Introduction
A key aspect of inclusive research practice is transparency in communication. It is not enough to conduct research ethically and rigorously—we must also ensure that our findings, methods, and motivations are communicated clearly, accessibly, and honestly. Transparency in communication means openly sharing not only our results but also our processes, uncertainties, and limitations. By doing so, we allow others to engage meaningfully with our work, fostering trust, accountability, and a more inclusive research culture.
Transparent communication is essential for ensuring that research is accessible to a broad audience, including fellow researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the public.
If research findings are difficult to access, obscured by technical jargon, or selectively presented, they risk being misunderstood, misused, or ignored.
Transparency in communication helps prevent these issues by making research more interpretable, reproducible, and useful. It also provides an opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of research participants and the wider community, ensuring that they can see how their involvement has shaped the work.
Many aspects of transparent research communication have already been touched on in other sections of the Hub. Practices such as reflexivity, pre-registration, and open-source software and data all contribute to transparency by making research processes more visible and accountable. However, when it comes to communicating research findings specifically, there are additional key considerations:
Community involvement: How are the people affected by or involved in your research included in decisions about how findings are communicated?
- Transparent communication means engaging with relevant communities to ensure that research is presented in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and ethical.
- Consider CLEAR Lab’s guidelines on community peer-review as a framework for including community perspectives in research dissemination.
Open access: How can you ensure that your research findings are freely available to all who might benefit from them?
- Paywalls and restricted-access journals create barriers to knowledge. Transparent communication involves making research publicly available through open-access publishing or freely sharing author manuscripts. Be aware, however, that the significant financial penalties most journals impose on open-access publishing mean that this option is usually limited to wealthy researchers and institutions.
- See the UK Reproducibility Network’s [primer on open access publishing]{https://osf.io/preprints/osf/94rsp} for practical guidance.
Clear and honest messaging: Are the key messages of your research clearly communicated, without exaggeration or omission of important details?
- Transparency means acknowledging uncertainties, limitations, and alternative interpretations of findings, rather than overstating conclusions.
- Avoid technical jargon where possible and provide clear summaries to make findings accessible to non-specialists.
Public engagement: How can you communicate your research beyond academic publications?
- Transparent communication extends beyond journals. Engaging with the public through blog posts, social media, public talks, and media outreach ensures that research has a broader impact.
- Seek out examples of effective public dissemination in your field. What makes them clear and engaging? How could they be improved?
By prioritising transparency in research communication, we help ensure that knowledge is shared, rather than siloed, understood, rather than misunderstood, and used responsibly, rather than misused. Transparent communication strengthens research by making it more accessible, accountable, and impactful for a wide range of audiences.
Practical Steps and Tools
Include citation diversity statements and reflexivity statements in all your published work.
Check your writing for clarity and use of plain English. Get feedback from people who don’t work in research or by utilising online tools, such as language models or AI-based writing assistants.
Wherever you end up publishing your results, consider publishing a preprint and/or make your author manuscript freely available. Go to the OSF website section on preprints and see if there is a section for your discipline.
If ethically permitted, always make your datasets and analysis code freely available.
Conduct a community peer review before submitting your next manuscript.
Present your work in a public forum, such as Pint of Science.
References and Further Resources
The RIOT Science Club YouTube channel features numerous videos on open research.
The UK Reproducibility Network offers a variety of primers on key topics in open and reproducible scholarship.
