Introducing PsyArXiv: Psychology’s dedicated open access digital archive

Contributed by David Barner, Benjamin Brown, and Alex Holcombe

PsyArXiv (PsyArXiv.com), psychology’s dedicated Open Access digital archive, launches today.

Today, PsyArXiv officially launches its open access digital archive, PsyArXiv.com, dedicated to psychological science. PsyArXiv joins a growing collection of online archives in fields including physics, biology, linguistics, and sociology, by providing a free, open access outlet for new findings in the psychological sciences.

According to Benjamin Brown, a developmental psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, “PsyArXiv makes new scientific knowledge accessible to all researchers, regardless of whether their universities have access to costly journal subscriptions. In an era that some describe as one of fake news and information bubbles, PsyArXiv gives the public free, first-hand access to new science, meaning that journalists, politicians, business leaders, and high school science teachers can all download the newest science and use facts to inform their decision making, and to fuel their natural curiosity about science.”

Like other scholarly archives such as Cornell’s original arXiv.org, PsyArXiv allows researchers to upload working papers, unpublished work, and articles currently under review (preprints), making them accessible to researchers and the public at no cost. PsyArXiv also permits researchers to share their work months or years earlier than usual, while also making it openly available to the public. PsyArXiv promises to create free, open access to psychological science, even for papers that are ultimately published in journals that are only accessible to subscribers.

Alex Holcombe, a cognitive psychologist and vision scientist at the University of Sydney, notes that PsyArXiv “allows researchers to get early feedback on their work from a larger pool of peers than through traditional journal processes. This both speeds science and leads to a better final product — a revised PsyArXiv entry, eventual journal publication, or both.”

PsyArXiv provides support for multiple versions of a file, within-browser rendering of manuscripts, inclusion of supplementary files, data, and code, appropriate metadata, and links to resulting journal articles including DOIs. PsyArXiv’s infrastructure is provided by the Center for Open Science, which also provides simultaneous search of PsyArXiv and other preprint services. Details regarding future plans for PsyArXiv, including new features, can be found at this roadmap.

PsyArXiv welcomes contributions from all areas of psychology, and hosts papers under review, working papers, and manuscripts that might be difficult to publish in traditional venues, such as replications of previous work or failures to replicate. Also, it allows researchers to update their files as their manuscripts benefit from community comments and the traditional journal review process. Researchers can upload papers and find out more about PsyArXiv at both PsyArXiv.com and on our blog, or can ask questions at info@psyarxiv.com.