The first imperative: Science that isn’t transparent isn’t science

Today we launch a new initiative to promote "open science" or as we hope to one day call it, "science"

In today's issue of Science Magazine we unveil a series of guidelines to promote transparency and reproducibility in research practices - critical aspects of science that are frequently overlooked in the pursuit of novelty and impact.

Transparency and reproducibility are the beating heart of the scientific enterprise. Transparency ensures that all aspects of scientific methods and results are available for critique, compliment, or reuse. This not only meets a social imperative, it also allows others to test new questions with existing data, makes it easier to identify and correct errors, and helps unmask academic fraud. Transparent practices such as sharing data and computer code, in turn, safeguard reproducibility: the idea that for a scientific observation to count as a discovery it must reveal something real and repeatable about the natural world.