Editors for the information age

As co-editors of Archives of Scientific Psychology, Harris Cooper, PhD, and Gary R. VandenBos, PhD, will pioneer psychology's first open-methods, open-data and open-access journal.

It's an experiment that has the potential to change the face of academic publishing by making psychology findings more accessible to the general public, while also making research methodology and data more transparent to fellow scientists. VandenBos, a pioneer of digital publishing, and Cooper, a world-renowned expert on meta-analysis, are poised to be the perfect team to oversee the journal.

APA Publisher VandenBos has been working to widely disseminate psychological information for almost 30 years. Archives will continue this mission by posting articles for free, online, where anyone with Internet access can view them, says VandenBos. The journal will also ask authors to write two versions of their abstracts — one for scientists and one for layreaders — which will make it less likely for research findings to be misinterpreted, he says.

Another interesting feature of the journal is its breadth, says VandenBos. "Archives covers all of psychology," he says. "To edit it, you have to be familiar with the entire field." Assisting him in this task will be the journal's editorial board — 30 distinguished psychologists, each one of them either a current or a past editor of a major psychology journal — plus more than 60 subject experts serving as consulting editors.

A former editor of Psychological Bulletin and chief editorial advisor for APA's journals, Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper is also well versed in research from across the field of psychology. Cooper, a specialist in research synthesis, was part of the team that developed APA's Journal Article Reporting Standard (JARS) template, which asks study authors to provide exhaustive detail on their sampling procedures, study design, data collection and statistical analyses. Every study published in Archives will link to a completed methods template, and authors will also submit their datasets, which qualified researchers will be able to access online. This methods- and data-sharing system will make it tougher for scientists to misreport their findings, and easier for scientists to scrutinize and build on one another's results, Cooper says.

"Archives has the potential to really move the field forward," Cooper says. "We're excited to see where it goes."

Archives of Scientific Psychology is accepting submissions.