New to PsyArXiv: DOI Versioning

You might have noticed some changes in how your preprints are appearing on PsyArXiv, and wondered “what the hell is going on?” The big change is that the Center for Open Science/Open Science Framework has implemented DOI (Digital Object Identifier) versioning for all of their preprint communities, including PsyArXiv. This means that every time you upload a new version of your preprint manuscript, it will be given a new DOI. It also means that URLs for papers will have a suffix like _V1 or _V2 after the unique OSF preprint identifier. You will still be able to view current and previous versions in the same way that you have previously, and the system (via Crossref) knows that each of these versions are linked. 

In practice, what does this mean for you when you’re uploading a preprint? For PsyArXiv, it won’t make much of a difference at all. You’ll still be able to upload your preprints in the same way, and upload updated versions when you need to. The only difference is that any new manuscript versions will have a different DOI to the original version.  If you are only making a change to the manuscript metadata, that won’t lead to a new DOI being minted. 

Because PsyArXiv uses a post-moderation approach, any submitted preprints will still go live immediately, and will then later go through a moderation process by our moderation team. 

DOI versioning may have an impact on your current use if you need to withdraw a preprint from PsyArXiv. For example, you might find yourself submitting to a journal that does not permit preprinting (*I guess these still exist somewhere?). When you submit a withdrawal request, it will relate to a specific version. So, if you need to ensure that all versions of a preprint are removed, you’ll need to communicate this request to PsyArXiv (e.g., submitting a withdrawal request for each version) or COS support. 

If DOI versioning isn’t going to make things different for users, you might wonder why you’d want to have different DOIs for different versions of a preprint. Well, having DOI versioning has been recommended by Crossref’s Preprint Metadata Advisory Group (see here:, Section 5.2.2 in particular), and is seen as best practice that supports an open peer review model to track review feedback and changes to the paper over time. For example, you could have an overlay journal that could use DOI versioning to track original submissions, an updated version in response to reviewer comments, and a final version accepted for publication. Another advantage is that translations of articles can have their own DOI, and different translated versions can be linked using appropriate meta-data. So, all in all, DOI versioning allows for more flexibility and opens up new possibilities for communities in terms of open reviewing. 

If you’d like a little more detail on creating a new article version, take a look at the OSF’s help guide here, and here for some more information on how DOI versioning relates to new approaches to peer review. 

I hope the above information is useful – Happy preprinting!

Dermot Lynott is an Associate Professor at Maynooth University, and the current chair of the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board.

When should I preprint my work?

People often come up to me and say, “Dermot, do you have the money now?”* But other times they will come up to me and ask “Dermot, when should I preprint my work?” This is a great question, and the general answer is, “whenever it suits you best”.  The important thing is that your work is out there, unpaywalled, and accessible to the world. So the specific timing might be more down to individual preferences, journal policies (like time-limited embargos), or some other factors.

But, by and large, there is nothing to stop you preprinting your own work, and at a time of your choosing.  There may be exceptions, but they will represent a tiny minority of cases. Here’s a nice introduction to preprinting – that covers motivations and advice for how to get started with preprinting your work.

So when and why do people decide to preprint? Let’s look briefly at different stages of the publication cycle and think why you might want to preprint your work at each point.

At the draft stage?

You can preprint your work before or after your first submission to a journal to get your fully-formed ideas out in the world as soon as possible, with a DOI, and time-stamped confirmation! It provides opportunities for early feedback, increased exposure, and let’s you claim precedence for your ideas.

After a round of reviews?

When you’ve revised a paper, you can preprint what is likely to be an almost final version that you know has had peer feedback. So, it’s still being released well before it appears “in print”, but with the knowledge that you’ve had input from your peers.

When it’s been accepted for publication?

Although later in the publication process, preprinting at this point can still be months before a journal version appears online, so it’s still really worthwhile doing it. And preprinting at this stage perhaps gives authors added confidence, knowing it’s been formally accepted and having gone through a full peer-review process.

Post-publication?

Even if your paper has been published, you can still “Preprint” (or postprint) your non-formatted manuscript version. This has the advantage that your work will remain freely accessible through “green open access”, even if the journal version is behind a paywall. An added bonus is that you don’t have to pay exorbitant fees to a publisher to make your work open access.

I think that more important than when you preprint, is that you do preprint, making your work open and accessible to all. If you’re looking for a place to preprint your work, there are lots of options from very general repositories like Zenodo or OSF Preprints, discipline-specific ones like the PsyArXiv, ArXiV, BodoArXiv, or AgriArXiv (see here for lots more preprint communities), or even region-specific repositories like AfricArXiv. So, if you haven’t preprinted before, make this the year that you do!

Dermot Lynott is an Associate Professor at Maynooth University, and the current chair of the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board.

* I think I originally heard Dylan Moran make this joke, so thank you Dylan!

Member institutions = hero institutions

Look at this parade of hero institutions, members of PsyArXiv who make a financial contribution to keep our preprint server running, free to upload and download, for everyone, worldwide and forever:

So thank you:

  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Max Planck Digital Libraries
  • Oregon State University
  • Rice University
  • University of Arizona
  • University of Bern
  • University of Leiden
  • University of Melbourne
  • University of Minnesota
  • University of Oregon
  • University of Sheffield
  • University of Victoria
  • Utrecht University
  • Tufts University

for all your support!

We list our members on the PsyArXiv landing page. If you think your institution could join them, please get in touch. Contact details and more at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv

PsyArXiv has a new streamlined preprint submission workflow

We’re excited to announce a new workflow for submitting preprints to PsyArXiv. This revision brings a unified submission workflow across the OSF preprint services and hopefully makes it easier for users to submit and edit their preprints.
To get started head over to PsyArXiv and hit “Submit a preprint”.

This takes you to the new submission interface, introduced in more detail in this OSF support article (which also shows how to begin the workflow from the main OSF Preprints page). First, enter your manuscript’s Title and Abstract:

After this, clicking on “Next” (button above) will take you through the rest of the workflow, whose steps are indicated on the left, above.

Please see the OSF support article for a complete walkthrough of the submission workflow. As always, you’ll find a “Contact Us” button over there for any further questions and feedback you might have.

Receiving updates from the blog

This is just a note about receiving updates from the blog. WordPress allows subscribers, but for administrative reasons we need to turn this function off. If you subscribed to the blog several years ago and still rely on this function you’ll need to pick another way to receive updates (sorry!).

If you’re new, there are a few ways to receive updates:

Public Engagement and Outreach: Sept 2024

Today marked the inaugural meeting of the PsyArxix public engagement and outreach subcommittee. Together, myself (Tom Stafford, UK), Shruti Bora (IN) and Matti Vuorre (NL) met and discussed how to promote the awareness and use of PsyArxiv.

Two areas we discussed focusing on were:

  1. Possible overlays for PsyArxiv, to enhance discoverability and discussion of preprints
  2. Outreach in low-resource research environments in, e.g., India, where PsyArxiv has strong potential to add value.

Stay tuned for updates, and if you’d like to help with engagement and outreach around preprints, please get in touch

Financial support for PsyArXiv

Center for Open Science have secured a major funding commitment, until the end of 2025, which will support your favourite OSF preprint servers – including PsyArXiv. It’s a big win for keeping the lights on at PsyArXiv, and continuing the mission to bring about a new age for the dissemination and discovery of scholarship in psychological science.

The funding comes from the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC), and since here at PsyArXiv we believe in full and proper credit, let’s list of the “13 sovereign academic libraries” which make up the IPLC partners: Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University.

Heroes!

Here’s a quote from the IPLC Directors which we fully endorse:

As representatives of some of the most well-resourced libraries in the country, we are committed to using our resources to promote public access to all research, not just the research our scholars produce&.Investing in infrastructure and services that are directly aligned with the research mission are critical to laying the foundation for a more open and equitable system of research that will result in better, faster answers to the problems of our time.

Read more in the original news item: 2024-03-18: “Support for OSF Preprint Infrastructure and Community Servers

View counts on PsyArXiv preprints

An update to the OSF preprints infrastructure means that view counts are now displaying for preprints alongside download counts as of March 17, 2022.

Please note, view count data has been collected only since November 28, 2018. Preprints posted prior to this date have incomplete view count data.

Update [May 5, 2022]: In some instances, current download counts may have decreased when compared to downloads observed prior to March 17, 2022. Currently, only views and downloads on or after January 1, 2019 are displayed, so older preprints may have observed a drop in download count. This is due to instability in download data prior to January 1, 2019. Updates in late 2022 may cause further adjustments to view and download counts as data is migrated to a newer, more reliable analytics system.

Not One but many Models of Open-Access Publishing

Not One but Many Models of Open-Access Publishing

David M. Condon,1 Jack Arnal,2 Grace Binion,3 Benjamin Brown,4 Katherine S. Corker5

1 University of Oregon, 2 McDaniel College, 3 Emory University School of Medicine, 4 Georgia Gwinnett College, 5 Grand Valley State University

 

As members of the Scientific Advisory Board for PsyArXiv, we are responding to the invitation for feedback in the recent article by APS President Shinobu Kitayama entitled “The Open-Access Model of Journal Publishing.” The piece provides an insightful introduction to Open Access (OA) from APS leadership, and we were particularly enthusiastic about the news that Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) will become a fully OA journal in 2021. Our response adds to Dr. Kitayama’s thoughts by addressing topics that warrant further explanation. These topics include the need to situate outlets like PsyArXiv in discussions about Open Access, as well as the broader need to distinguish between various types of OA publication models.

 

What is PsyArXiv?

