Promoting ethical, transparent, and reproducible research practices can improve the integrity of science and inspire better public policy.
Growing demand for rigorous evidence on policy impacts and cost-effectiveness has driven increased investment in data-intensive social science research. Yet the incentives, norms, and institutions that govern the way research is conducted do not always promote openness, integrity, or rigor, resulting in an evidence base that is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. CEGA’s flagship transparency and reproducibility initiative, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), advances practices, tools, and policies to strengthen the integrity of research, while carefully studying how researchers and policymakers respond to initiatives that advance transparency and reproducibility. Similarly, through our Open Policy Analysis (OPA) work and Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI), we are developing new standards, tools, and “best practice” approaches to facilitate the reporting and delivery to policy makers of evidence that is more transparent, relevant, and rigorously produced. With higher quality evidence in hand, they can, in turn, spend less time assessing credibility and more time making informed decisions. We leverage these tools and approaches to train researchers and policymakers, build communities of practice, develop wide-reaching institutional policies, and build capacity to produce and utilize high quality evidence.
BITSS wins Einstein Foundation Institutional Award for Promoting Quality in Research
Learn moreInitiatives
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Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) strengthens the integrity of research and evidence used for policy-making. -
The Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI) improves and scales the use of high-quality cost evidence in impact evaluation.
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Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL)
IDEAL helps standardize and improve comparability of the main results produced by randomized evaluations. -
Open Policy Analysis (OPA) improves the credibility and reusability of policy reports.