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A Trust Signal Framework

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Richard Sever, PhD

Chief Science & Strategy Officer, openRxiv

Co-Founder, bioRxiv & medRxiv

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Better trust signals are possible

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Opportunity in an open ecosystem

“We now have the opportunity to adopt a new approach with better trust signals, in which judgments of an article’s merits are not made at a single point in time”

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“Content checks can take place at various stages in the life cycle of an article.”

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Sever (2023) PLOS Biol doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002234

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Better trust signals

“checks are performed at various points….sequentially added to articles to give readers increased confidence”

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“A taxonomy would need to be established for it to be useful, and clearly there would need to be some form of registration and verification of the services ”

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Sever (2023) PLOS Biol doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002234

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Distinctions

  • Core metadata versus event metadata

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  • Verifiable versus verified

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  • Verification versus opinion

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  • Verification (transparency) versus assertion (claim)

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Architecture

Server

or

Repository

3rd-party checker

Metadata

authority

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Proposal

  • Review of existing signals/checks AND user research

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  • Develop initial extendable framework and display guidelines

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  • Select initial signal for pilot

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  • Run Pilot

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  • Refine framework and set up governing authority

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  • Develop metadata schema