Researchers want a ‘nutrition label’ for academic-paper facts

"I, like many others, have grown concerned about research integrity. Through transparency, we want to show how closely journals and authors are adhering to the scholarly standards of publishing. We want to help readers, including researchers, the media and the public, to decide whether an article is worth reporting on or citing.

The facts that we have selected for the label include publisher and funder names, the journal’s acceptance rate and the number of peer reviewers. The label also shows whether the paper includes a competing-interests statement and an editor list, where the journal is indexed and whether the data have been made publicly available. Averages for other participating journals are listed, for comparison.

It’s important that such information is readily available. When we conducted an exercise with secondary-school students, asking them to find these facts for a single academic article online, many of them took 30 minutes to do so. Some couldn’t find the information. This finding justifies the need for the label: it shouldn’t take half an hour to establish that a journal adheres to scholarly standards....

We’ve built in ways to automatically generate the label, to ensure that the format is standardized across journals and articles and to make the label available in several languages. We have created a third-party verification system, too, to ensure that authors’ identities are not revealed to peer reviewers and vice versa. This relies on authors, reviewers and editors using ORCID, the service that provides unique indicators with which to identify researchers....

Although we’re initially building the label for OJS journals, it is an open-source plug-in that other publishing platforms will easily be able to adapt. The software is currently listed as being ‘under development’ on GitHub and will be shared there on release...."