Preserving the Flame: The Past, Present, and Future of EJOP.

Abstract

Europe’s Journal of Psychology has a long history of pushing boundaries in psychological publishing, being an early journal adopting a diamond open access model, allowing for the sharing of information to a wide range of audiences by a wide range of authors. As I am taking over the editorship of this journal, I want to continue this legacy and continue to push boundaries with this journal. With this will come a number of changes that aim to stimulate new ways of how we do research. These changes can be summarized under three key points: Exploration, Replication, and Reflection. Since the inception of EJOP it has published more than 800 articles from 1458 unique authors across 70 countries. This represents a substantial level of diversity, which is made even more compelling by the fact that nearly one fifth of all articles in EJOP have been authored by cross-national author teams. In the future we want to carry forward this diversity, specifically encouraging submissions from areas historically underrepresented in psychological journals (Henrich, 2020). Raising the unexpected, curious, and thought provoking to the eye of the scientific community is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of the advancement of science. By being presented with empirical observations that make us question our held beliefs we can grow simultaneously as individual researchers and as scientific community. While a large focus since the replications crisis in psychology has been ensuring the robustness of the cumulative psychological corpus (Lilienfeld, 2017; Shrout & Rodgers, 2018), many researchers have highlighted that attempts at replication need to go hand in hand with an open curious exploration of novel phenomena (Fife & Rodgers, 2022). In line with this come the first two concrete changes for EJOP that will be relevant for all authors going forward. First, we now require all articles to fulfill Level 3 of our Open Science practices as outlined on the EJOP website. In practices this means that all studies submitted for review in EJOP require their data, code, and materials to be made available in a form which allows other researchers the ability for unrestricted access and reuse with proper attribution. This means we will no longer publish quantitative studies which do not allow for computational replication of a study without input from the original authors. To support authors and reviewers in ensuring the highest quality of their data, data-dictionary, and code as well as the plain language statements, we will create additional junior editor positions in EJOP who will oversee the application of these processes, for which we encourage applications to the editor. We are cognizant of the heterogeneity of research approaches and fields, especially in qualitative research (Prosser et al., 2022). We therefore encourage authors who aim to submit an article which contains data that for legal, ethical, or other reasons cannot be made public at the moment of submission to contact the editor in advance of submission to negotiate alternative solutions (such as time-delayed release or alternative approaches to anonymization). Second, notwithstanding the previous point about the value of curious exploration as basis of scientific progress, to build psychology as a discipline we require a modicum of understanding how robust our findings are and what are the boundary conditions of our observed effects. While much has been written in the main-stream psychological literature about the failures to replicate highly visible studies these approaches only cover a small sub-section of our total field.