Publisher Preferences for a Journal Transparency Tool: A Delphi Study Protocol

Peer-reviewed, scholarly journals play a critical role in disseminating biomedical research. Scientific publications must be reported and disseminated according to particular best practice standards in order to be of use to clinicians, other researchers, and patients. For example, published research should be properly indexed and archived so that it can be found and preserved over time. Several calls have been made for academic journals to become more transparent, including opening up the peer-review process and making study data publicly available. To address this call for increased transparency, we want to develop a publicly available digital journal transparency tool that can assist different stakeholders including the public, researchers, and publishers to ascertain information about how a journal operates and which best practices it meets. The aim of this particular research study is to determine the needs and preferences for a digital transparency tool from the publishing community.