ARL Signs Onto TOP Guidelines to Improve Research and Publishing Practices
Today in Science, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee has published the TOP Guidelines, a set of author guidelines that journals can adopt to enhance the transparency of the research they publish. These guidelines represent a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices.
Already, 111 journals and 34 organizations, including ARL, have expressed support for the principles of transparency and openness and have pledged to consider adopting them within the next year. ARL joins a broad coalition across scientific disciplines including societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, and the Association for Psychological Science.
ARL executive director Elliott Shore said, “Greater transparency in research and publishing will help research institutions achieve their mission of creating knowledge as a public good. The TOP Guidelines will improve and strengthen community standards and better enable research libraries to provide necessary services and infrastructure to support open scholarship.”
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TOP is first and foremost a transparency initiative that promotes disclosure of data, code, and procedures. By allowing others in the scientific community to retrace the steps that produced a research finding, transparency reduces cost, enables researchers to leverage many datasets to establish greater precision in estimating effects, ultimately accelerating the pace scientific discovery.
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The guidelines are the output of a November 2014 meeting at the Center for Open Science (COS), co-hosted with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) and Science Magazine, and funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The TOP Committee is a diverse group of 39 journal editors, society leaders, funders, and other stakeholders in the behavioral and social sciences.
Read the Complete Announcement
Direct to Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines (via COS.io)
Page includes the following resources:
- Article introducing the TOP Guidelines, Science
- Summary worksheet of the TOP Guidelines
- The TOP Guidelines wiki
- The TOP Guidelines (PDF)
- Journal Signatories
- Organization Signatories
Complete List of Organization Signatories as of 6/25/15.
- AAAS
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- American Geophysical Union
- American Meteorological Society
- Association for Psychological Science
- Association for Research in Personality
- Association of Research Libraries
- Behavioral Science & Policy Association
- Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
- Bio, Tech and Beyond
- Center for Open Science
- Databrary
- DataONE
- Dataverse
- Dryad
- EGAP
- F1000
- figshare
- Global Biological Standards Institute
- International Association for Relationship Research
- Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
- Laura and John Arnold Foundation
- Mozilla Science Lab
- Open Context
- Open fMRI
- Prometheus Research
- rOpenSci
- Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology
- Society of Australasian Social Psychologists
- SPARC
- Sunlight Foundation
- Time-series Experiments in Social Sciences
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Libraries, Open Access, Public Libraries, Publishing, Resources

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.