Sunsetting TOPFactor.org: What’s Changing and Why

Since its 2020 launch, TOPFactor.org has served as a resource for researchers seeking to understand how journal policies support open and transparent research practices through their policies. Over the last six years, the Center for Open Science (COS) has learned from the database’s use. Today, we are announcing our plans to sunset the tool on March 16, 2026, what prompted this decision, and how the research community can continue to advance open and transparent policymaking into the future.

What is TOP Factor and TOPFactor.org?

TOP Factor was released in early 2020 to shift focus away from the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as the sole measure of a journal’s quality. TOP Factor instead focused on evaluating criteria that are more central to ideal scientific practices, such as the degree to which journals promote transparency of the underlying evidence and replication studies. Rather than asking researchers to rely on opaque and proprietary measures of impact based on mean citation rates, TOP Factor has aimed to empower informed choices about where to publish based on alignment with open practices.

Journals were scored according to the framework provided by the first iteration of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines published in 2015. Over the next few years, TOP Factor grew to include over 3,200 journals in the database, with underlying data and evaluation rubric available for download. Members of the research community could discover TOP Factor scores through a searchable website called TOPFactor.org.

What’s changing?

As of February 2025, we announced that TOP Factor scores would no longer be added or updated after we released the updated TOP 2025 Guidelines. Today, we’re announcing that COS will be sunsetting the TOP Factor interactive website. The dataset of TOP Factor scores will remain available for download on the Open Science Framework (OSF). These changes reflect both the evolution of the TOP Guidelines themselves and what COS has learned from several years of maintaining and expanding the data that the TOP Factor resource provides.

What we’ve learned

As TOP Factor grew, COS has remained committed to actively seeking and responding to community feedback. Since launching TOP Factor, we have noticed a number of positive trends, including:

• Updates to journal policies, with several major publishers (notably Cell, Nature, Science, and their respective journals) updating language to align with the TOP framework.
• Inclusion in Clarivate’s “Master Journal List” as an addition to the JIF in assessment of journal information.
• Opportunities to engage with discipline experts to assess and compare journal policies within disciplines in order to advocate for improved policies.
• Offering a unique and complementary resource to other databases of journal policies and practices that document, for example, open access policies.

Community feedback also highlighted several important limitations of journal-level scoring:

• Policies alone are not enough. A journal could have a very assertive TOP policy; however, if that policy isn’t well implemented or enforced, it can’t guarantee the open and transparent practices it prescribes will be followed. The meaningful criterion is whether papers themselves are transparent, which relies on effective implementation and enforcement of journal policies.
• Disciplinary differences matter. TOP standards do not apply uniformly across all fields. Differences in methodologies, norms, and readiness meant that some disciplines were more likely to receive higher scores than others. These differences are not necessarily an indicator of lack of commitment to openness and transparency.
• Policy language is often unclear. As more journals were reviewed, evaluators encountered ambiguous, incomplete, or even self-contradictory policies. These ambiguities led to weak inter-rater reliability in TOP scoring.
  
• Room for improvement to TOP 2015 standards. Evaluators also noted a lack of clarity in the precise requirements for each level of TOP to enable consistent interpretation and scoring. This feedback has since been incorporated into the updated TOP 2025 guidelines.

Moving forward with TOP 2025

In 2025, COS released an updated version of the TOP Guidelines that incorporates insights gained over the past decade, including lessons learned directly from developing and maintaining TOP Factor. The revised framework is designed to improve TOP’s clarity, interpretation, and applicability across different research communities.

With the arrival and promotion of the updated TOP 2025 guidelines, as well as emerging methods to assess transparency practices of papers directly with tools like DataSeer, there is more burden than benefit to updating and maintaining the TOP Factor database, particularly in light of the limitations we’ve discussed. However, the underlying data remains open for research and updating by others if anyone wishes to use it.

We’re grateful to the community who supported the development and evaluation of TOP Factor. While we may be retiring the TOP Factor interface, we remain clear in our commitment to and enthusiasm for the updated TOP Guidelines. We are eager to continue working with the research community on the TOP framework in support of policies that promote greater transparency and openness. We welcome opportunities to collaborate and partner on this work at top@cos.io.