FLICKR, BIO LABMore than 100 journals and 31 scientific organizations have signed new science publication guidelines, called Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP), published last week (June 25) in Science. Authored by Science editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt and nearly 40 researchers, TOP aims to help scientists and journals understand their respective roles in making sure research integrity is maintained and offer incentive structures for openness.
“Transparency and reproducibility are the beating heart of the scientific enterprise,” coauthors Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science, and Chris Chambers of Cardiff University, wrote in The Guardian. “Transparency ensures that all aspects of scientific methods and results are available for critique, compliment, or reuse. . . . Transparent practices such as sharing data and computer code, in turn, safeguard reproducibility: the idea that for a scientific observation to count as a discovery it must reveal something real and repeatable about the natural world.”
TOP outlines eight areas of disclosure, such as data transparency, and each category contains three levels of stringency, from stating where the data can be found to ...
