Tag: preprints

Updates to PsyArXiv moderation policies

Every preprint submitted to PsyArXiv is viewed by a member of the PsyArXiv moderation team to ensure that PsyArXiv continues to contribute to the integrity of the scientific record. To ensure that we are able to continue delivering the best possible experience for our readers and users in face of a rapidly increasing submission volume, we have adopted the following changes to our moderation policies.

From March 2026, moderators have added additional checks to ensure that authors have complied with all the terms of service for PsyArXiv. Moderators will also use authors’ past publication record to establish scholarly expertise for formats such as reviews, case studies, opinion pieces, etc. or topics where moderators have less experience, such as theories of consciousness, linguistics, philosophy, psychiatry, computational theory, etc. Such formats and topics require more specialist knowledge to establish whether they are in scope as scientific psychology, and what their scholarly contribution represents; hence, submissions cannot be evaluated by moderators in only a few minutes, and we rely on established scholarship to inform decisions. Submissions also need to be complete enough that they represent an independent contribution to the field of psychology, so slide decks and working papers presented as notes or research proposals or with incomplete methods will no longer be accepted into the archive, as they also require more than a few minutes to evaluate. We encourage authors to use OSF projects to record and version work-in-progress. However, PsyArXiv continues to accept stage 1 registered reports, where they pass standard checks for well-crafted registered reports. 

Authors can help by clearly stating their affiliations on the first page; ensuring that all metadata (title, authors and abstract) match the submission exactly; by including a contact e-mail address; adding author notes with ORCIDs and funding information; and for submissions presenting primary or secondary data, details of the institutional review board record at the start also speed up moderation. For student work contributing submissions with primary data, we encourage adding supervisors as co-authors with their permission and adding a CRediT statement. Where authors feel that their submission meets all the criteria but was still rejected, they can appeal moderator decisions, and the moderation supervision team will give the submission further consideration.

Please refer to PsyArXiv’s policies page (https://blog.psyarxiv.com/about-psyarxiv/) and frequently asked questions (https://blog.psyarxiv.com/faq-frequently-asked-questions/) for more information about the moderation process and how to appeal.

We are always looking for volunteers to join the moderation team. If you are interested, please reach out via psyarxiv@improvingpsych.org.

Thank you to everyone contributing to PsyArXiv
– The PsyArXiv team

How to search for PsyArXiv preprints on the OSF platform

PsyArXiv is hosted on the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform, and over the years their interface and search syntax has changed. Guidance on how to search is a snapshot in time. Presently, the search functionality allows users to tailor a search strategy to strive for recall or precision. Users could go directly to the PsyArXiv repository or search all OSF hosted preprints and (if desired) limit to PsyArXiv as a provider. 

Some functions that could be used by searchers include boolean operators, nesting, truncation, fuzzy matching, phrasing, and filtering (post-query refinement). These functions are described in the table below.

FunctionDescriptionOSF Functionality*Examples
Boolean searchUsing AND, OR, NOT in compound queries+ serves as the AND operator 
| (pipe or vertical bar) serves as the OR operator
– (hyphen) serves as the NOT operator 		resilience + anxiety
biomarker | biological marker
ASD – Acute Stress Disorder
NestingFacilitates order of operations with compound queries () Parentheses (biomarker | biological marker) + violence
TruncationFacilitates retrieving variations of a term. E.g., search* yields results containing the terms search, searcher, searchers, searches, and searching* (asterisk) violen*
Fuzzy matchingFacilitates broader word matching, which is useful for spelling variations like color/colour and misspellings ~ (tilde) with or without a number signifying total number of different charactersEating behavior~1
PhrasingSearching with exact terms in a desired order” (straight quotation marks surrounding desired terms) “Acute Stress Disorder”
FilteringPost-query refinement Left menu on search results page to facilitate query refinement– Creator (Author)- Date created (YYYY)- Subject (Child Psychology)- License (e.g., CC-BY)- Provider (repository)- Institution (but only if institution is an OSF member institution- Additional filters (Indicates that results have related OSF deposited resources) (e.g., preregistration, data, supplemental materials)
* OSF Functionality last checked in January 2026.

OSF has more information on their current search syntax available on the following webpage: https://help.osf.io/article/588-getting-started-with-osf-search#Refine-Results-Using-Special-Search-Syntax-YbtIb

As mentioned above, search guidance on a given platform is often a snapshot in time. Platforms make changes, and ideally those changes are well documented so users can make search strategy adjustments. Some librarians are committed to monitoring syntax changes, and the OSF platform is included in this syntax table: https://lib.uvic.ca/preprintsearchsyntax (Premji & Riegelman, 2026).

Amy Riegelman
Amy Riegelman is a Social Sciences and Evidence Synthesis Librarian at University of Minnesota and a member of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

Discovering research from PsyArXiv

When you share a preprint in PsyArXiv it becomes available for a worldwide audience to read, share, and cite. Readers may access your work via its DOI, by searching the PsyArXiv site, or by discovering it in one of the many other platforms that index content from PsyArXiv. 

Some of the major sources where readers can discover content from PsyArXiv include:

This list will likely grow in the future as preprints are increasingly incorporated into discovery tools. For example, Scopus began indexing preprints from selected sources in 2023, although it currently does not index content from PsyArXiv.

Andrea Schuler

Andrea Schuler is the Head of Open Scholarship & Research Data at Tisch Library, Tufts University, and a member of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

PsyArXiv Returns to Normal Operations

Thanks to PsyArXiv’s amazing team of 100+ moderators, all preprints meeting PsyArXiv’s requirements have now been approved! Thank you to everyone who volunteered and worked tirelessly over the past 3 weeks to get the situation under control. This was a true community effort, and a testament to the value our community sees in PsyArXiv.

We have now resumed normal operations, which means you can expect any newly posted or edited preprint to be moderated within 24-72 hours of submission. If you post a new preprint (or create a new version of an existing preprint), please be sure to follow the policies to ensure a smooth moderation process.

If your existing preprint is still pending moderation, it is likely that a moderator found an issue which will require an update before it can be approved. The most common issues are a mismatch between the information listed on the paper (e.g., title, author names, author order) and the preprint metadata (the information that is entered into the PsyArXiv system). You can speed up the approval of any preprints with these issues by editing the preprint file and/or preprint metadata to comply with PsyArXiv’s requirements.

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.