One part of openness and transparency of research is to open the research methods used during the research as early as possible in the research process. Open research methods have a positive impact by making research stronger and more reliable. This is because they allow for ‘reproducibility’. Reproducibility refers to being able to get the same results again by using the same data, materials, study design, methods, or procedures as the original research.
Open research methods can include preregistration of study designs, open protocols and workflows, citizen science, open access software and computational models, participation in open peer-review, and the publication of detailed metadata and documentation to ensure the reproducibility of open research data.