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From pre-registration to preprints – take a quick break from your experiments and catch up with what’s happening in the world of open science.

• There has been a lot of discussion about the role of “fake news” in the most recent US election. The threat of “fake discoveries” affects the scientific community and efforts to address this are under way. On a more grassroots level, librarians are leading the way in helping students and researchers parse through the miasma of misinformation available.
• Want to help lead the way and win some money for your lab? Enter the Center for Open Science $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge. Preregistration increases the credibility of hypothesis testing by confirming in advance what will be analyzed and reported. You could be one of 1,000 scientists that wins $1,000 for publishing the results of preregistered research!
• Preprint severs are an increasingly valuable resource for not only establishing priority when a new discovery is made, but also for getting community feedback on your work. An encouraging sign that major societies and publishers are embracing preprints and open science, is that The Journal of Neuroscience just announced that it’s initiating a direct submission process for manuscripts posted on bioRxiv.
• National Autonomous University of Mexico scientist Erin McKiernan has been advocating for Open Access and Open Science for years (check out her blog here), now she’s contributing to the re-imagining of universities and preparing them to take on 21^st century challenges. Go check out her white paper “Imagining the ‘open’ university: Sharing science to improve research and education.”