What is this handbook?
This open research cycle handbook provides detailed practical guidance for making research open, responsible, and reproducible by design. It covers the full research life cycle, from formulating questions and preregistering studies to publishing articles, data, and code. It links to our self-paced tutorials, LMU support services, and essential tools to support open research in everyday practice.
Who is this handbook for?
This manual can be used by individual researchers in any scientific field but is primarily designed to be adapted and adopted by research groups as a whole. Each section outlines concrete actions for ongoing projects and concludes with a team checkpoint.
Navigate our open research cycle handbook
How to build your own lab handbook?
To build a tailored research practice handbook for your research group:
- review the core discipline-agnostic sections by clicking on one of the quadrant in the figure above,
- consult discipline-specific guidance (in development - ETA end 2026),
- explore an example,
- tailor the overview checklist figure
- use our lab-handbook template (in development - ETA end 2026)
- request a consultation with the LMU Open Science Center; a 1h one-on-one consultation, or a 6-month training and consultation program for research group (see About this Project below).
About this project
This work is part of the “Switch-to-Open Program” (SwOP) funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
This program consists in a 6-month structured pedagogical intervention designed for research groups, centered on the co-creation of a tailored research practices lab handbook and culminating in a departmental seminar to facilitate adoption by other groups.
This program is designed to:
- improve workflow efficiency and reproducibility by establishing clear, standardized procedures and documentation
- facilitate onboarding and collaboration through a shared, practice-oriented lab handbook
- support compliance with FAIR and Open Science requirements (see e.g. LMU good research practice guidelines), and enabling researchers to meet evolving recruitment and funding expectations.
Interested in entering the Switch-to-Open Program (SwOP) with your research group?
Contact us
How to cite our handbook
Our handbook and other material are licensed CC-BY Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International: please feel free to reuse, adapt, and share openly by citing “Ihle Malika, Gupta Reema, Schönbrodt Felix 2026 Open Research Cycle Handbook, URL, date and time of access. CC.BY.-SA 4.0”
- Explore / reuse research outputs
- Check legal frameworks
- Write Research Data Management (RDM) plan
- Design study and plan statistical analyses
Team checkpoints: study plan presentation + preregistration submission
- Collect data following standard protocols
- Manage data efficiently, and FAIR-ly by design
- Anonymise data
- Control data quality
Team checkpoint: data quality validation meeting
- Process and analyze data reproducibly
- Write reproducible reports and follow reporting guidelines
Team checkpoints: repository & code peer-review + result presentation
- Publish data and/or metadata and data use agreement
- Publish code (with real, simulated or synthetic data)
- Deposit a preprint
each with contributorships, persistent identifiers, license.
Team checkpoint: manuscript submission with DOIs for all materials