[Excerpts taken from the article “New Measure Rates Quality of Research Journals’ Policies to Promote Transparency and Reproducibility”, published by the Center for Open Science at their website.]

“Today, the Center for Open Science launches TOP Factor, an alternative to journal impact factor (JIF) to evaluate qualities of journals. TOP Factor assesses journal policies for the degree to which they promote core scholarly norms of transparency and reproducibility.”

“TOP Factor is based primarily on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, a framework of eight standards that summarize behaviors that can improve transparency and reproducibility of research such as transparency of data, materials, code, and research design, preregistration, and replication.”

“Journals can adopt policies for each of the eight standards that have increasing levels of stringency. For example, for the data transparency standard, a score of 0 indicates that the journal policy fails to meet the standard, 1 indicates that the policy requires that authors disclose whether data are publicly accessible, 2 indicates that the policy requires authors to make data publicly accessible unless it qualifies for an exception (e.g., sensitive health data, proprietary data), and 3 indicates that the policy includes both a requirement and a verification process for the data’s correspondence with the findings reported in the paper.”

“TOP Factor also includes indicators of whether journals offer Registered Reports, a publishing model that reduces publication bias of ignoring negative and null results, and badging to acknowledge open research practices to facilitate visibility of open behaviors.”

“At the TOP Factor website, users can filter TOP Factor scores by discipline, publisher, or by subsets of the standards to see how journal policies compare.”

“‘Disciplines are evolving in different ways toward improving rigor and transparency,’ noted Brian Nosek, Executive Director of the Center for Open Science. ‘TOP Factor makes that diversity visible and comparable across research communities. For example, economics journals are at the leading edge of requiring transparency of data and code whereas psychology journals are among the most assertive for promoting preregistration.’”

“So far, over 250 journal policies have been evaluated and are presented on the TOP Factor website. …Journals will be added continuously over time.”

“Editors and community members can complete a journal evaluation form on the TOP Factor website to accelerate the process. Center for Open Science staff review those submissions and confirm with the journal’s publicly posted policies before posting the scores to the TOP Factor website.”

To read the article and access TOP Factor, click here.