Best-Practice Guidelines for Psychology: Project Pre-Specification

In 2015, the Center of Open Science (COS) introduced the Transparency And Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP), a policy framework for journals to implement eight publication standards aligned with open science. In 2025, an updated version of TOP was introduced to clarify definitions and enhance its applicability across different research designs and disciplines. The update, however, introduces a key change at the most stringent standard of the guidelines (previously Level 3, now called “Certified”). While previously requiring concrete, measurable actions, the current version is more abstract, relying on adherence to “best practices”. This is a difficult standard to establish and implement, because it is not clearly defined or universally established across – or even within – disciplines such as psychology. As a result, it is difficult to assign or verify the most stringent standard of TOP unambiguously. Therefore, our goal is to develop consensus-based best-practice guidelines for psychology. By bringing together researchers from different psychological sub-disciplines, open science experts, and the infrastructure community, we develop modular guidelines that can help implement the TOP Guidelines in psychology. This pre-specification is a frozen version of the project website and provides an overview of the project plan.