A call to accompany pre-registration with means to valuable and effective exploration

Harking and p-hacking are considered as main causes of the replication crisis, and pre-registration of hypotheses and analyses is regarded as the best countermeasure so far. However, the pressure to produce purportedly confirming results through hidden exploration largely resists. While some pre-registration advocates encourage the alternative of honest and comprehensive explorative research, others accuse pre-registration of harming exploration. We argue that researchers must be equipped with competencies on valuable exploration if pre-registration is to become mainstream and exploration is to be freed from its narrowed and flawed purpose. We discuss what valuable exploration should be: honest, as full as necessary (especially in new research domains) and as efficient as possible (resulting in only few and presumably true new hypotheses). After discussions on methods for filtering explorative results and pre-registration we end with a short research agenda on exploration and proposals for implementation to stakeholders (peer-reviewers, journal editors and funding agencies) who have the means both to enforce pre-registration and to provide room for valuable exploration. For example, we propose that yet a study abstract must contain separated lists of confirmatory results and new hypotheses obtained from exploration.