Why the preregistration revolution needs PIDs

Faced with well-known issues in the reporting of empirical studies such as “p-hacking” and the file-drawer problem, authors increasingly bolster the credibility of their finding by preregistering their studies and/or providing pre-analysis plans (PAP). Several venues for pre-registration already exists (clinicaltrials.gov for medical studies, EGAP for political science, the AEA RCT registry for economics, and OSF across disciplines). Metadata standards for preregistration are barely existing. There is no way to systematically associate a preregistration with a published article or to easily query existing preregistrations for a given author. We develop a blueprint for a PID-based system that allows for the systematic citation of study preregistrations, as well as the linkage of preregistration to other digital objects (data, article) as well as researchers. We explore to what extent the existing DOI infrastructure can already accomplish this and where changes are needed.