Open Science Badges (Open Data, Open Materials,…

Open Science Badges (Open Data, Open Materials, Preregistered)

The Open Science Badges are a set of journal-awarded visual icons, created and administered by the Center for Open Science (COS), that certify a published article met a disclosed openness standard for one of three practices: publicly posting the study's underlying data (Open Data), publicly posting the materials needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis (Open Materials), or registering the study design -- and, for the Preregistered+Analysis Plan variant, the analysis plan -- in a public registry before data collection began (Preregistered). A journal awards a badge either on a simple author self-disclosure statement or after independent editorial verification, and displays the badge icon alongside the article together with a link to the disclosed data, materials, or registration.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A Psychological Science article earns both the Open Data and Open Materials badges because the authors deposited their raw dataset and stimulus materials on OSF prior to publication, documented well enough for another lab to reproduce the reported analyses.

Is an instance

A clinical psychology journal awards the Preregistered badge to a paper because the authors registered their hypotheses and design on OSF Registries before collecting any data, and the published article discloses that one exploratory analysis was not part of that original plan.

Open Science Badges are icons that a journal prints on a published article to signal that the authors met a disclosed, verifiable standard for one of three open practices. The badge program was created and is administered by the Center for Open Science (COS), and functions as a lightweight, journal-level implementation of COS’s broader TOP Guidelines. Rather than requiring a full mandate, a journal opts in to offering one or more badges, and authors earn each badge independently based on what they actually made available.

The Three Badges

There are three core badges, plus one variant:

Open Data — awarded when authors publicly post, in a trusted repository, all the digitally shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results, documented well enough for an independent researcher to actually reproduce them.
Open Materials — awarded when authors publicly post the components of the research methodology needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis: stimuli, instructions, survey instruments, protocols, or analysis code, depending on the field. See Open materials for how “materials” is defined by discipline.
Preregistered — awarded when the study’s design was registered in an independent, institutional public registry (commonly OSF Registries) before data collection began, and the published article discloses whether the reported analyses matched that registered plan.
Preregistered+Analysis Plan — a stricter variant of the Preregistered badge, additionally requiring that the analysis plan itself was specified and registered prior to data collection, not just the study design.

How a Journal Awards Them

Per COS’s own program page, a journal can award each badge in one of two ways: on a simple author disclosure statement (authors state where the data/materials/registration lives, and the journal takes that at face value), or through independent peer review of the actual availability and completeness of what was disclosed. Which mechanism a given journal uses is a matter of that journal’s own editorial policy, not something COS mandates uniformly — a reader who wants to know how rigorously a specific badge was checked needs to consult that journal’s badge policy, not assume a fixed standard.

Journal Adoption

Psychological Science (published by the Association for Psychological Science) was the first journal to adopt the badges, in 2014. Adoption has since spread well beyond psychology: COS lists over 100 participating journals across disciplines including neuroscience, education, business, archaeology, and language studies, published by SAGE, Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, APA, and Cambridge University Press, among others.

Evidence: Do Badges Actually Change Behavior?

The most-cited evidence comes from Kidwell et al., “Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency” (PLOS Biology, 2016). The study coded all 2,478 empirical articles published in Psychological Science and four comparison journals from January 2012 through May 2015. Before Psychological Science adopted badges, fewer than 3% of its articles reported open data; after adoption, that rose to 23% overall and to 39% in the first half of 2015, an accelerating trend. The four comparison journals, which did not adopt badges over the same window, showed no meaningful change in their own (low) data-sharing rates. The study also found that when a badge was earned, the underlying data was more likely to actually be available, correct, usable, and complete than data referenced without a badge — badges did not just increase claims of openness, they correlated with better-quality open data.

How Badges Differ From Related Mechanisms

Badges are easy to conflate with adjacent but distinct practices:

Data availability statement — a data availability statement is a policy-required disclosure of where data can be found (which may be “available on request” or even “not available”); an Open Data badge requires the data actually be deposited publicly and meet the journal’s disclosed or reviewed completeness standard. A statement alone does not earn a badge.
Registered Reports — a Registered Report is a publication format where the study design is peer-reviewed and provisionally accepted before data collection begins, as a two-stage review process. The Preregistered badge, by contrast, is awarded after the fact to a conventionally reviewed article whose authors separately registered their design in a public registry before collecting data — registration and peer review are not linked in the same way.
TOP Guidelines — badges operationalize a subset of the TOP Guidelines‘ standards (data transparency, materials transparency, and preregistration) at COS’s lightest implementation level; a journal can adopt TOP standards at stricter levels (requirement or verification) without using the badge visual system at all, and can use badges without formally adopting TOP.

Why This Matters for Research Data Management

For research data management practice, badges are notable less as a symbol and more as a natural experiment: they show that a low-cost, purely reputational incentive, layered on top of a journal’s existing workflow, measurably shifted author behavior at scale, without a funder mandate or an IRB-style enforcement mechanism. That evidence base is one reason badge-style recognition keeps showing up in discussions of how to operationalize the reproducibility crisis response beyond top-down policy requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does an Open Data badge guarantee the data is error-free?

No. It certifies that the data was made publicly available and, per the Kidwell et al. findings, badge-earning data was on average more likely to be complete and usable than unbadged “available” data — but a badge is not an independent correctness audit unless the awarding journal specifically uses peer review (rather than self-disclosure) as its award mechanism.

Can a badge be earned without actually sharing anything?

Not under the program’s own criteria — all three badges require something to actually be publicly posted or registered (data, materials, or a design record), not merely a statement of intent to share. A generic “data available upon request” note does not meet the Open Data badge standard.

Is the badge program the same as preregistration itself?

No. See Preregistration of a Study Protocol for preregistration as a research practice; the Preregistered badge is simply one journal-level way of publicly recognizing that a specific published article followed that practice.

References

Center for Open Science, “Open Science Badges” program page (cos.io/initiatives/badges).
Kidwell, M.C., et al. (2016). “Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency.” PLOS Biology, 14(5).

Use in your systems

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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