I would regard projects like COMPare, which rate studies after publication, as much more valuable than preregistration. Yes, preregistration reduces researcher degrees of freedom, but it also increases red tape. Ioannidis mentions how researchers are spending too much time chasing funds. Preregistration increases costs (in terms of extra work) to the researcher; encouraging them to chase more funding. Increasing quality will likely require reducing the cost of doing higher quality research; not increasing it. Yes, I'm aware COMPare is using the preregistration to rate the studies, but that's just one method. The question mark for me with preregistration is: what is the opportunity cost? If researchers are now spending this extra time figuring out exactly what they plan to do all from the beginning of the study, and then filling out preregistration forms, what are they not doing instead?
If researchers are now spending this extra time figuring out exactly what they plan to do all from the beginning of the study, and then filling out preregistration forms, what are they not doing instead?
Spending time on using a lot of different statistical techniques till one of them provides statistical significant restuls?
John Ioannidis has written a very insightful and entertaining article about the current state of the movement which calls itself "Evidence-Based Medicine". The paper is available ahead of print at http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf.
As far as I can tell there is currently no paywall, that may change later, send me an e-mail if you are unable to access it.
Retractionwatch interviews John about the paper here: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/16/evidence-based-medicine-has-been-hijacked-a-confession-from-john-ioannidis/
(Full disclosure: John Ioannidis is a co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), where I am an employee. I am posting this not in an effort to promote METRICS, but because I believe the links will be of interest to the community)