At Hindawi we believe that science works best when research is open and are keen to pursue partnerships with others to drive greater openness in scholarly publishing. That is why we are happy to announce that all Hindawi journals are now included in the Transpose database, which brings together multiple journals’ policies on peer review, co-reviewing, and preprinting, acting as a single source of easy to access policy information for authors and publishers alike, improving transparency.
Transpose is a crowd-sourced initiative aiming to build a database of journal policies; anyone may contribute to the database, but Transpose then seeks verification of the information provided from journals and publishers. We have therefore chosen to supply policies for all our journals directly to Transpose, ensuring the accuracy of the policies at this stage.
Last week Transpose launched their user interface covering all journals that have been added so far, allowing any user to easily navigate and search for a specific journal’s policies. This will provide potential authors with information regarding the differences between various journals, enabling them to make informed decisions. It will also enable users to conduct wide research on policies in one location, rather than visiting each journal’s website individually.
Catriona MacCallum, Director of Open Science at Hindawi commented: “Signing up all Hindawi journals to the Transpose initiative aligns with our ongoing Open Science mission and allows authors, readers and anyone in the academic community, to easily access, read, and compare our journal policies to those from other publishers and journals across the industry. We fully support this new initiative and hope the research community find the database useful.”
The initiative’s goal is to “foster new practices while increasing awareness among authors, editors, and other stakeholders” and to “provide resources to assist journals in setting, sharing, and clarifying their policies”. We hope that joining the Transpose initiative will help the scientific communities surrounding our journals become fully aware of our policies, but also enable us to continue to strive for best-practice journal policies as part of our Open Access and Open Science mission.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.