Atlantis Press Now a Signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

June 4th, 2018

Atlantis Press today became a signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines issued by the Center for Open Science (COS). The TOP Guidelines are a community-driven and evolving effort, changing to meet the needs of the community while pursuing the most transparent practices. As an organizational signatory of these guidelines, Atlantis Press expresses support for the principles of openness, transparency and reproducibility of science and encourages journals to conduct a review of these standards and levels of adoption.

Transparency, open sharing and reproducibility are core values of science. When asked most scientists embrace these features as disciplinary norms and values. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that they are not always part of daily practice. A likely reason for this disconnect is an academic reward system that does not sufficiently incentivize open practices. In the present reward system, emphasis on innovation may undermine practices that support verification. Too often, publication requirements (whether actual or perceived) fail to encourage transparent, open and reproducible science. By adopting the TOP Guidelines, journals, funders, publishers and societies can express their support for these principles, enhance awareness and help to increase the reproducibility of research.

The TOP Guidelines include the following eight modular standards:

  • Citation Standards: cite shared data to incentivize their publication.
  • Data Transparency: disclose, require or verify shared data.
  • Analytical Methods (Code) Transparency: disclose, require or verify shared code.
  • Research Materials Transparency: disclose, require or verify shared materials.
  • Design and Analysis Transparency: sets standards for research design disclosures.
  • Preregistration of Studies: specification of study details before data collection.
  • Preregistration of Analysis Plans: specification of analytical details before data collection.
  • Replication: encourages publication of replication studies.

Each of these standards comes with three levels of increasing stringency: (i) Disclosure: the article must disclose whether or not materials are available; (ii) Requirement: the article must share materials when possible; (iii) Verification: third party must very that the standard is being met. 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, while simultaneously establishing community standards.

At the time of writing this article more than 5,000 journals and organizations have already become signatories of the TOP Guidelines and more than 1,000 journals have implemented one or more TOP-compliant policies. As such, the TOP Guidelines can be regarded as a widely used tool for implementing open science practices.

Atlantis Press (https://www.atlantis-press.com) is a global open access publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) content which was founded in Paris in 2006 and which currently has offices in Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Beijing. The company’s mission is to support the advancement of scientific, technical and medical research by contributing to a more efficient and effective dissemination and exchange of knowledge both for the research community and society at large. The Atlantis Press content platform currently contains more than 75,000 published articles which are all open access and hence freely accessible.