Abstract
Background: "Open science" is an umbrella term describing various aspects of transparent and open science practices. The adoption of practices at different levels of the scientific process (e.g., individual researchers, laboratories, institutions) has been rapidly changing the scientific research landscape in the past years, but their uptake differs from discipline to discipline. Here, we asked to what extent journals in the field of sleep research and chronobiology encourage or even require following transparent and open science principles in their author guidelines. Methods: We scored the author guidelines of a comprehensive set of 27 sleep and chronobiology journals, including the major outlets in the field, using the standardised Transparency and Openness (TOP) Factor. The TOP Factor is a quantitative summary of the extent to which journals encourage or require following various aspects of open science, including data citation, data transparency, analysis code transparency, materials transparency, design and analysis guidelines, study pre-registration, analysis plan pre-registration, replication, registered reports, and the use of open science badges. Results: Across the 27 journals, we find low values on the TOP Factor (median [25 th, 75 th percentile] 3 [1, 3], min. 0, max. 9, out of a total possible score of 29) in sleep research and chronobiology journals. Conclusions: Our findings suggest an opportunity for sleep research and chronobiology journals to further support recent developments in transparent and open science by implementing transparency and openness principles in their author guidelines.
Highlights
Through our hybrid search strategy, we found six additional journals (PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, International Journal of Gerontology, Lung India, Annals of Thoracic Medicine, Chronic Respiratory Disease, and Frontiers in Psychiatry), which we did not further consider, as they did not focus on sleep research or chronobiology, or were general purpose journals
Low explicit implementation of transparency and openness in sleep research and chronobiology journals Across the 27 journals we examined, we find a total median Transparency and Openness (TOP) Factor of 3 (25th percentile 1, 75th percentile 4, minimum 0, maximum 9, IQR 3) out of a maximum of 29 points (Table 1 and Table 2)
As the TOP Factor was only launched in February 2020, we see the low transparency and openness scores in sleep research and chronobiology journals as an opportunity to revisit how we do science, and how we report it
Summary
Author roles: Spitschan M: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Software, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; Schmidt MH: Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; Blume C: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing
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