Protocols

Protocols sit at the practical center of transparent research. They help turn ideas into clear, reviewable plans and make it easier for others to understand how a project was designed.

Why Protocols Matter at COSSEE

At COSSEE, protocols are part of a broader commitment to open, rigorous, and reusable research. They are especially valuable for synthesis projects, evidence maps, systematic reviews, and studies where analytical decisions need to be made visible early.

Registrations

Registrations are structured records of a project’s questions, hypotheses, design choices, and planned analyses. They can help distinguish planned work from later interpretation and make a study easier to evaluate on its design merits.

Within ecology and evolution, registrations can be useful for both empirical studies and synthesis projects, including meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and evidence maps.

Registered Reports

Registered reports are a publication format in which the rationale, methods, and analysis plan are peer reviewed before results are known. If the design is strong, the study can receive in-principle acceptance before the main results are completed.

This format encourages careful planning and reduces pressure to privilege only surprising or statistically significant findings.

Published Protocols

Published protocols are stand-alone, peer-reviewed descriptions of planned work. They are particularly helpful when a project is large, collaborative, or methodologically complex, and when a team wants a stable public reference for the design.

For evidence synthesis, protocols can clarify:

review questions and scope
search strategy and inclusion criteria
screening and extraction procedures
planned effect sizes, models, and sensitivity analyses
updating and versioning decisions

Broader Open-Science Context

At COSSEE, protocol-based planning connects to a wider set of practices: