From Policy to Practice: COS’s Commitment to Applying the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

The Center for Open Science’s (COS) mission is to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research by promoting research that is transparent, linked, and accessible across its entire lifecycle. A key component of this work is the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, a policy framework for advancing open science practices. The TOP Guidelines provide a shared playbook to engage the research, scholarly communications, and funding communities to implement policies. Originally released in 2015, the TOP Guidelines have recently been updated for 2025 after a two year process to incorporate feedback and revisions through the TOP Advisory Board. 

Demonstrating TOP 2025 through Example

We recognize that policy efforts on their own can sometimes seem abstract — and even idealistic — to translate into real-world adoption. Over the next six months, we’ll be giving you a view into the nuanced and at times messy process of transforming policy into meaningful action. COS will be releasing a series of demonstrations to illustrate how we put the guidelines into action given the various roles we play in the scholarly community, acting as a pass-through funder, providing infrastructure to enable open practices, performing research on research, enabling publication of research results, and building capacity and community to transform research culture. We’ll complement these COS-led demonstrations with a series of webinars showcasing efforts by external members of the research community to leverage TOP 2025 to build on and implement open science policies and processes. By grounding TOP 2025 implementation in real world scenarios led by ourselves and other organizations, we hope to galvanize greater action across the research community — and invite the community to join us in implementing the TOP Guidelines in their policies. 

More About TOP 2025

TOP’s central goal and scope is to promote the verifiability of empirical research claims. The revisions streamline the framework and provide conceptual clarity surrounding research practices and levels of implementations of those practices. TOP consists of seven research practices, which can be implemented in up to three distinct levels:

1. Disclosure, where the researcher states whether or not the practice was conducted.
2. Share and Cite, where the researcher posts the relevant output in a repository for others to verify or reuse.
3. Certification, where an independent third party evaluates a practice against a disciplinary standard.

TOP also consists of two verification practices and four verification study types that collectively improve the credibility of many research processes. 

The TOP conceptual framework outlining research practices, verification practices, verification studies, and the ultimate objective for the TOP guidelines. 

The process of research varies across disciplines and methodologies. The tiered and modular structure of TOP has always allowed this reality to affect how organizations use TOP. Given the diversity of implementation needs across the research ecosystem, TOP allows for customization where TOP’s scope can be best applied, because TOP is not a uniform mandate across all of science.

With TOP 2025, this ethos has been continued and built into the framework. “Certification” (Level 3) now explicitly calls out this diversity by pointing to discipline-specific practices for certification. The modular and tiered structure of the guidelines allows organizations to tailor policies, taking into consideration readiness, applicability, and resource constraints. TOP can be applied in different ways by members of the research community, including publishers, funders, and research institutions. COS has performed functions in — or analogous to — these roles, providing us with an opportunity to demonstrate what implementation could look like in each domain. 

In the coming months, we will host a series of webinars and share examples through blog posts on how COS and other community members have applied TOP in different scenarios, serving as a window into considerations around their application. These demonstrations will model how other organizations might apply the guidelines.

Share Your Efforts with Us

TOP is a community-supported effort stewarded by COS, and its success depends on the collective efforts of journals, funders, institutions, researchers, and publishers. We want to hear from you. Our ideal future state is one in which the process, content, and outcomes of research are open and connected by default, enabling greater access to and onramps into the research lifecycle. 

We continue to invite feedback from journals, preprint servers, funders, academic institutions, research labs, research publishers, and other potential users so we can develop implementation guidance that best matches your needs. We also want to shine a light on efforts to implement and promote the guidelines to inspire wider adoption, meet community needs, and iteratively develop and improve implementation guides for various communities; all while being cognizant of efforts that do not use these principles in good faith and calling them out when we see it. If you have feedback, implementation stories, or lessons learned from working with TOP, get in touch with us at top@cos.io.