This project aims to develop and test interventions to promote the adoption of open and reproducible research practices in Brazilian graduate programs in the life and health sciences.
Open, transparent, and collaborative practices strengthen the reliability, credibility, and societal value of research. In Brazil, scientific production is largely publicly funded and centered in graduate education. Thus, intervening at the level of graduate programs is a strategic pathway to improving transparency and research quality.
The project is grounded in the premise that durable adoption of open and reproducible practices depends on the interaction between individual competencies and institutional incentives. It therefore tests whether training interventions, policy-oriented interventions, or their combination most effectively produce measurable change.
The project unfolds in two stages. First, we will develop actionable recommendations to help graduate programs foster transparency, responsible research assessment, and open practices. Simultaneously, we will create open online educational materials on transparent, collaborative, and reproducible research. All materials will be openly licensed to ensure scalability and long-term dissemination.
In the second stage, these resources will support two interventions: (1) structured policy discussions with program coordinators and faculty to develop a one-year transparency action plan, and (2) intensive in-person training workshops for students and faculty. Approximately 40 graduate programs will be randomly assigned to policy-only, training-only, combined intervention, or control conditions, enabling rigorous estimation of isolated and interactive effects.
Effectiveness will be evaluated using pre- and post-intervention surveys, longitudinal analysis of policy documents and research outputs, and qualitative data from feedback forms, field notes, and focus groups.
Outputs include publicly available recommendations, an open online course, approximately 30 in-person interventions, webinars, outreach materials, and peer-reviewed publications. By generating empirical evidence on the effectiveness of training and institutional factors interact, we hope to provide scalable, tested models to strengthen transparency and reproducibility in graduate education.