On the possibly spurious grounds that an editorial is slightly less ephemeral than a blog, we are publishing an editorial to follow up our blog announcement [1] earlier this month that BMC Biology has added Registered Reports to the article formats it will consider for publication.
Since the announcement, we have collected the views of our Editorial Board on the format. They were – as always – interesting and instructive, and – as predicted – spread broadly across a spectrum from disapproval and deep scepticism to energetic enthusiasm. Their views, all of them valid, are represented in Q&A format below as a quick guide to what we think we’re doing.
Many of the questions reflect issues that have arisen before in the history of Registered Reports, and I have borrowed liberally from the extremely useful FAQs [2] on the Center for Open Science website (happily published under the Creative Commons License) in suggesting answers, as well as shamelessly quoting, with modification but without attribution, some of the remarks that came from the Board.
We will begin at the beginning with…