Call for Speakers for the 2026 BITSS Annual Meeting

The  Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) will hold its 14th Annual Meeting on Thursday, April 16 at UC Berkeley! This event is in-person only.

Program

The BITSS Annual Meeting brings together actors from academia, scholarly publishing, and policy to share novel research and discuss efforts to improve the credibility of social science by advancing research transparency, reproducibility, rigor, and ethics. The program will feature presentations of meta-scientific work selected from this Call for Papers, as well as a keynote presentation. The Institute for Business and Social Impact (IBSI) of the UC Berkeley Haas school of Business and BITSS are co-hosting this year's conference.    

Call for Papers

We invite papers or long abstracts (500-1000 words) in all aspects of meta-science, including but not limited to work that assesses scientific practice, evaluates the credibility of bodies of social science literature, presents new tools or strategies to improve research transparency and reproducibility, or evaluates the effectiveness of existing tools. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Pre-registration and the use of pre-analysis plans;
• Disclosure and transparent reporting;
• Research ethics;
• Replicability and reproducibility;
• Peer review and changes in academic publishing;
• Methods for detecting and reducing publication bias or data mining;
• The intersection of openness and inclusion in science;
• Assessment of the validity or reproducibility of literature;
• Meta-analysis and evidence synthesis;
• Open policy analysis;
• Role of AI in research transparency;
• Other policy-relevant research.

Eligible projects include completed works, work in progress, and prospective work. All submissions are due by Sunday, January 18, 2026 (11:59 PM Pacific Time). Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 5, 2026.  

Contact 

Reach out to Jo Weech (jweech@berkeley.edu) with any questions about this event.

Deadline to submit papers is Sunday, December 14, 2025 at 11:59 PM PST. PacDev 2026 will take place on Saturday, March 14, 2026. It will be hosted by the University of California, Davis.

When submitting your paper, you will be asked to include the following:

• Title
• Author and co-author(s)’s name(s)
• Paper abstract
• Paper to upload as pdf file

Full papers and extended abstracts will be reviewed. If your paper is not selected for a presentation, it may be considered for the poster session. 

PacDev welcomes paper submissions in all research topics in development economics. Priority will be given to full papers, but extended abstracts will also be considered. Submissions from junior researchers are encouraged, including submissions for a Junior Researcher poster session that is open to doctoral students in their third year or below, masters students and graduates, and advanced undergraduates.

Please submit via this site by December 14, 2025. You will be notified of a decision by January 16, 2026.