A million… I mean three and a half years ago, when I wrote my incoming editor’s editorial at Perspectives on Psychological Science  (DOI: 10.1177/1745691609356780), I said that I wanted to encourage new types of articles that I thought would help our field grow stronger and faster.  One of them was dubbed ‘‘The File Drawer” and I wrote: “What I envision is … the Editorial Board identifies topics: phenomena that researchers have not been able to replicate. Next, we appoint lead researchers: people who will collect the mostly unpublished failures and write an analysis of what was done, what was (or was not found), etc.  Finally, the authors who published the original research would be given a chance to respond.”

We (Hal Pashler, Tony Greenwald, and I) identified a study to replicate and contacted the original author early on but he seemed so unnerved by the process that we paused to re-group.  In the meantime, Hal and I developed psychfiledrawer.org where researchers can individually post their attempted replications (both successes and failures).

Then flash forward three years to when Dan Simons and Alex Holcombe proposed what has become the Registered Replication Reports initiative — a way to get teams of researchers to try to replicate important studies with the cooperation of the original authors.  OF COURSE Perspectives should host and publish such articles.

For more on the backstory of the creation of RRR see:  http://blog.dansimons.com/2013/05/registered-replication-reports-stay.html

For more about the pushback I’ve gotten to the replication project see: http://wp.me/p2Wics-1o

We are teamed with the Open Science Framework where projects will be developed and shared.

To get started on your very own replication research report, or to join one already in progress, go to:  http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/replication/ongoing-projects

And if you want some ideas for experiments that people would like to see replicated, take a look at psychfiledrawer’s top-20 list of studies users would like to see replicated.

And now…. for our very first public launch… whose study will it be?  3… 2… 1…    You can find out here.