TRANSPOSE journal policies database

We’re crowd-sourcing a database of journal policies relating to peer review (openness, recognition for co-reviewing) and preprinting.

⚠ This information is out of date; please see our updated site for the latest information on contributing

Why TRANSPOSE?

While there are fantastic databases that indicate whether archiving a preprint is allowed (Sherpa/RoMEO) and whether journals are partnered with Publons, to our knowledge, there is no database of information on topics such as:

the openness of peer review (whether the content of peer reviews and the identities of reviewers are published, or whether reviews can be transferred to other journals),
recognition for peer review (whether postdoc co-reviewers are acknowledged),
detailed policies on preprinting (for example, what version is ok to post, whether preprints can be cited, and what licenses and media coverage of preprints are permitted).

Without this kind of information, it’s difficult to monitor or advocate for changes that would make scholarly publishing more open and fair. It’s also difficult for authors to easily compare different journals to make choices that support their needs and interests in open communication.

In order to address this, we’re building a user-editable database that contains this information. The database entries are human-readable YAML files that we’ll use to build visualizations on the web down the road.

For more information on this initiative, visit our homepage.

Contributing

👉Edit and add new records to TRANSPOSE

Participation Guidelines

This project adheres to a code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to jessica.polka@asapbio.org.

Events

Editathon

We held an editathon to explain some of the motivation behind the project, help users with any issues, and gain feedback on the schema and editing process. (The instructions in the notes refer to an older architecture that we have since replaced with Google Sheets and Google Forms).

MozSprint

We participated in the Mozilla’s Global Sprint on May 10-11, 2018.

Find issues we’re looking for help with labeled “mozsprint” here
TRANSPOSE on the Mozilla Global Sprint repo here
We discussed the TRANSPOSE project on a Mozilla Sprint Demo call at 12pm ET (16:00 UTC) on Tuesday, May 8, 2018. See notes and join info
During the Sprint, we can keep in touch via Gitter:

Local usage

(Note: The code in this repository is no longer being used to run TRANSPOSE)

Most users will not need to run the code in this repository locally.
However, if you’d like to modify the code or test a change locally, follow these instructions.

This repository uses conda to manage its environment as specified in environment.yml.
Install the environment with:

conda env create --file=environment.yml

Then use conda activate policies-database and conda deactivate to activate or deactivate the environment.

With the environment activated, you can validate YAML policy files with the following commands:

# Validate a single test YAML policies
pykwalify \
  --data-file policies/test-policies/test-policy-id-only.yml \
  --schema-file policies/schema.yml
# Validate all YAML files in policies/policies
pytest policies/validate_policies.py

License

All original work in this repository is dedicated to the public domain under the CC0 license.
See LICENSE.md.
SHERPA RoMEO data is reused under its CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 License.
Learn more in the romeo README.

Data source

Information in the policy records is derived from the RoMEO database which is compiled by SHERPA and has been modified for use here. Data from SHERPA RoMEO is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.