Summary: To encourage each other to do better science, my lab has put together a checklist of goals and guidelines for scientific papers. Our focus is on encouraging best practices for open science and statistical rigor.

I’ve recently signed the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative (PRO). Here are some thoughts on why, and more generally on how we as reviewers can have a positive impact on science.

I examined the gender balance of speakers at annual meetings of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language from 2009–2015, and in authors in the journal Brain and Language from the beginning of 2015. Of the conference speakers, 30% (14/47) were women, with no year having more than 38% speakers who were women. In contrast, approximately half of the authors (82/159) published in Brain and Language were women. These findings suggest intentional strategies are needed to achieve conference speaker gender balance.