Moving towards an open research culture in public administration

Abstract

Transparent reporting, replications and open data are vital for scientific progress and developing useful knowledge for practice. However, public administration is not fully transparent (for instance, null effects are seldom published), replications are almost never conducted let alone published and few open datasets are available. We do not have a fully open research culture. In this article, I first argue that this is problematic. Second, I show how we can make progress. At the moment, we are facing a collective action problem: the research community would benefit if we promote an open research culture, but individual scholars lack incentives. One fruitful way to move forward is that journals like Public Administration Review step in and actively promote values like transparency, openness and replication. This can be done by adopting – in a thoughtful and nuanced way – the recently developed Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines for journals.