LAUSR

In this essay, editors at the Journal of Business Ethics, Julia Roloff and Mike Zyphur, explore the practice of preregistered research (i.e. wherein research plans are assessed before data collection starts) and propose the trial of a preregistration procedure at the journal. Together with several other Journal of Business Ethics editors, they will edit a special issue designed to experiment with their suggested protocol and build our knowledge and capacity around preregistration. We hope to get a number of papers that actually use the preregistered protocol being trialled, as well as a number of papers that critically examine the idea of preregistration, publication of null results and all of the ethical issues associated with these ideas. It is both timely and appropriate for the journal to be pursuing the topic of preregistered studies. The Journal of Business Ethics is marked by its breadth and depth of scholarship and expertness of editors across many fields. This gives us the opportunity to be adventurous, to explore new ideas and take some risks with the new practices. We would like to explicitly encourage quantitative research that is both focused on ethical issues and undertaken in an ethical manner. We are not taking the position that preregistered reporting of studies is the only way to achieve this goal, nor that it necessarily will achieve this goal. However, we would like to explore these possibilities. In short, we offer these ideas as an experiment. We are committed to making Journal of Business Ethics a place where innovation and experimentation are possible. We are grateful to the authors of this essay and a number of our editors for their important contributions to this effort.