Goals
By turning recommendations and guidelines into a series of checklists hosted on a website, users could more rapidly click through it and provide more of the recommended information. This would generate a small text file that summarizes what option was chosen for each item of the checklist. This machine readable file could then be used to automatically generate part of the methods section of an article.
But, if done right, this could also in the long term enhance the adoption of emerging neuroimaging standards (BIDS, fMRIprep, NIDM...), facilitate data sharing and pre-registration, help with peer-review...
Vision
We envision that using checklists to report methods and results can:
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provide comprehensive human and machine readable descriptions of the data collection and analysis pipelines used in published papers: in other words we want an app to help document pipelines to improve the reproducibility of our work and to reduce inefficiencies and frictions when trying to build on each other's work.
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facilitate the creation and preparation of pre-registration and registered reports by reminding of future analysis steps that we might otherwise overlook or forget about: in other words we want an app to help us think about and create pipelines before we start collecting data.
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help make peer-review more objective: we want an app to help us check pipelines.
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facilitate systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses (use the app to read pipelines)
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facilitate data sharing (use the app to standardize the report of information on a pipeline)
Constraints
The implementation of this project should remain flexible enough to:
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accommodate the inclusion of new items in the checklist as new methods mature (e.g. new multivariate analysis, high-resolution MRI...),
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easily fork the project and convert it to create a checklist-website for a different field.
Milestones
We are trying to divide our goals and milestones in 3 main categories: