About PsyArXiv

PsyArXiv (psychology archive) is designed to facilitate rapid dissemination of psychological research. PsyArXiv is a creation of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) and the Center for Open Science (COS).

PsyArXiv allows scholars to post documents such as working papers, unpublished work, and articles under review (preprints), making them accessible to other researchers and to the public at no cost. Users can also upload revisions of their posted document and supplemental documents such as appendices.

Most journals in psychology permit posting of preprints, and for most journals you can find their policy at the SHERPA/RoMEO database. Before publication, articles are your creative product to do with as you please. If your article has already been published in a journal, be sure to check the journal policy on posting — for example, many do not allow posting of the publisher-prepared PDF, but do allow posting of the original author-formatted document.

PsyArXivs infrastructure is provided by the Center for Open Science which also allows simultaneous search of PsyArXiv with other preprint services. Additional existing and coming capabilities for PsyArXiv can be found at the roadmap.

PsyArXiv encourages a broad range of submissions, including (but not limited to) replication studies, commentaries, meta-analyses, and reviews.

When you submit to PsyArXiv, you will be asked to state whether or not any of the submitted research has data available, was preregistered, or whether there are any conflicts of interest you would like to declare.

Furthermore, in order to promote better practices in open science, all data, program code and other methods should be appropriately cited. Such materials should be recognized as original intellectual contributions and afforded recognition through citation.

  • All data sets and program code used in a publication should be cited in the text and listed in the reference section.
  • References for data sets and program code should include a persistent identifier, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Persistent identifiers ensure future access to unique published digital objects, such as a text or data set. Persistent identifiers are assigned to data sets by digital archives, such as institutional repositories and partners in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS).
  • Data set citation examples:
    • Campbell, Angus, and Kahn, Robert L. ANES 1948 Time Series Study. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2015-11-10. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07218.v4
    • Kidwell, M., Lazarevic, L. B., Baranski, E., Hardwicke, T. E., Piechowski, S., Falkenberg, L.-S., & Nosek, B. A. (2016, August 18). Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency. Retrieved from osf.io/rfgdw

Finally, in order to encourage completed reporting of key details of study procedures, authors should follow standards for disclosing key aspects of the research design and data analysis. Authors are encouraged to review the standards available, such as those from equator-network.org/, and to use those aspects that are relevant for the reported research applications. In particular, this Transparency Checklist from Aczel and colleagues (2020) should be considered as relevant to PsyArXiv authors., (Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., Sarafoglou, A. et al. A consensus-based transparency checklist. Nat Hum Behav 4, 46, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0772-6, direct link to shiny app: shinyapps.org/apps/TransparencyChecklist).

For additional info, see the old FAQ, the new FAQ or follow PsyArXiv on Twitter. To discover new PsyArXiv preprints check out our bot — it tweets links to new PsyArXiv postings on: