Making replicability the norm starting with oneself and depersonalizing research debates

In their paper presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) and published as a comment “How to make replication the norm” in the journal Nature in February 2018, Paul Gertler, Sebastian Galiani and Mauricio Romero write about policies of journals in the social sciences and summarize their results about the replicability of articles published in economics journals. The comment is not replicable itself although the Berkeley Initiative that also funded the research officially has a – though vague - policy on replicability and the policy of the journal Nature says “authors are required to make materials, data, code, and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications”, and “Nature Research titles will be required to include information on whether and how others can access the underlying data.” Here I describe how to get access to better information, how to improve documentation, and suggest that depersonalization is central for progress in transparency and debates in science.