Website of the month for February - Top Factor

For February's website of the month we cast our view to perhaps the future of how academic journals might be evaluated and a new metric - The Top Factor. This is a project by the Center for Open Science and stands for Transparency and Openness Promotion and looks to highlight which journals meet transparency and reproducibility standards.

https://topfactor.org/

Taken from the Top Factor website

The Standards

Published in Science in 2015 (OA), the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (PDF and HTML) include eight modular standards, each with three levels of increasing stringency. Journals select which of the eight transparency standards they wish to implement and select a level of implementation for each. These features provide flexibility for adoption depending on disciplinary variation, but simultaneously establish community standards.

Standards: Data Citation | Data, Materials, and Code Transparency | Design and Analysis | Preregistration | Replication

Levels: Disclose, Require, or Verify

TOP Factor

Journal policies can be evaluated based on the degree to which they comply with the TOP Guidelines. This TOP Factor is a metric that reports the steps that a journal is taking to implement open science practices, practices that are based on the core principles of the scientific community.  It is an alternative way to assess journal qualities, and is an improvement over traditional metrics that measure mean citation rates. The TOP Factor is transparent (see underlying data and the evaluation rubric) and will be responsive to community feedback.

Read more about TOP Factor here.