There are no known cases of unexplained lost pre-registrations at AsPredicted.
If you cannot find your pre-registration, search your email inbox for the pre-registration number or title, it will help consider these possibilities:
Finally, check your 'archive', a place where you can send pre-registrations to get them out of the way
If none of these solve your problem, contact us.
The best way is by forwarding the confirmation email you received when creating the pre-registration.
If you don't have that, the date when it was created.
This is easy to solve.
Create a new account with an email address you do have access to (perhaps you already have it, no need for brand new one).
Visit the account page for that account, enter the email address of your previous account as a secondary email for the new one. If you no longer have access to the old one, it's OK, just indicate that's the case when you add it.
To merge accounts simply:
When you click on the confirmation link, both accounts will be merged.
Yes. We will fix anything that is our responsibility.
Examples include titles that do not fit the .pdf width, and characters that do not display correctly in the pdf.
It has fortunately been the case that, historically, we have caused very few issues that we have had to fix, but if something outside your control seems off with your pre-registration, please get in touch.
No.
We do not edit, delete, or undelete pre-registration except to fix a problem caused by us (which is very rare).
There are two common situations where authors regret deleting an AsPredicted pre-registration and contact us asking about it.
One scenario is a co-author failing to confirm within 6 days, and the pre-registration getting automatically deleted.
The other is an author creating a new pre-registration and declaring a previous pre-registration a draft for it, thus deleting it, but they chose the wrong pre-registration as the draft.
In either case the best solution is to:
No. For transparency and credibility of the pre-registration system, once something is included in a shared pre-registration it must always be included, and that includes links to other pre-registrations the authors indicated were related.
No. For transparency and credibility of the pre-registration system, once a link to the pre-registration is created, the link must always be available.
At this point in time, we do not offer search and do not index our pre-registrations thus as long as you do not share the link, nobody should come across it. We may change this in the future and provide centralized access to all pre-registrations, but do not currently plan to.
We never make any changes to pre-registrations. We don't fix typos, add information, change answers, etc.
Authors have the following options to make edits or flag problems:
If it has not been approved yet by all authors, they may reject it, and create a new pre-registration, the answers of the rejected pre-registration can be automatically copy pasted to the new form, and then edited before submitting.
If it has been approved by all authors, and it has been only a few days since its creation, you may start a new pre-registration. You will be asked how it relates to recently created pre-registrations and you may deem the existing one a 'draft', this will lead the new pre-registration to replace the old one, the draft, which will then be deleted.
If it has been more than a few days since the to-be-edited pre-registration was created, or if you have already generated a .pdf, you can no longer delete it or edit it. You can explain in your paper any shortcomings with the pre-registration that you want to alert readers to.
Sometimes author include identifying information in an answer to a pre-registration question, our recommendation then is to download the .pdf, manually cover the information you wish to hide, and explain in your submission the issue.
When is a Pre-Registration Private vs Public?
Private pre-registrations and shareable PDFs.
A central aspect of a pre-registration platform is how authors share pre-registrations with readers. At AsPredicted, when a pre-registration is created, only its authors have access to it, there is no way for third parties to access that pre-registration, no link to it exists. When authors decide to share a pre-registration, for example, in order to link to it from a paper they are submitting for peer-review, one of the authors needs to generate a PDF. It will be anonymous (will not list authors), and will have a permanent URL which will look like this: https://aspredicted.org/b3c3d-e41h.pdf
When the paper is accepted, the PDF should be updated so that it is no longer anonymous. Importantly, when that happens, the URL will not change. The URL that is first generated for a pre-registration will always be its only URL, and only the target of the link, the PDF file, will be updated to be anonymous or not.
Reversibility
The act of creating a PDF is non-reversible. Once a PDF exist, once a URL linking to a pre-registration is created, it cannot be deleted, even if created in error.
In contrast, the act of making a PDF anonymous or not-anonymous, is reversible. At any point authors can re-generate the PDF so that it does or does not reveal author names. When they do, the URL remains unchanged.
Policy up to September 2024.
From nearly its beginning in 2015, until September 2024, AsPredicted PDFs were handled in a slightly different way. Pre-registrations used to have three modes, "private", "reviewer", and "public". Private mode has not changed. When authors created a pre-registration only they had access to it, there was no external link to it. When authors wished to submit to a journal an anonymous version of the pre-registration, they created a PDF in "reviewer" mode, which was a PDF that was anonymous and indicated visibly that it was only intended for peer-review. Early on the links to those PDFs looked like this,: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=asdsje, and then they looked like this: https://aspredicted.org/ABC_DEF.
Pre-registrations in reviewer mode were not backed up to the WebArchive (because they were supposed to be temporary).
The third mode was "public", which involved a permanent PDF that listed the authors, with URLs like this: https://aspredicted.org/abcde.pdf
These PDFs were backed up to the WebArchive.
Problem with the old policy
The reason we changed this policy is that authors often forgot to update the AsPredicted links in their papers when they got accepted, and thus many published papers link to the anonymous and not backed-up version of the pre-registrations. In September of 2024 we made a forward looking and a backwards looking change. The previous section explains the forward looking one, the new policy. In terms of the latter, we asked authors who had any anonymous PDFs created already, whether they would consent to having those be backed-up on the WebArchive if they were found in the public domain, which we operationalize as having been found by a major search engine crawler like Google or Bing. Because these engines crawl academic papers, pre-prints, and public websites, but do not crawl personal files or emails, these crawler provide an efficient way to locate anonymous pre-registrations that made their way to the public record and thus should be backed up. We will back up a pre-registration if any of its authors consents to the new policy.
Pre-registrations PDFs are permanent and backed up to the Web Archive.
All pre-registrations PDFs at AsPredicted are permanent, authors may not delete them or hide them after they are created.
In addition, PDF files are backed up to the WebArchive. The back up to each AsPredicted URL is simply the original URL plus the following text before it: http://web.archive.org/web/*/.
For example, the backup for the pre-registration available from
https://aspredicted.org/kv692.pdf, is found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://aspredicted.org/kv692.pdf
PDFs are backed up when any of the following events occur:
The triggers described in (2) and (3) were added in September of 2024. They are applied to anonymous PDFs created before such date if at least one of the authors of the pre-registration agreed to the policy change.