An exploration of transparency policies of book publishers and the availability of transparency and verification material for 577 monographs

The transparency of journal publishing has increased substantially over the past 10 years. Next to journal articles, monographs still play an important role for presenting research and the career of political scientists. The importance of monographs has been ignored in open-ness debates. There is little knowledge about the transparency policies of book publishers and book series. Moreover, there are no assessments of the transparency of research pre-sented in monographs as measured by the public availability of code, data and supplementary material and documentation. We present the exploratory findings of a transparency survey of 19 book publishers and 137 book series. No publisher or series has a policy that extends be-yond encouragement for following open science practices. Furthermore, we reviewed 577 monographs to determine the availability of reproduction materials and documentation that enhances transparency. The findings indicate that the transparency of book-length research falls short of the practices known from journal publishing. We recommend that book publish-ers, series editors and authors adopt and adhere to policies familiar from journals. There is no apparent reason why book publications should be less transparent.