Collabra: Psychology intro by Simine Vazire

Hi! Welcome to this video on what Collabra:Psychology is all about. I’m Simine Vazire, the editor-in-chief of Collabra:Psychology. This video will explain the core values and policies of Collabra. We do things a bit differently here than what you might be used to and we want to make sure that everyone in the Collabra community - authors reviewers editors and readers - knows what our core principles are. First Collabra is an open access journal. That means all of our papers are free for anyone to read and share.

We do ask authors to pay an 00:32 - article publication charge or APC but we’re working to shift that cost to libraries. Libraries are used to paying high subscription fees to other journals but APCs are relatively new thing for them. We’re also working to offer more waivers for authors who don’t have funds to cover the APC. We don’t want the APC to stand in the way of anyone publishing at Collabra, so if it’s a barrier for you, please let us know. Second the peer-review process at Collabra focuses on rigor we’re not going to make decisions based on how novel your paper is, how exciting the results are, or how much we think your paper will boost our impact factor.

We do have high standards but they’re all about scientific rigor. Specifically, we focus on the methodological rigor and the match between the evidence and the claims made. We also ask for viewers to provide ratings of construct validity, statistical validity, internal validity, and external validity, along with their comments. We hope this will make the peer-review process more predictable for authors. Our subjective judgments of what we find interesting won’t factor into our decisions.

This will also help level 01:33 - the playing field for all manuscripts regardless of how popular the topic you study is or what population you’re studying. We won’t tell you that your work belongs in the more specialized journal or that your sample of non-Americans is too niche for our journal. If it’s high-quality, transparent research in the domain of psychology we think it belongs at Collabra. Third, the research we publish should be transparently reported. We require that all manuscripts include open data, analysis code, and materials, to the extent this is ethically possible.

In addition, we encourage pre- registration 02:06 - for new studies and we offer registered reports. These steps help reviewers and editors evaluate the paper more thoroughly, and they also help readers of our published articles make more informed decisions about what conclusions to draw. Fourth, we want to be transparent on our end, too. To that end we’ll publish the reviews and decision letters associated with each accepted manuscript. This is sometimes called transparent review.

That means that if your paper is accepted, the 02:33 - peer review history will be published along with the paper. If your paper is rejected we won’t publish the peer review history but we give you full permission to publish or share it as widely as you want. This helps hold us accountable. If our peer review process is unfair or shoddy, our community should be able to see that. Fifth, we want to reduce bias in peer review. To that end, we aim for double-masked review. This means that the reviewers should avoid knowing the authors’ identities and affiliations, and the authors won’t know the reviewers’ identities unless the reviewers choose to sign their reviews.

To 03:07 - prepare your manuscript for double-masked review, we just ask that you remove authors’ names and other identifying information to the extent that that’s easy to do. We know it’s not always possible to remove all traces of identities and we know reviewers will sometimes be able to deduce the authors’ identities. Our primary goal is to avoid making that information salient and to ask authors and reviewers to cooperate in making a reasonable attempt to keep that information masked for the duration of the peer review process. Those are just a few of the steps we’re taking at Collabra to make research, and the peer review process, as transparent and rigorous as possible. For a full description of our editorial policies and submission guidelines you can find those on our website at collabora.

org If you have questions or ideas for how 03:51 - we can improve our process please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Email us at editorial office at Collabra dot org and look out for another very video where I talk about my editorial philosophy and give some tips for reviewers and editors. .