Ever since Cabells started in the 1970s, it has sought to shine a light on journals and highlight information needed by academic scholars. Simon Linacre shares today’s news that Cabells has signed a transparency declaration aimed at opening-up peer review and editorial policies.
Cabells is delighted to announce that today it has become just the second institution to sign the Declaration on Transparent Editorial Policies for Academic Journals. As well as becoming a signatory, Cabells will be working with other supporters to work on improving the transparency for all aspects of editorial policy.
The Declaration was formed last year by the participants of the meeting “IT Tools in Academic Publishing: between Expectations and Challenges”, held at Leiden University in The Netherlands on 5-6 July. The aim was to promote greater openness in peer review and editorial procedures, and those individuals signing up were from publishers such as Elsevier, IOP and Brill, institutions such as Tilburg and Paris Descartes Universities, and industry operators PubPeer and Origin Editorial.
Key aims
At the heart of the Declaration there are four clear publication phases where Cabells believes greater transparency will benefit authors and editors, as well as the scholarly publishing environment as a whole. These are:
- Submission: Journals and publishers explain editorial governance, including the precise composition of the editorial board, the scope of the journal, the applicable ethics policies, and the use of journal metrics, including rejection rates
- Review: Journals and publishers should explain the criteria for article selection (e.g. the relevance of novelty and/or anticipated impact and methodological rigor) and the timing of review in the publication process (e.g. whether registered reports and/or post-publication review are used). They should be clear about the extent to which authors’ and reviewers’ identities will be known (blinding), and to whom review reports will be communicated. They should also specify how reviewers will be selected, instructed, or possibly trained, and explain how digital tools such as similarity scanners and scanners for digital image manipulation will be used and whether any reporting guidelines are applied
- Publication: Journals and publishers should make information about the review process of published articles available on the article-level, by detailing the roles in the review process (e.g. specify how many reviewers were involved and what other people contributed to the final decision), what criteria for acceptance and what digital tools were used
- Post-publication: Journals and publishers should explain the criteria and procedures for corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, or other rectifications or changes to published material.
(Source: www.ru.nl/transparencydeclaration)
Going forward, Cabells will be using these tenets as guidance on the decisions it makes for journals it assesses for both its Whitelist and Blacklist products. The Declaration states that making editorial policies more transparent will require a concerted effort by publishers and editors, but this effort will be rewarded by trust in the research community. Cabells believes this is the sincere aim of every responsible publisher and editor, and as such is proud to sign the Declaration as part of its ongoing support for scholarly communications.
