There's a growing awareness in the science and journalism community about how the process of doing science is represented and communicated. This is an important issue, not only for being able to relate research findings to the public, but also for scientists themselves. The assumption that science is self-correcting—that mistakes are caught and learned from and that the total body of knowledge progresses over time—relies on the credibility and replication of published studies. Without a vigilant culture of verification, "one is left with unconfirmed (genuine) discoveries and unchallenged fallacies... Any deviation from the principle that seeking the truth has priority over any other goals may be seriously damaging to the self-correcting functions of science," says John Ioannidis, of the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

The strong imperative to publish results, coupled with the publication bias towards positive results, may compromise the ultimate goal of truth-seeking in precisely that way. To combat this tendency, a growing body of concerned scientists is seeking to institutionalize a more open approach to sharing experiments and results. For example, this National Geographic article by Ed Yong discusses the new Center for Open Science and the Reproducibility Project, both of which are dedicated to improving scientific transparency and credibility.

Media have a valuable role to play in bringing this subject to light and offering solutions. A handful of journals are working with new selection criteria, offering a publication platform for the replication of experiments and gauging the value of a paper by the question and process it pursues rather than on the answers it finds. The blog Retraction Watch, founded by Ivan Oransky, is devoted to bringing retractions (whether of fraudulent papers or honest mistakes) to light as a "window into the scientific process." Alltrials.net, founded by a consortium of scientists and science foundations, calls for the registration and complete publication of all clinical trials. Less formally, the Twitter hahstag #overlyhonestmethods wryly gives vent to some of the day-to-day humanness and foibles of lab work.

This post at brainpickings.com quotes Richard Feynman on the essential nature of honesty in science over any pretensions of certainty: "It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing…the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."

For more on the subject of openness in science, check out the podcasts Prideful Predictions? and Medicine's Missing Half: How Withholding Clinical Trials Degrades the Evidence Base. Also, catch our upcoming event, "Envy: The Cutthroat Side of Science" on April 30th. Mariette DiChristina, editor-in-chief of Scientific American; Ivan Oransky, founder of Retraction Watch; Morton Meyers, author of Prize Fight: Recognition and Reward in Scientific Discovery; and Harold Gerner, physicist and government advisor, will discuss the challenge of sustaining a culture of scientific integrity  in the face of mounting competitive “publish or perish” pressures.