Submit to Open Psychological Science
An open platform for summarizing psychology research (last updated January 2021)
Welcome to Open Psychological Science, and thank you for your interest in the initiative.
I have created Open Psychological Science to help us as psychological scientists to communicate our research openly, freely, and clearly to general public audiences. We are all conducting to taxpayer-funded research, and the least we can do is tell people about our findings.
However, we know that descriptions of our data are skewed by the ideological whims of the popular media. By taking control of the flow of information, we have an opportunity to communicate our findings in an open and transparent manner.
Why Medium?
According to the platform’s creator, Ev Williams, Medium has a approximately 50,000 writers, and 80 million (!) unique readers every month. This is a huge potential audience. Medium also provides an easy platform for writing, editing, and publishing stories quickly. It is easy to use, even for those of us who are less technically-minded, with a small number of formatting features and a clean design.
Benefits of Writing for Open Psychological Science
It costs nothing to use Medium as a writer, meaning there are no financial barriers to publishing overviews of research here.
As a general rule, readers do not have to pay for access to stories. Non-paying members have access to a handful of stories per month, but people can also subscribe to Medium for $5 per month to gain access to every article on the site. These subscription payments are then distributed to writers who enroll their articles into the Medium Partner Program, with earnings being dependent on total read time.
Open Psychological Science articles will be enrolled into the Medium Partner Program. This allows writers to be compensated for their efforts in accordance with the read time for each of their articles. However, all authors will be able to share their work via friend links to make them available to anybody, whether they subscribe to Medium or not.
All articles published by Open Psychological Science will be available to anybody on Medium (and also non-members off it who have access to story links). This is consistent with the growing trend towards open science and the availability of information that we’re all striving for.
How to Submit
We want to make the submission process for Open Psychological Science as easy as possible. With this in mind, just follow these steps:
- Sign up to Medium
Open up www.medium.com, and click “Get Started” in the top right hand corner of the screen. There are options to sign up via Twitter, Facebook, Google accounts, or manually using your email address.
Medium has a policy of not selling any personal data, and you’ll never be shown ads on the site.
- Request to be a writer for Open Psychological Science
Post a response to these guidelines at the bottom of the page requesting to be a writer. You will then be added to the publication, which will allow you to add draft articles to the publication. Every effort will be made to add you as a writer within 24 hours (some delays may be unavoidable at weekends).
- Write your article and add it to the publication
Once you are a writer (you will get a notification telling you about this), you can write your story! To do this, go to www.medium.com, and sign in to your account. On the homepage, click on “Write a story” in the top left hand corner.
This will take you to the editor. You should use the Medium editor to it’s fullest to make your article as accurate, but as beautiful, as possible. You can make font bold or italics, put it inside a speech format, and play around with different headers. Using a combination of these seems to make stories easier to read on Medium, and increase the likelihood that your article will be shared by readers.
Once you have drafted your article, add it to the publication. You can find this option here:
When you click “Add to publication”, select Open Psychological Science, and then click “Add draft”. That will send your article for review.
Your article will then be reviewed and published, so long as it meets basic quality checks for writing style and the content is appropriate (i.e., the article describes a piece of recent psychological research).
Turnaround times will vary, but the aim is to have things published in the same work week that they are submitted.
Specific Guidelines
Ease is the order of the day here.
Articles should present an overview of recently published research papers. ‘Published’ here means that it has gone live on a journal website, or a preprint has been posted. or ‘in progress’ ideas
As a general guide, try to keep your article under 1,000 words, and cover:
- a little bit of background literature (to contextualize the research)
- the research question(s) you sought or seek to answer
- some information about the methods used (this should make sense to non-experts)
- your key results
- some implications arising from the work
Links to research articles should ideally be open-access (e.g., preprints or postprints via ResearchGate or PsyArXiv) in order to be consistent with the general spirit of Open Psychological Science.
Other than that, we’re fairly open about how you frame your article. Open Psychological Science is merely a platform for promoting your work and ideas to the world of Medium. The content is yours to own.
Will Your Article be Changed?
No content will ever be changed in your articles. The only edits you might see when the article is published is stylistic (in terms of making use of the Medium editor’s full visual functionality) and to improve the grammar/readability of your piece.
Changes might be made to the tags to make the article more discoverable in the Medium ecosystem.
I hope that you will consider supporting this initiative, and help to promote our field on this large and exciting platform, and look forward to receiving your articles soon!
