Collabra: Psychology, Editors' Report
Simine Vazire & M. Brent Donnellan
UC Davis; Texas A&M University
Collabra: Psychology is an innovative open access outlet (see the section below about publishing in 2017, created with input from publisher Dan Morgan) that aims to be selective on dimensions of quality/rigor. Collabra: Psychology strives to keep author fees low (and waives them when authors or their institutions don't have the budget for them) and shares income with reviewers and editors. Both Simine Vazire and Brent Donnellan serve as senior editors at Collabra: Psychology. Here they describe why they are so excited about this venture. Those interested in learning more about Collabra: Psychology should check out https://www.collabra.org/.
Why Are You Excited About Collabra: Psychology?
Simine: So many reasons. First, I think it's important to have a psychology journal that is both selective when it comes to quality, but committed to overcoming other selection filters that afflict many journals. For example, Collabra: Psychology's goal is to have very high standards when it comes to rigor and replicability, but not make editorial decisions on the basis of what's likely to drive up its impact factor (i.e., de-emphasize novelty, avoid exaggerated claims, etc.). That means we are trying innovative things to counteract publication bias (e.g., we'll soon offer Registered Reports), we welcome studies that present robust evidence of null findings, we welcome replication studies, etc.
I'm also really excited about the editorial team –we have a diverse group on many dimensions, though we're always looking to broaden and grow.
Finally, I'm excited that Collabra: Psychology recently became an official journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS). I'm a little biased but I think it's a pretty perfect match. Because Collabra: Psychology is open access and run by the nonprofit UC press (i.e., not a profit-making venture), this gives us a lot of freedom to experiment with new ways to do peer review and publishing. There are many things about the old system that don't make much sense anymore, but traditional journals are often conservative about changing the status quo. At Collabra: Psychology, we can experiment with trying to improve on some of these old and outdated habits.
Brent: I am a believer in striving to insure that published findings are based on solid science. I also think it is important for the vitality of a field to have published findings widely available to all readers and to have them available quickly. Collabra: Psychology embodies those values. It is an exciting time to be involved in personality research as standard practices are improving toward more openness and this is explicit in the mission of Collabra: Psychology. They are now the official journal of the society that Simine co-founded, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
I also like that Collabra: Psychology has found a way to compensate reviewers for their efforts by sharing income. Reviewers contribute huge amounts of effort in evaluating papers in exchange for a place on journal masthead or a year-end shout out in the back pages of the last issue. There would be no peer-review without reviewers but there is little reward for doing this work in the current system. Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful that so many of members of our community are willing to participate in this system as I think it speaks to our collective commitment to our values. However, I also like that Collabra: Psychology has found a way to compensate reviewers with more than just a token thank you. And you can still volunteer and forego any payment – reviewers and editors have mechanisms to pay it forward by donating any proceeds back into the system to support open access publishing and to provide waivers for financially challenged authors. In fact, I pledged to donate at least 50% of any proceeds that I earn from editing at Collabra to the pool for waivers for authors who cannot afford the existing article processing charges.
What Makes Collabra: Psychology Different from Other Journals?
Simine: I think the fact that it has a mission that is focused primarily on quality/rigor is pretty distinctive. It's not trying to make money for a society—not even SIPS—or attract the most famous authors. But we do want it to be a place people are proud to publish (and ideally, we'd like it to help people's careers who have published there). I also like that it's a psychology-wide journal, but not a mega-journal. I think that is an ideal level of breadth for a journal. The fact that it covers all of psychology means your articles are more likely to be read by people a little bit outside of your area of specialization. But it's a focused enough journal that editorial policy will be focused on the issues facing psychology research in particular, and editors and reviewers should be people who are qualified to evaluate your manuscript.
I also like the fact that we have editors who span the whole range of career stage, from a recently minted Ph.D. (Michèle Nuijten, who will be joining as an editor in the Methodology & Research Practices section, starting in January) to geezers like Brent. It's exciting to be involved with a journal that's not afraid to break the rules, when there don't seem to be particularly good reasons for the old rules.
Brent: The standards for publication are exclusively about rigor rather than whether a paper is novel or groundbreaking. I think rigor is easier to evaluate than whether something is novel or groundbreaking. (This is something Simine has written about in more detail: http://sometimesimwrong.typepad.com/wrong/2017/06/whatisrigor.html). It is often easier to see that a paper is groundbreaking in retrospect. So the editorial decision making is somewhat more straightforward at Collabra: Psychology than at other outlets.
I will add that I do not believe judgements of rigor are entirely objective or that reviewers won't disagree. However, there are relatively objective aspects of a study that factor heavily into judgments of rigor – was the sample size large enough to provide for informative results, did the measures have acceptable levels of precision and validity, etc.? Thus, I think the decision making at Collabra: Psychology is different in important ways from other journals which might use other criteria. I suspect this means that findings in Collabra: Psychology might be more replicable than findings in other outlets (especially when they are novel and groundbreaking!) I am personally more comfortable with this kind of decision making process than others.
What can ARP members do?
