Sharing is caring: Ethical implications of transparent research in psychology

The call for greater openness in research data is quickly growing in many scientific fields. Psychology as a field, however, still falls short in this regard. Research is vulnerable to human error, inaccurate interpretation, and reporting of study results, and decisions during the research process being biased toward favorable results. Despite the obligation to share data for verification and the importance of this practice for protecting against human error, many psychologists do not fulfill their ethical responsibility of sharing their research data. This has implications for the accurate and ethical dissemination of specific research findings and the scientific development of the field more broadly. Open science practices provide promising approaches to address the ethical issues of inaccurate reporting and false-positive results in psychological research literature that hinder scientific growth and ultimately violate several relevant ethical principles and standards from the American Psychological Association's (APA's) Ethical Principles of Psychologists Code of Conduct (APA, 2017). Still, current incentive structures in the field for publishing and professional advancement appear to induce hesitancy in applying these practices. With each of these considerations in mind, recommendations on how psychologists can ethically proceed through open science practices and incentive restructuring-in particular, data management, data and code sharing, study preregistration, and registered reports-are provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).