Open Science and Intervention Research: a Program Developer’s and Researcher’s Perspective on Issues and Concerns

Open Science practices bear great promise for making research in general more reproducible and transparent, and these goals are very important for preventive intervention research. From my perspective as a program co-developer, I note potential concerns and issues of how open science practices can be used in intervention research. Key issues considered are in the realms of pre-registration (making pre-registration a living document; providing rewards for hypothesis-generating research, in addition to hypothesis-testing research), data archiving (resources for data archiving of large datasets; ethical issues related to need for strong de-identification), and research materials (intervention manuals and materials, and characteristics, training and supervision of intervention staff). The paper focuses on easier-to-address and considerably harder-to-address issues and concerns in these three areas.