fraudulent use or misuse of open data would be discovered in the usual peer-review procedures. 

Absolutely not. Obviously, the idea of registering your study means that you will attempt to conduct the experiments as planned. But it is appreciated that science experiments often deliver unexpected hurdles and resulting deviations from the plan.  In this situation, transparency is key - deviations from the plan should be included within the final article and authors should also include any additional exploratory analyses that were not anticipated during the preregistration stage.