PsyArXiv is an open access preprint repository for psychological research. Established in 2016, PsyArXiv serves the psychological science community, just as bioRxiv and arXiv serve the disciplines of biology, physics, mathematics, computer science, and related fields. Despite its short history, PsyArXiv has been widely embraced among psychological researchers. The service is already receiving an average of nearly 20 new manuscript submissions per day, download rates of more than 5,000 per day, and a 147% increase in pageviews from 2019 to 2020 (year-to-date). Works deposited in PsyArXiv enjoy high discoverability regardless of the ultimate journal outlet, although it is important to note that a substantial proportion of these works have not (yet) undergone peer review. Each preprint is given a unique digital object identifier (DOI), indexed by Google Scholar, and briefly evaluated for consistency with PsyArXiv‘s terms of use by a volunteer member of our moderation team. The costs of providing these services have historically been supported by the Center for Open Science and, more recently, by the university library systems of our member institutions. We think our rapidly growing usage rates indicate clear demand for access to psychology research findings among consumers who lack institutional access, including members of the general public.

 

How does PsyArXiv relate to the Open Access models Kitayama mentions?

The Open Access movement has proliferated in numerous directions over the last two decades, and a color-naming system has evolved in an attempt to simplify this diversity. PsyArXiv is classified in this system as “green” OA because it is a repository for authors who seek to freely share their scholarly output with both consumers (readers) and producers of research (Samberg et al., 2018). The niches that Kitayama has described  serving “cutting-edge” and “nontraditional” research projects  are both examples of “gold” OA. These outlets are peer-reviewed journals that publish open articles and make use of article publishing charges (APCs). This approach differs substantially from traditional publishing models where peer-reviewed articles are published without expense for the authors, but at substantial expense to libraries; further, articles are locked away behind a “paywall.” Many readers of the APS Observer are likely familiar with hybrid approaches as well (sometimes called “paid open access”). This model gives authorship teams the choice, after peer-review, to pay APCs to add open access publishing to their accepted paper, or they can choose to publish without expense by effectively signing away the licensing rights to their article. Many additional variations exist, each with its own color-name (see Barnes, 2020 and Samberg et al., 2018).

Though the traditional subscription-based publishing model is clearly under pressure, there is little consensus about the best long-term fix. Many of the largest consumers of research (i.e., university libraries) have recently sought to negotiate “transformative agreements” that seek to resolve the unsustainable financial burdens of bundled subscription agreements  the so-called “Big Deals” between libraries and publishers. The downstream consequences of this unresolved turmoil has caused confusion for scientists who seek to publish their findings in prestigious and widely-accessible outlets on a tight budget. Kitayama’s summary highlights the tension among these goals, but only within the context of gold OA models. In short, more prestigious outlets tend to be more expensive (though the correlation is not perfect), and there are good reasons to be concerned about this association.

 

Can PsyArXiv help to address these concerns?

We think it does. At the most fundamental level, PsyArXiv complements all forms of publishing by equitably providing psychological researchers with a free, simple, and immediate outlet that can be accessed by anyone with reliable internet service. This gives early access to timely research findings, provides an alternative access option for works that are not published openly, increases discoverability (Norris et al., 2008; Lewis, 2018), and reduces the file-drawer problem (Franco et al., 2014). Beyond this, the PsyArXiv infrastructure allows for further innovation in psychology publishing that can build on the benefits of open access. These might include overlay journals, which have gained considerable attention in other scientific disciplines recently and provide peer-review and/or editorial curation of content posted on arXiv (for examples, see Discrete Analysis and The Open Journal of Astrophysics). Models like these offer the potential for niche journals to flourish in a manner that would not be viable within the traditional publishing ecosystem. In short, we hope that researchers, including submitters to APS journals, will take advantage of APS generous article posting policies and make copies of their pre- and post-publication work available for the community at PsyArXiv, thereby helping the community capitalize on these many benefits.


?

References

Barnes, L. (2020, August 11). Green, Gold, Diamond, Black  what does it all mean? https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0089

Franco, A., Malhotra, N., & Simonovits, G. (2014). Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer. Science, 345(6203), 1502-1505. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1255484

Kitayama, S. (2020). The open-access model of journal publishing. APS Observer, 33(7). https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/open-access-journal-publishing

Lewis, C. L. (2018). The open access citation advantage: Does it exist and what does it mean for libraries? Information Technology and Libraries, 37(3), 50-65. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v37i3.10604

Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). The citation advantage of openaccess articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1963-1972. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20898

Samberg, R., Wolfe, M., Scott, K., Taylor, A., Barclay, D., Hruska, M., Chan, J., & Anderson, I., and the University of California Libraries (2018, February 27). Pathways to Open Access. https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/groups/files/about/docs/UC-Libraries-Pathways%20to%20OA-Report.pdf

 

PAX Member Institutions

The PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board would like to express deepest gratitude to all of our member institutions. PsyArXiv was founded on the generous support of the Center for Open Science and has since transitioned to an institutional membership model to sustain high-quality service to the discipline of psychology and its allied fields. Our member institutions provide invaluable financial and strategic support. They are each integral in helping us maintain the quality of our service, and without them, PsyArXiv would not be running today. Thank you to each of the following institutions:

The University of Melbourne - Course Seeker