A number of guidelines and tools have been developed that journals can adopt to promote transparency of the science they publish:

TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion)

Eight guidelines suitable for a wide range of empirical disciplines. These guidelines can be adopted singly or in any combination and at any of three levels of stringency. As of July 2017, over 2900 journals have become TOP signatories, including > 20 prominent journals in ecology evolution, such as Ecology Letters, the journals of the Ecological Society of America, Evolution, American Naturalist, Conservation Biology, and Systematic Botany. For more information about investigating the suitability of TOP for your journal, visit the TOP website, the TTEE website (see below) or contact Tim Parker (parkerth@whitman.edu), Shinichi Nakagawa (s.nakagawa@unsw.edu.au), or David Mellor (david@cos.io).

TTEE (Tools for Transparency in Ecology and Evolution)

TTEE is designed to provide resources for journals in ecology and evolution wishing to adopt TOP or other transparency standards.

Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices

These are emblems placed on the first page of a published article to indicate that the article was produced with the indicated transparent practice. Badges have been shown to dramatically increase data archiving (Kidwell et al. PLOS Biology 2016). Besides acting as an incentive for open practices, badges serve to identify articles meeting transparency standards to later readers.

Currently three badge types are available through the Open Science Framework:

• Open Data
• Open Materials
• Pre-registered