Simine: Submit your papers! Volunteer to review! Get a Collabra t-shirt and wear it to scientific meetings, and then tell people what it's all about (come on introverts, we can do this).
Brent: Submit papers! Right now we need high quality content. The editorial staff is committed to constructive feedback and we also have a mechanism for "streamlined review." Say you submitted solid work to a traditional journal and the paper was rejected for reasons of novelty. The reviewers raised no concerns about the logic, method, or results. You can respond to those reviews in a submission to Collabra: Psychology. This often leads to a much faster decision and is an efficient use of existing reviewer efforts.
Anything Else?
Simine: I'd like to pre-register my prediction that in five years, you'll wish you had published in Collabra: Psychology before it was cool (is it already too late for that?).
Brent: Please let me know if you are willing to review papers for us!
Scientific Publishing in 2017, and Collabra: Psychology's place in it
by Dan Morgan
A quick note on Open Access
Open access (OA) journals are becoming ever more common, but that does not mean they are all the same any more than traditional journals are all the same. In terms of their financial models, some OA journals are fully funded (by benefactors like funders, or institutions, or other organizations, e.g. eLife). Some OA journals are supported by a membership-style business model (e.g. PeerJ, Open Library of the Humanities). And the most well-known model is the payment, by a budget on the author's side, of Article Processing Charges (APCs) after an article is accepted. This last model was pioneered by publishers such as BioMed Central, and the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Collabra: Psychology currently utilizes this model.
In terms of their editorial policies or journal profile, some OA journals are high profile journals with high rejection rates (e.g. PLOS Biology, eLife,). Some are multidisciplinary "megajournals" that publish articles that the editors and reviewers discern as "sound science" (PLOS ONE, Frontiers). And some, as we know all too well, are now known as "predatory" journals—seemingly willing to publish anything (either with or without a semblance of peer review) just to make some money. We must all be vigilant against these, but also not presume that OA is somehow damaged by their existence.
Most importantly, though, is the point that OA is an outcome for a scholarly item (e.g. an article) and not a type of business model, nor a type of peer review process or editorial policy. Specifically, there is nothing inherent in OA publishing that has any bearing on the quality of an article—only an editorial policy has any bearing on the quality of science getting published at a journal.
Three interrelated concerns
One concern about the traditional journal subscription model—selling access to paywalled content—is that subscription prices of established journals are no longer based on, or even close to, the actual costs of publishing journals, but are based on what the markets (e.g. university libraries) are prepared to pay for them. While OA publishing does not mean publishing is free or automatically becomes cheaper, it is more common to base APCs on actual costs of the steps and services an article undergoes, rather than any inherent quality some content will over other content. (For example, in the subscription model, a top-tier journal that publishes 50 articles a year will be more expensive than a mid-tier journal that publishes 50 articles a year, even if the services provided by the publisher to both journals are exactly the same.)
Therefore the second concern, related to the first, is that the notion of having to sell content based on its subjective quality creates a need to select papers based on perceptions of impact and novelty in addition to scientific rigor. And, sometimes, the goal to increase impact occasionally over-emphasizes impact over rigor, and, in the worst cases, replaces it entirely, and this is in tension with the goal of ensuring and maximizing the scientific value and rigor of published content.
But then a third concern emerges around selectivity: namely that if a financial model is based on providing publishing services, and you can only earn more money by publishing more articles, this may create too much of an emphasis on increasing volume artificially to increase income. Some people are worried that an emphasis on volume—low selectivity—is problematic.
What Collabra: Psychology is doing
At Collabra: Psychology we attempt to address all three of these concerns. Firstly, our APCs are nonprofit prices, calculated from the ground-up and based on what services we need to provide to ensure high-quality publishing.*
Secondly, and thirdly, we are changing the narrative about rigor. We are being selective for rigor, and the bar is set high. By not reviewing for impact or novelty, it is not a reduced standard, it is simply a more objective standard, which, as Brent and Simine point out above, might actually be easier to agree upon. And, rather than being based on our price or impact factor, our brand for rigor will be ensured by our editors, our policies of transparency and openness, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, and the University of California—which is a pretty strong team!
So, please check out Collabra: Psychology!
* For those authors who do not have the support for APCs, you can apply for a waiver, and these are almost always granted (or UC Press will help you find funds through your university, which often exist but are hard to find on your own). Additionally, it should be noted that, uniquely at Collabra: Psychology, if you review for the journal and pay forward your earnings to the waiver fund, you can feel like you've earned any waiver you might ever need to ask for! (Not that the journal would ever require this for a waiver—but we've noticed that authors from Western institutions are sometimes shy of asking for waivers.)
Here are some links to more information about topics related to peer review and publishing in Collabra: Psychology:
https://medium.com/@CollabraOA/peer-review-are-you-actually-volunteering-your-time-be3ca06b891e
https://medium.com/@CollabraOA/peer-review-in-5-points-1edd73d9282e
https://medium.com/@CollabraOA/streamlined-review-an-accelerated-option-for-submissions-f1c5aec08985