Should we publish researchers' pledges?

Question

During a breakout room at the recent SORTEE conference, Daniel Mietchen suggested an intriguing idea: what if we were to develop a common (machine-readable) format for the various pledges that researchers take and **publish these pledges in an indexed journal**. This could help to increase visibility of the pledges, provide citeable DOIs, celebrate researchers who commit to positive action, and facilitate searches/meta-research on the pledge space (because everything would now be machine-readable). Daniel also pointed out that Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) already publishes a variety of 'alternative' research outputs beyond articles and could thus incorporate this new pledge format relatively easily. 

In the context of collective action campaigns on Free Our Knowledge, this could be a great way to celebrate when we reach the target number of signatures and pledges go live. For example, in our Preregistration Pledge we're aiming to get 100 pledges in any particular field (psychology is almost there with 73 pledges!) before we hold people accountable to their pledges. If and when we reach this target, we could publish the pledge details in RIO and list everyone who has taken the pledge as a co-author (with their permission of course). This could then be something that those researchers can point to in their CV, as a demonstration of their commitment to open science, and also something that we can cite in future pledges and publications (e.g., in any papers resulting from those 100 preregistered studies), potentially starting a feedback cycle that increases mainstream awareness/adoption of these pledges.

What do you think about this idea? Would it motivate you/others to take more pledges? Would you give your permission to co-author a 'pledge publication' in this way, for a pledge that you've taken?

Note: this question is also mirrored on the Free Our Knowledge discussion forum

Answer 1

So first things first: I hadn't heard about researchers' pledges before, but the "Free Our Knowledge" website got me on speed.

The idea proposed here uses the concept of a journal in some different, creative way. However, one should discuss alternatives and then evaluate which option is best. Let me suggest two such alternatives:

1. Pledge-sites such as "Free Our Knowledge" could offer virtual badges for pledges made and kept. Let me give an example of what I have in mind: w3-consortium offers an html-validation-service (https://validator.w3.org). Once you validated your html-file/website, you can download an image certifying your conformity with standard which you can put on your website. Instead of an image the badge could be embeddable as an <iframe> or similar to ones web-CV.

2. Or, going wild here, something similar could probably be done with a Non-Fungible Token (NTFs). This would, in my understanding of the technology, allow to some extend to verify the badge.

Maybe I am completely missing the point here. Maybe there are also other alternatives? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of each of those.