Research Transparency Check Update

Here’s an update on Research Transparency Check: a a software tool that provides automatic assessments of the transparency of data and methods in research reports before they are published and that suggests improvements. You can read the grant proposal here. The project is funded by TDCC-SSH Challenge grant (#ICT.001.TDCC.018) of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). We are well underway.

From Papercheck to Metacheck

In the past months, we have been working hard to develop new modules for transparency and quality checks in research reports. The developers renamed the package formerly known as Papercheck to Metacheck. The new name is unique and better reflects the possibility to check all sorts of research works, as well as the possibility to conduct meta research. You can find all about metacheck here: https://www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/.

At the AI in Peer Review conference on 5 June 2026 at Technical University Eindhoven, Cris Mesquida launched the beta version of metacheck, which is available at https://github.com/scienceverse/metacheck.

Daniel Lakens has created an extensive manual for metacheck, explaining how you can use each of the 26 modules that metacheck currently includes, such as checks of preregistrations, statements on ethics approval, funding and conflicts of interest statements, open practices, effect sizes, p-values, power analysis, and references: https://www.scienceverse.org/metacheck_book/. We are continuously working on the development of new modules. You can contact the metacheck team at metacheck.scienceverse@gmail.com.

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Planned developments

Cris Mesquida is leading a meta science paper describing the validated modules of metacheck. Keep an eye out for the paper that will appear later this summer!

Jakub Werner is working on the development of a one-click user interface. It will greatly improve the accessibility of metacheck, because will not need to install R in order to use metacheck.

The university library of VU Amsterdam will be building on metacheck to monitor open practices in research publications. The monitor will contribute validation data for refinement of the open practices module. Rene Bekkers and Sander Bosch lead this project.

A project funded through the Open Science NL scheme, Assessing and Improving the Effectiveness of Data and Code Sharing Policies in Dutch Research Performing Organizations, will use metacheck to assess open practices in research performing organizations in the Netherlands. Krist Vaesen at TU Eindhoven leads this project.

After the summer Rene Bekkers will organize the Delphi study with transparency deliberations. Because metacheck is tailored to research in psychology with an experimental design, it needs adaptation for other data communities. The results of the sessions will produce priorities for variants of metacheck serving research in other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities reporting on surveys, interviews and focus groups, and news and social media data.

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Values statement

In November 2025, we published a statement expressing the values we share: transparency and reproducibility; fair recognition and rewards for contributions; accessibility, adoption and diffusion; community engagement and epistemic diversity; quality control; scientific knowledge as a public good; sustainability; and consistency. Read our full values statement here: https://osf.io/29hy7

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Conference presentations

In October 2025, we presented the project at the Open Science Conference in Hamburg organized by the ZBW. We received good feedback on how to prioritize the development of modules, largely in line with the feedback we received from many of you at the kickoff conference at VU Amsterdam (slides here).

In December 2025, Rene Bekkers visited the Excelsior group led by Tracey Weissgerber at the University of Coimbra. The visit helped us sharpen our commitment to validation of new modules before the beta release of the software.

In April 2026, Rene Bekkers presented the plans for transparency deliberations at the STS NL 26 conference at the University of Twente. The presentation is here.

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Greetings from the team

At VU Amsterdam: Rene Bekkers (PI), Max Littel (research assistant); at TU Eindhoven: Daniel Lakens (Co-PI, metacheck developer), Cristian Mesquida Caldentey (programmer and analyst), Jakub Werner (programmer), Lavinia Ion, Hadeel Khawatmy, Levi Baruch, and Mink Veltman (research assistants); at the University of Glasgow: Lisa DeBruine (metacheck developer and maintainer).