image: Researchers find Best Paper awards lack transparency and do not increase equitability.
Credit: Patrick Tomasso, Unsplash (CC0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
Research awards are an integral part of the universal “prestige economy” in science, but do they incentivize greater transparency, inclusivity, and openness? This study uses cross-disciplinary data to explore the level of transparency of publicly available award descriptions and assessment criteria, asking whether such awards contribute to or propagate existing reproducibility crises and inequities in science.
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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002715
Article Title: “Best Paper” awards lack transparency, inclusivity, and support for Open Science
Author Countries: Australia, Japan, Poland, Brazil, Taiwan, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Cameroon, Canada
Funding: Australian Research Council grant DP230101248 awarded to M.L. and S.N., Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2019-05520) awarded to A.R.M., and John Templeton Foundation (grant ID: 62631) awarded to R.M.R. Funders had no role in designing, conducting or reporting this research.
Journal
PLoS Biology
Method of Research
Meta-analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
COI Statement
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.