Abstract: Researchers serving on committees need to assess the credibility (trustworthiness) of research when deciding which grants to fund and which researchers to hire. Through a survey of 485 biology researchers who have served on grant or hiring committees in the past 2 years, we found that assessing credibility is very important to most researchers (81%) but they are unable to assess credibility as effectively as they would like. Aspects of credibility that are particularly important to assess include aspects of research integrity, rigor, and transparency, but these may be the hardest to assess efficiently in a research assessment context. Researchers often use proxies, such as Journal Impact Factor, that are not designed for assessing the intrinsic qualities of research outputs to make these assessments. The gap between the high importance of assessing credibility to respondents, and their low level of satisfaction with their ability to complete this task, suggests that researchers would be motivated to adopt new approaches to research assessment.
Bio: Iain is responsible for PLOS’ goals to increase adoption of Open Science practices, and understand and increase the benefits of adopting Open Science. This includes but is not limited to PLOS’ policies and initiatives relating to posting preprints, sharing research data, sharing code, and sharing methods and protocols. Iain was previously Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature and has worked in various roles at F1000 and BioMed Central (BMC). He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters related to various aspects of Open Science.