Registered Reports
PREREGISTERED REPORTS
Various journals offer the option to submit a preregistered report which goes through a review process before data collection can commence. On the OSF website, you can find a list of all such journals:
If the reviewers agree that the study design is well thought-through and the study is worth conducting, you will receive an in-principle-acceptance. This means that regardless of your results, you will get to publish your paper! Null-findings will not be a problem with this mode of publishing. Usually, this also reduces the workload after data collection, given that the introduction and method sections are usually requested to remain unchanged. If you register the data analysis script together with the preregistered report, all you need to do after data collection is write up your results and the discussion and conclusion sections.
What should be in there?
The preregistered report consists of the introduction and method sections as they ought to appear in the final paper. Moreover, it helps the reviewers to understand your study design well if you also include all materials you want to use. In order to deeply think about what kind of data you expect and how you will analyse this data, it might be a good idea to create a mock-up data set, prepare the R/ SPSS/ .. code you will want to run on the actual data, and try it out. You should also include a sampling plan in which you describe how you will recruit your participants.