Open Science

APA supports publishing open, rigorous, and transparent research. The APA Ethics Code prohibits authors from withholding data from qualified requesters for verification through reanalysis in most circumstances (see Standard 8.14, Sharing Research Data for Verification), as long as the confidentiality of the participants is protected. Section 1.14 of the Publication Manual (7th ed.) addresses many issues about data retention and data sharing—both during review and after publication. Section 1.15 provides guidelines and additional considerations specific to qualitative research, including presentation of raw data in research reports, confidentiality limitations, consent limitations, and researchers’ perspective limitations.

APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (APA Style JARS) include guidance on how to report on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method studies. Transparency is a central issue across APA Style JARS. These guidelines provide a degree of comprehensiveness in the information that is routinely included in reports of empirical investigations, be they quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods in nature. Thus, transparency in reporting permits readers to better comprehend the way methods were carried out, to replicate methods in varied contexts, and to locate findings within the published article.

We also support the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines developed by a community working group in conjunction with the Center for Open Science. Additional information about research transparency standards, replication studies, open science badges, preprints, preregistration, and more can be found on the APA Journals Open Science at APA page.