IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jpubli/v10y2022i4p46-d986868.html

Adoption of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines across Journals

Author

Listed:
  • Inga Patarčić

    (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, 13125 Berlin, Germany)

  • Jadranka Stojanovski

    (Department of Information Sciences, University of Zadar, 23000 Zadar, Croatia
    Ruđer Bošković Institute, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia)

Abstract

Journal policies continuously evolve to enable knowledge sharing and support reproducible science. However, that change happens within a certain framework. Eight modular standards with three levels of increasing stringency make Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines which can be used to evaluate to what extent and with which stringency journals promote open science. Guidelines define standards for data citation, transparency of data, material, code and design and analysis, replication, plan and study pre-registration, and two effective interventions: “Registered reports” and “Open science badges”, and levels of adoption summed up across standards define journal’s TOP Factor. In this paper, we analysed the status of adoption of TOP guidelines across two thousand journals reported in the TOP Factor metrics. We show that the majority of the journals’ policies align with at least one of the TOP’s standards, most likely “Data citation” (70%) followed by “Data transparency” (19%). Two-thirds of adoptions of TOP standard are of the stringency Level 1 (less stringent), whereas only 9% is of the stringency Level 3. Adoption of TOP standards differs across science disciplines and multidisciplinary journals (N = 1505) and journals from social sciences (N = 1077) show the greatest number of adoptions. Improvement of the measures that journals take to implement open science practices could be done: (1) discipline-specific, (2) journals that have not yet adopted TOP guidelines could do so, (3) the stringency of adoptions could be increased.

Suggested Citation

  • Inga Patarčić & Jadranka Stojanovski, 2022. "Adoption of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines across Journals," Publications, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-10, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:10:y:2022:i:4:p:46-:d:986868
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/10/4/46/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/10/4/46/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Monya Baker, 2016. "1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility," Nature, Nature, vol. 533(7604), pages 452-454, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. O’Boyle, Ernest H. & Götz, Martin & Zivic, Damian C., 2024. "Increasing the practical relevance of management research: In honor of Timothy T. Baldwin," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 161-171.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kleber Neves & Pedro B Tan & Olavo B Amaral, 2022. "Are most published research findings false in a continuous universe?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(12), pages 1-18, December.
    2. Dennis Bontempi & Leonard Nuernberg & Suraj Pai & Deepa Krishnaswamy & Vamsi Thiriveedhi & Ahmed Hosny & Raymond H. Mak & Keyvan Farahani & Ron Kikinis & Andrey Fedorov & Hugo J. W. L. Aerts, 2024. "End-to-end reproducible AI pipelines in radiology using the cloud," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-9, December.
    3. Caicedo, Juan D. & Guirado, Carlos & González, Marta C. & Walker, Joan L., 2025. "Sharing, collaborating, and benchmarking to advance travel demand research: A demonstration of short-term ridership prediction," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 531-541.
    4. Chai, Daniel & Ali, Searat & Brosnan, Mark & Hasso, Tim, 2024. "Understanding researchers' perceptions and experiences in finance research replication studies: A pre-registered report," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    5. Deer, Lachlan & Adler, Susanne J. & Datta, Hannes & Mizik, Natalie & Sarstedt, Marko, 2025. "Toward open science in marketing research," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 212-233.
    6. repec:plo:pcbi00:1005412 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Peter Harremoës, 2019. "Replication Papers," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(3), pages 1-8, July.
    8. Hasso, Tim & Brosnan, Mark & Ali, Searat & Chai, Daniel, 2025. "Perceived problems, causes, and solutions of finance research reproducibility and replicability: A pre-registered report," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    9. Jemesa Landers & Tom Coupé & Andrea Menclova, 2026. "The Long-Term Impact of War Victimization on Life Satisfaction - Evidence from the Life in Transition Survey," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 182(1), pages 1-20, March.
    10. Antonella Lanati & Marinella Marzano & Caterina Manzari & Bruno Fosso & Graziano Pesole & Francesca De Leo, 2019. "Management at the service of research: ReOmicS, a quality management system for omics sciences," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 5(1), pages 1-13, December.
    11. Thomas F. Heston, 2024. "Redefining Significance: Robustness and Percent Fragility Indices in Biomedical Research," Stats, MDPI, vol. 7(2), pages 1-12, June.
    12. Erastus Karanja & Aditya Sharma & Ibrahim Salama, 2020. "What does MIS survey research reveal about diversity and representativeness in the MIS field? A content analysis approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(3), pages 1583-1628, March.
    13. Breznau, Nate & Rinke, Eike Mark & Wuttke, Alexander & Adem, Muna & Adriaans, Jule & Akdeniz, Esra & Alvarez-Benjumea, Amalia & Andersen, Henrik K. & Auer, Daniel & Azevedo, Flavio & Bahnsen, Oke & Ba, 2025. "The reliability of replications: a study in computational reproductions," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 12(3), pages 1-23.
    14. Bor Luen Tang, 2023. "Some Insights into the Factors Influencing Continuous Citation of Retracted Scientific Papers," Publications, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-14, October.
    15. David N. Carruthers & Patrick C. Kinnunen & Yuerong Li & Yan Chen & Jennifer W. Gin & Ian S. Yunus & William R. Galliard & Stephen Tan & Tijana Radivojevic & Paul D. Adams & Anup K. Singh & Jess Susta, 2025. "Automation and machine learning drive rapid optimization of isoprenol production in Pseudomonas putida," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 16(1), pages 1-16, December.
    16. McWay, Ryan & Braaksma, Matthew, 2025. "The political consequences of resource scarcity: Targeted spending in a water-stressed democracy. A replication study of Mahadevan and Shenoy (Journal of Public Economics, 2023)," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    17. Julian N. Marewski & Ulrich Hoffrage, 2025. "Heuristics: how simple models of the mind can serve as tools for transparent scientific justification," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 24(2), pages 947-998, December.
    18. repec:plo:pbio00:2005561 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Taavi Päll & Hannes Luidalepp & Tanel Tenson & Ülo Maiväli, 2023. "A field-wide assessment of differential expression profiling by high-throughput sequencing reveals widespread bias," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 21(3), pages 1-27, March.
    20. Rosenblatt, Lucas & Herman, Bernease & Holovenko, Anastasia & Lee, Wonkwon & Loftus, Joshua & McKinnie, Elizabeth & Rumezhak, Taras & Stadnik, Andrii & Howe, Bill & Stoyanovich, Julia, 2023. "Epistemic parity: reproducibility as an evaluation metric for differential privacy," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120493, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    21. Despina Michelaki & Michail Tsagris & Christos Adam, 2025. "An Overview of Economics and Econometrics Related R Packages," Stats, MDPI, vol. 8(4), pages 1-13, September.
    22. Maier, Gunther, 2025. "Gutenberg 2.0 − Academic publishing in the digital world," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:10:y:2022:i:4:p:46-:d:986868. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.