Article | Open Access
The Adoption of Open Science Practices in Communication Research: Taking Stock of the Field in 2025
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Abstract: Five years after Dienlin et al.’s (2021) agenda-setting call for communication research to adopt open science practices, this study assesses the current state of adoption within the field. Through a manual content analysis of articles published in 2025 across 20 leading communication journals, we evaluated the use of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) research practices. Results show that adoption remains limited. While research materials are shared more frequently, data and analytic code are rarely made available, and overall transparency remains inconsistent. Quantitative studies score higher on transparency indicators than qualitative studies, likely reflecting the limited applicability of TOP standards to qualitative research paradigms. Explicit discussion of deviations from preregistrations is present in approximately half of preregistered studies, and the absence of such discussion does not necessarily imply that deviations occurred. Yet room for improvement remains. We argue that voluntary adoption may be insufficient and discuss the need for stronger institutional incentives to establish open science as a normative standard.
Keywords: communication research; open science; preregistration; reproducibility; research transparency; TOP guidelines
Published:
Issue:
Vol 14 (2026): Open Research Infrastructures and Resources for Communication and Media Studies (In Progress)
© Jasmijn Kruijt, Chaoyi Gao, Xiaojing Ke, Sofie Přibylová, Wenyuan Yang, Bert N. Bakker. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.