Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

Overleaf has joined the growing list of signatories of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, put forward by the Center for Open Science and designed to help encourage and support openness and reproducibility in research.

Transparency, open sharing, and reproducibility are core features of science, but not always part of daily practice. Journals can increase transparency and reproducibility of research by adopting the TOP Guidelines. TOP includes eight modular standards, each with three levels of increasing stringency.

Journals select which of the eight transparency standards they wish to adopt for their journal, and select a level of implementation for the selected standards. These features provide flexibility for adoption depending on disciplinary variation, but simultaneously establish community standards.

The guidelines are the output of a meeting held in November 2014, organized by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, Science Magazine, and the Center for Open Science. TOP Guidelines are one of a family of efforts aiming to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. Read the guidelines and see the list of signatories at: http://centerforopenscience.org/top/.