Transparency

Transparency and the Scientific Ethos

The transparency of a research design concerns the open or conditioned accessibility to all of its phases: problem definition, selection of indicators, sampling procedures, inclusion criteria, time, space and quality of data collection, coding procedures, methods and tools of analysis, and presentation of results. Transparency also regards the sources of funding for a given research and the topic selection processes implemented by publishers. A transparent research design helps other scientists to replicate one empirical work. Thus, there is a strong link between transparency on one hand and reproducibility, verifiability, and falsifiability on the other hand. Transparency is a precondition of open science and communist ethos in the terms offered by Robert K. Merton in his 1973 work The Sociology of Science. In this text, the American sociologist lists four institutional imperatives that ideally characterize modern science: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Communism is defined as the common and shared ownership of any scientific good.

However, while the ethical valorization of transparency is largely shared, the link between transparency and reproducibility is more controversial. Positivist social scientists take this link for granted. Indeed, positivism advocates the continuity between social sciences and natural sciences as logical and experimental disciplines. Given this continuity, it is considered possible for a social scientist to obtain the same results by replicating ceteris paribus a given experiment, all the conditions of which are transparently known.

The hermeneutic paradigm, however, conceives man as a meaning-making being. This distinguishes the social sciences, whose data nature is interpretative, from the natural sciences, which instead deal with objective data. Given the subjective and interpretative character of the relationship between researcher and research participants, in the hermeneutical approach, transparency is not conceived as a guarantee of replicability but rather as related to the rigor of data collection and of interpretative procedures.

Certainly, there are more varieties of positivism and more varieties of hermeneutic approaches. Moreover, there are more intermediate positions and critical theories between the two epistemological poles. This distinction is therefore to be understood in an ideal-typical sense.

Transparency in Various Disciplines

The debate on transparency has had an uneven development among the social sciences. In economics, the discussion on transparency is quite advanced and has produced both institutional arrangements and publishing policies. As institutional arrangements are concerned, a brilliant example is represented by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in Social Sciences (BITSS), an interdisciplinary team whose directors and staff are mainly economists and quantitative data analysts. The BITSS project, according to its website, is aimed to “improve the credibility of science by advancing transparency, reproducibility, rigor, and ethics in research.” Its mission is threefold: generating evidence on problems and solutions in science through meta-research, increasing access to open science education, and strengthening the scientific environment. A concrete outcome of BITSS has been the publication of MetaArxiv, an interdisciplinary archive of preprints aimed at improving access to information and meta-analysis in various disciplines. In addition, since the beginning of the 2000s, the American Economic Association adopted an extensive policy regarding the availability of data and materials for published works.

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