Reporting guidelines should be free to publish, read, and use

Abstract

R eporting guidelines are important tools aimed at improving transparency and reproducibility in health research [1][2][3][4][5][6].However, many reporting guidelines are currently hidden behind paywalls and restrictive copyright licences, which is in direct opposition to their stated goal.The UK EQUA-TOR Centre (https://www.equator-network.org/about-us/uk-equator-centre/)argues that tools created to improve transparency in research should be freely accessible for all researchers to read, share, use, and build upon and that publishers should facilitate this by waiving article processing charges (APCs) from reporting guidelines.Reporting guidelines reduce research waste by helping authors write a complete account of their study, allowing others, in theory, to reproduce it.They prompt authors to include the information needed for readers to understand what was done, how, why, and the implications of the results [1,2].They are usually published as papers in scientific journals.The most used and updated reporting guidelines are published in a short "statement" paper describing their development, with a checklist of the minimum set of items to be reported.These checklist papers are often accompanied by a longer explanation and elaboration (E&E) paper, usually a separate publication explaining each item and providing examples of complete reporting [6].Despite over a decade of promoting reporting guidelines by the EQUATOR Network [3], International Committee for Medical Journal Editors [4], publishers, journals [7], the Committee of Publication Ethics [8], and others, incomplete and inadequate reports of health research studies continue to be published [9,10].One reason may be that authors are unable to access reporting guidelines, their associated checklists, or the helpful explanations and examples of good reporting in the E&E papers.

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