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Publisher preferences for a journal transparency tool: A modified three-round Delphi study

2025· preprint· en· W4407036447 on OpenAlexafffund
Jeremy Y. Ng, Henry Liu, Mehvish Masood, Rubaina Farin, Mireille Messih, Andres Felipe Orduz Perez, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Juan Pablo Alperín, Gregory L. Bryson, Qiuxia Chen, Alan Ehrlich, Alfonso Iorio, Wim J. N. Meester, John Willinsky, Agnes Grudniewicz, Erik Cobo, Imogen Cranston, Phaedra Eve Cress, Julia Gunn, R. Brian Haynes, Bibi Sumera Keenoo, Ana Marušić, Eleanor-Rose Papas, Alan Purvis, João de Deus Barreto Segundo, P Ravi Shankar, Pavel Stoev, Josephine Weisflog, Margaret A. Winker, Kelly D. Cobey, David Moher

Bibliographic record

VenueF1000Research · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of OttawaSimon Fraser UniversityMcMaster UniversityImpactOttawa Hospital
FundersMitacs
KeywordsOpen peer reviewTransparency (behavior)Plant biologyDelphiDelphi methodOpen sciencePhysiologyPsychologyMedicineNeuroscienceComputer scienceBiologyMathematicsArtificial intelligenceComputer securityStatisticsBotany

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background: We propose the creation of a journal transparency tool (JTT), which will allow users to obtain information about a given scholarly journal's operations and policies. We are obtaining preferences from different stakeholders to inform the development of this tool. This study aimed to identify the publishing community's preferences for the JTT. Methods: We conducted a modified three-round Delphi survey. Representatives from publishing houses and journal publishers were recruited through purposeful and snowball sampling. The first two Delphi rounds involved an online survey with items about JTT metrics and user features. During the third round, participants discussed and voted on JTT metric items that did not reach consensus after round 2 within a virtual consensus meeting. We defined consensus as 80% agreement to include or exclude an item in the JTT. Results: Eighty-six participants completed the round 1 survey, and 43 participants (50% of round 1) completed the round 2 survey. In both rounds, respondents voted on JTT user feature and JTT metric item preferences and answered open-ended survey questions regarding the JTT. In round 3, a total of 21 participants discussed and voted on JTT metric items that did not reach consensus after round 2 during an online consensus group meeting. Fifteen out of 30 JTT metric items and none of the four JTT user feature items reached the 80% consensus threshold after all rounds of voting. Analysis of the round 3 online consensus group transcript resulted in two themes: 'factors impacting support for JTT metrics' and 'suggestions for user clarity.' Conclusions: Participants suggested that the publishing community's primary concerns for a JTT are to ensure that the tool is relevant, user-friendly, accessible, and equitable. The outcomes of this research will contribute to developing and refining the tool in accordance with publishing preferences.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.100
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.088
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Bibliometrics, Scholarly communication, Open science, Research integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch, Bibliometrics
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.721
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1000.088
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.1010.110
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0360.001
Open science0.0190.007
Research integrity0.0010.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.849
GPT teacher head0.638
Teacher spread0.211 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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