How do Journal Editors Make Decisions About Adopting Open-Science Related Policies or Reforms in their Journal?

Journal editors play a key role in shaping research practices by deciding whether journals adopt policies related to open science and transparency. Despite sustained advocacy for open science, adoption of these policies remains highly variable across social science journals. This proposed qualitative study will use semi-structured interviews to examine how social science journal editors make decisions about adopting open science-related policies at their journals. Guided by the COM-B model of behaviour change, we will explore editors’ perceived capability, opportunity, and motivation to implement open science related policies at their journals. The study will investigate twelve open science policies and practices, with primary focus on data and code sharing and computational reproducibility, open content peer review, and naming the handling editor on published articles. Additional practices include open identities in peer review, materials sharing, preregistration, and publishing registered reports, null results, direct replications, and post-publication critique. Editors will be recruited through an international online community for social science journal editors, and purposely sampled to capture diverse disciplines, journal economic models, and perspectives. Interview data will be analysed using deductive content analysis informed by the COM-B model alongside inductive thematic analysis. By providing rich descriptive evidence on editors’ experiences, reservations, and constraints, this study aims to inform approaches to promoting open science policy adoption at journals.