Trinity Review: Integrating Registered Reports with research ethics and funding reviews

Abstract

One major source of high exhaustion for researchers is the redundant paperwork of three different documents (research papers, applications for ethics review, and applications for research grants) for the same research plan. These similar documents are submitted to three different organizations, each with its own format, and independently peer-reviewed three times. This is a wasteful and redundant process for researchers. Here, we propose a trinity review that integrates scientific, ethics, and research funding reviews. In our proposed trinity review system, scientific and ethics reviews are undertaken concurrently for a pre-experimental research protocol. When the protocol is accepted in principle through these review processes, a funding review will occur, and researchers will conduct their studies. After experiments or surveys, the scientific review will be conducted for a completed version of the paper including results and discussions (i.e., the full paper) again, and the full paper will be published after it has passed the second review. This paper provides a detailed explanation of the operation of the trinity review system and discusses the positive impacts and solutions to difficulties in its implementation.