Hi all,

I’m writing to invite you to join our Preregistration Pledge on Project Free Our Knowledge (FOK). Project FOK aims to accelerate the adoption of open research practices through collective action. By acting together, we can mitigate risks to vulnerable individuals, motivate action, signal our desire for change, and overcome the multitude of collective action problems that hold back progress in academia.

For our Preregistration Pledge, we’re asking researchers to pledge to preregister at least one study in the next two years, once 100 people in their field have taken the same pledge. If we reach this threshold in a particular field, we’ll list the names of everyone who has pledged on our website, contact them to let them know that the pledge is now active, and progressively tick off each person’s name as they complete their preregistration. In the future, we can then build on this success to host ever-larger campaigns as we cooperate to make Preregistration (and other open science practices) the norm throughout academia.

If you’d like to see preregistration become the norm in your field, please support this campaign by taking the pledge now (it only takes a minute!). Psychology is currently in the lead (8 signatures), with Neuroscience hot on their heels (6 signatures). Previous research has shown that there tends to be a tipping point for collective action campaigns at around 30% of the target (Hallam, 2015, Information Communication & Society), so if the COS Ambassador community could help us get to 30 signatures it would go a long way toward supporting Project FOK and demonstrating the potential for collective action to create change in academia.

Thanks for your time and commitment to open science,

Together in action,

Dr Cooper Smout