The Adoption of Open Science Practices in Communication Research: Taking Stock of the Field in 2025
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
Five years after Dienlin et al.’s (2021) agenda-setting article explicitly called for communication research to adopt open science practices, this study systematically assesses the current state within the field. Through manual content analysis of articles published in 2025 across 20 leading communication journals, we evaluated the adoption of six Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Research Practices provided by the Center for Open Science, namely study registration, study protocol, analysis plan, materials transparency, data transparency, and analytic code transparency. The results show limited adoption of TOP research practices in communication research. Sharing of research materials is done more frequently than other practices, yet its extent of transparency remains limited. Quantitative studies achieve higher transparency scores than qualitative studies. Critically, justifications for non-sharing of materials, data, or analytic code, as well as explicit reporting of deviations from preregistrations, are mostly absent, despite their importance for transparency and openness. We argue that voluntary adoption may be insufficient and discuss whether stricter enforcement mechanisms are needed to establish open science as a normative standard. By mapping the current implementation of open science practices, this study contributes to critical reflection on the reproducibility and credibility of communication research and informs the development of infrastructures to support greater transparency.
