Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy

I am honored to be Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy’s fifth editor-in-chief. I want to take this opportunity to thank outgoing editor Heather Bullock for the support she provided during the transition period.

In this update, I focus on recent open science initiatives implemented by ASAP. For more details, please see both my editorial (https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/asap.12152) and revised author instructions (https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/15302415/about/author-guidelines).

My initial goal for ASAP is to increase reproducibility of published articles. Psychology and other fields are in the midst of a methodological renaissance (Nelson, Simmons, & Simonsohn, 2018). Increased openness about methodology is rapidly becoming the norm. I recognize that not everyone agrees about the need for openness. However, I see the changes occurring at many psychology outlets as steps toward better science.

As a first step in improving practices, ASAP is now as a signatory on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines (https://cos.io/our-services/top-guidelines/). There are nearly 5,000 outlets across numerous disciplines that are signatories. TOP guidelines focus on availability of materials, data, and analysis code; encouragement of preregistration; and support for publication of replication studies.

I am currently working with our publisher to offer Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices (Center for Open Science, 2013 for descriptions). Applying for these badges involves a simple process handled by the online submission portal.

ASAP authors are now eligible to publish as part of the Preregistration Challenge. This campaign will reward 1,000 researchers with $1,000 prizes for publishing results of preregistered research. Preregistration is a process wherein researchers specify plans for a study such as the number of participants, measures, rules for data exclusion, data analysis plans, and hypotheses.

I want to make clear that ASAP does not require authors to share data and materials, to earn open science badges, or to preregister. ASAP does require disclosing whether you are sharing data and materials as well as whether your work is preregistered.

Finally, I am instituting new reporting standards consistent with the Center for Open Science’s standard reviewer statement (Nosek et al., 2017). These standards request that authors confirm that they report all measures, conditions, data exclusions, and how they determined their sample sizes.

In closing, I want to take the time to recognize that some of these approaches may be new to some authors. Please do not see this as a barrier. I am committed to providing authors with support to navigate these requirements.

References

Nelson, L. D., Simmons, J., & Simonsohn, U. (2018) Psychology’s Renaissance. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 511-534. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011836

Nosek, B. A., Simonsohn, U., Moore, D. A., Nelson, L. D., Simmons, J. P., Sallans, A., & LeBel, E. P. (2017, June 12). Standard Reviewer Statement for Disclosure of Sample, Conditions, Measures, and Exclusions. Retrieved from osf.io/hadz3 
 

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