Am very happy to find out a journal that is open access a real way to distribute and share knowledge in psychology. This is a pioneering effort for a wider audience to have and get to know the current trends in this field. I hope that this will continue to be as it is, open and people interested in psychology should engage and be part of this initiative.
Mabuhay to an empowering Psychology!
Archives of Scientific Psychology: A New Journal for a New Era
Harris Cooper and Gary R. VandenBos
The science of psychology matures in many ways. Its concepts and theories become more precise. Its methods incorporate advances in statistics and research design, as well as new technologies. Publishing in scientific psychology also matures.
Archives of Scientific Psychology is a new journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). It is a response to recent changes in how social, behavioral, and cognitive scientists communicate with one another and with the public. As importantly, it responds to changes in what people expect to learn when they read a scientific research report.
The subject matter of Archives of Scientific Psychology spans the entire discipline of psychology. Readers will find articles on subjects ranging from neuroscience topolitical psychology, and all points in between. Articles will also describe research conducted using any of the methods found in the psychologist's toolbox (Cooper et al., 2012).
Articles published in Archives of Scientific Psychology have five characteristics that, together, make them unique:
The articles are free and open to the public; anyone with access to the Internet should have access to these research reports. In addition, readers can sign up for e-mail and other alerts when articles of interest to them are published.
Following APA's Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS; APA Publication and Communication Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards, 2008), the authors of articles have completed a detailed description of their methods; this description is also available on the Internet.
The authors have made available the data that underlie the analyses presented in the article. The data can be used by others for verification or extension of the study's results. The data are available from APA or another approved repository upon agreement regarding usage. If deposited with APA, next users agree to offer to the researchers who generated the data involvement in any subsequent publications.
Because articles published in Archives of Scientific Psychology are available to the general public as well as scientists, readers find two versions of each article's Abstract and Method section.
One abstract is written in nontechnical language; it describes the study and why its findings are important to understanding human thought, feeling, and behavior and/or to assisting with solutions to psychological or societal problems. The other abstract is a scientific abstract and is used for retrieval of the article from databases of scientific references.
The Method section contains a brief, nontechnical description of methods. Also, it contains a link to the detailed description of the investigation's design, implementation, and analyses mentioned above.
Finally, to facilitate discussion of the article among multiple audiences:
The (a) article, (b) comments on the article by scholars who took part in the peer review process (and perhaps others), and (c) the authors' response may be published as a separate document at the same time as the target article. The comments and author reaction also pass review by the action editor.
The article will contain a link to a discussion group dedicated to the article.
Each of these characteristics of Archives of Scientific Psychology is briefly discussed below.
Open access
“Open access” in the publishing domain refers to the availability of scholarly materials, typically peer-reviewed, free of charge to readers and with a minimum or reduced set of copyright restrictions. The expense of distributing the material is borne by the author or an institution supportive of open access. The principal barrier to obtaining open access material is the need for access to the Internet (seeSuber, 2012, for an excellent introductory but nuanced definition of open access).
The arguments in favor of open access are persuasively presented by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002):
Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002)
The Harvard Open Access Initiative goes on to say:
Open access makes knowledge accessible and reusable, accelerates the pace of discovery and discussion, maximizes the return on our investment in research, and speeds the development of all the benefits that depend on research, from new medicines and useful technologies to informed decisions, solved problems, and improved public policies. (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 2012)
Finally, a growing body of evidence appears to support the notion that open access publishing has benefits for authors as well; their work is more likely to be cited in the works of others (OpCit Project, 2012).
Open access publishing is not without criticisms. These primarily revolve around issues raised by publishers (and learned societies) concerned about the sustainability of the funding model, its potential influence on the peer-reviewprocess, and its impact on technological innovation in publishing (Nature Publishing Group, 2004).
A study conducted in 2010 revealed that about 8.5% of scientific scholarship was available through journals that were open access. In the social sciences the figure was 5.6% (Björk et al., 2010). The number of articles published in open access journals has been increasing dramatically (Laakso et al., 2011). This suggests that the open access model of publishing is here to stay.
