Integrating open science practices into recommendations for accepting gambling industry research funding

Abstract

Diverse funding sources, including the government, nonprofit, and industry sectors support academic research, generally, and gambling research, specifically. This funding allows academic researchers to assess gambling-related problems in populations, evaluate tools designed to encourage responsible gambling behaviors, and develop evidence-based recommendations for gambling-related topics. Some stakeholders have raised concern about industry-funded research. These critics argue that industry funding might influence the research process. Such concerns have led to the development of research guidelines that aim to preserve academic independence. Concurrently and independently, researchers have begun to embrace ‘Open Science’ practices (e.g. pre-registration of research questions and hypotheses, open access to materials and data) to foster transparency and create a valid, reliable, and replicable scientific literature. We suggest that Open Science principles and practices can be integrated with existing guidelines for industry-funded research to ensure that the research process is ethical, transparent, and unbiased. In the current paper, we engage with the aforementioned issues and present a formal framework to guide industry-funded research. We outline Guidelines for Research Independence and Transparency (GRIT), which integrates Open Science practices with existing guidelines for industry-funded research. Specifically, we describe how particular Open Science practices can enhance industry-funded research, including research pre-registration, separation of confirmatory and exploratory analyses, open materials, open data availability, and open access to study manuscripts. We offer our guidelines in the context of industry-funded gambling studies, yet researchers can extend these ideas to the behavioral sciences, more generally, and to funding sources of any type.