How peer reviewers might hold the key to making science more transparent | Pete Etchells

A new initiative published this week outlines how scientists can make a change to open science practices at an individual level

Open science - broadly, the idea that scientific papers, data and materials should be freely available and accessible to all - is an easy concept to talk about, but a difficult one to put into practice. That's because it requires effort; individual scientists have to invest extra time and money in making code readable and data accessible, and be ready to deal with criticisms of - and in extreme cases, attacks on - their work. It's made all the more difficult by the fact that sharing data and materials isn't the current de facto standard across many scientific disciplines. So why bother going against the grain, if all it's going to cause is grief and extra work?

It's important, because transparency is fundamental to good scientific practice. No scientist is perfect, and it's entirely normal to expect that genuine mistakes can creep into analysis scripts, or in data files themselves. By allowing others to access these sorts of materials, errors can be identified - or in extreme cases, academic fraud can be uncovered - and the scientific record can be corrected. But there's more to open science than this. Allowing other scientists access to your data might result in new avenues of research to be uncovered, and for unanticipated discoveries to be made. And in some situations, it can even help avoid bizarre run-ins with the legal system.