A New Open Access Journal from the American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association is preparing to launch Archives of Scientific Psychology, its first open access journal. The Archives of Scientific Psychology will have the following five unique characteristics:

•  The articles are free; anyone with internet access will be able to read them.
•   Following APA’s Journal Article Reporting Standards, the authors of each article will provide a complete description of the methodology that they used when conducting their research.  
•  The article authors will be making their data open to the public; it will be available from APA or another approved repository. Other researchers will be able to use this data if they obtain permission to do so from the article authors. 
•  Each article will have two versions of an abstract and methodology section.  One version will be geared towards the layperson, the other towards the scholarly community.
•  Both the article and the comments made by reviewers who took part in the peer-review process will be published online.

The American Psychological Association is launching this journal in response to the way social workers and psychologist make decisions about social services.  There is now a professional impetus for those in the helping professions to base treatment and intervention decisions on the best available research. This means that professionals are more carefully evaluating research articles, and having access to the data that underlies the research in the article helps the professionals assess the quality of the information.

   

What else makes this new journal unique? The publication process for journal articles can be a lengthy one, and it is not uncommon for there to be more than a six-month span between the submission of a paper and its’ actual publication date.  This inevitably delays the pace in which critical information can reach the public. The editors of the Archives of Scientific Psychology post new articles on a weekly basis, and they are committed to publishing articles within two weeks of their final acceptance.

The American Psychological Association expects to begin publication of the Archives of Scientific Psychology in early 2013. It will span all psychological disciplines.

Cooper, H. & VardenBos, G. (2012). Archives of Scientific Psychology: a new journal for a new era. Retrieved from: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/ARC-Editorial-090712.pdf

For more information about this new publication, please visit: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/arc/index.aspx