My manifesto as would-be editor of Psychological Science

**Update 8 Feb 2019: After my initial application, I'm happy to report that I've progressed to the next stage of consideration. Obviously I'm still a long way from the destination, and it will undoubtedly be an extremely competitive field of candidates, but I am one step closer. Special thanks to all the colleagues who took the time to support my nomination! I will update again when there are further developments.**

**Update 18 June 2019: I have just heard that the role has been offered to another candidate. A big thank you to everyone who supported me and to the APS for considering me. I wish the new editor -- whoever they are -- the very best of luck and would urge them to consider implementing at least some of the initiatives in my agenda below.**

This week I received a nice email informing me that I have been elected as a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. A warm thanks to whoever nominated me -- I have no idea who you are, but I appreciate your faith in me. 

In the spirit of using this position to achieve something meaningful, I have put myself forward for consideration as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychological Science. The turnover of the Journal's editorship offers the opportunity to elevate Psychological Science from being the flagship journal of the APS to becoming a global beacon for the most important, open and reliable research in psychology -- an example not just for other journals in psychology but for science as a whole.

On December 18, I submitted the following statement to the Search Committee:

I am a professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University (see here for homepage including basic CV). I currently serve as a senior section editor at six peer reviewed academic journals, including BMJ Open Science, Collabra: Psychology, Cortex, European Journal of Neuroscience, NeuroImage, and Royal Society Open Science and I previously served on the editorial board at PLOS ONE and AIMS Neuroscience. Among other initiatives, I co-founded Registered Reports, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines, the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, and the accountable replications policy at the Royal Society. In total I have edited ~200 submissions, including ~120 Registered Reports. As a senior editor of Registered Reports, I am experienced at managing teams of editors. I am a fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and was recently awarded fellowship of the Association for Psychological Science (member #119281). In 2007 I was awarded the BPS Spearman Medal and in 2018 my book on the need for reform in psychology won the BPS Book Award (Best Academic Monograph category.) As chief editor of Psychological Science, I would complete the important mission that Steve Lindsay began, implementing a range of policy reforms to maximise the quality and impact of research published in the Journal.

Steve Lindsay, and Eric Eich before him, have done a superb job introducing the APS and Psychological Science to the world of open science. I am standing for consideration as chief editor on a manifesto that will consolidate and extend the mission that they began.  

1. Full implementation of Registered Reports

Psychological Science currently offers a limited version of Registered Reports in which the format is available only for direct replications of selected previous studies published in the Journal. I will expand the format to offer full Registered Reports and I will appoint a dedicated Registered Reports editor. 

2. Registered Reports Funding Models

I will commence discussions with funding agencies to support Registered Reports grant models in which a Stage 1 Registered Report to Psychological Science is simultaneously assessed by the Journal and the funder, with successful proposals achieving provisional acceptance and funding support on the same day. 

3. Accountable Replications Policy

I will introduce an Accountable Replications Policy in which Psychological Science guarantees to publish any rigorous, methodologically sound replication of any previous study published in the Journal. This initiative will be similar to the policy I recently launched at Royal Society Open Science and the European Journal of Neuroscience. 

4. Exploratory Reports

Hypothesis-testing is just one way of doing science. I will introduce a new Exploratory Reports format, similar to the initiative I helped shape at Cortex, to provide a dedicated home for transparent exploratory research employing inductive or abductive methods. This format will focus on generating ideas and testable predictions for future studies. 

5. OSF Badges

I will review the Journal’s current policy concerning OSF Badges, seeking to raise standards for the awarding of the Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered badges. I will appoint a dedicated Reproducibility Editor to oversee this review and the badges programme. 

6. TOP Guidelines

Psychological Science is a signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. I will implement the TOP guidelines at the Journal, achieving a minimum of Level 2 across all eight standards. Among other requirements, this will mean that all empirical articles must either make anonymised study data, analytic code, and digital study materials freely available in a publicly accessible repository, or the authors must explain in the article the legal and/or ethical barriers to archiving. The appointed Reproducibility Editor will oversee the implementation and compliance with TOP. 

7. Open Peer Review

I will implement a simple policy of open review in which all reviews and editorial decision letters are published alongside the corresponding articles, with the action editor identified and reviewers retaining the choice to either sign their reviews or remain anonymous. 

8. Verification Reports

I will launch a new ultra-short report format in which independent authors are given the opportunity to repeat and expand the analyses of original data in published articles in the Journal. The format will serve to verify or challenge the original authors’ conclusions and subject the results to robustness checks. 

I am standing for this role because I believe that psychology faces one of two possible futures. In one, we fail to reform our research culture and diminish. The legacy of psychology will eventually be forgotten, along with its enormous potential in understanding the mind and helping society. In an alternate future, we seize this moment -- right now -- and lead the way in placing quality and reproducibility at the heart of our scientific mission. I’m reminded of that signature episode of Star Trek Voyager when the Doctor says to Harry Kim, desperately trying to alter the timeline and save his crew: “Somebody has got to knuckle down and change history, and that somebody is you”.

If that somebody is you then let’s do this together. Email editorsearch@psychologicalscience.org and support my nomination as the future editor of Psychological Science.

Invisible police in senior academia

I have this recurring experience on social media where I say something that, to me, seems bleedingly obvious but ends up offending senior academics. What happens next is always the same: a series of private communications, admonishing me for my tone, holding me responsible for the failure of other scientists to choose to do better quality science, and asking me to rethink my “strategy”.

As one professor wrote to me privately the other day (and no, I will never reveal their identity or the identity of anyone else who contacts me privately): “I think you are really sabotaging your cause with this kind of behavior. I recently was discussing [Registered Reports] with someone and they basically said that they have a bad taste in their mouth about them simply because of your behavior as their primary advocate. I hope you will take a breath and think about how to best achieve your goals (which I largely share) - I don't think belittling the people you want to convince is the way.”

It was a heartfelt response from someone I like and respect to this tweet, where I referred to senior academics in neuroimaging as “unique and beautiful snowflakes”. This isn’t alt-right rhetoric – it’s a quote from Fight Club (one of my favourite films) that I think aptly and ironically summarises the primitive feudal system in the life sciences. As I wrote nearly five years ago, “Cognitive neuroscience is littered with petty fiefdoms doing one small study after another – making small, noisy advances.” I also write about this in my book. My message is always the same: scientists asking important questions do what’s necessary to answer them, and if that requires working in consortia then that’s what they do. Those who need to take these steps but refuse to try are usually driven by a combination of careerism and delusion.

The nature of these responses I get from professors tells me something interesting: that a lot of scientists – and for whatever reason they usually tend to be senior academics – misunderstand why I use social media. They assume that it’s part of some strategy or tactic, or a tool in an ongoing programme of open science advocacy. I know that’s how some people use twitter (and they do it very well), and perhaps my twitter feed looks like that from time to time, but it’s NOT how I use it and it’s not why I joined twitter in the first place.

Going right back to 2012, the reason I joined twitter was to offer the public (and non-scientists especially) some behind the scenes insights into the life of a working scientist. If people are interested in hearing these thoughts then they can tune in. If not they can ignore me or even block me, which is absolutely fine. I’ve tried to stay true to this mission by following three simple rules.

1.    Always be honest. On a lot of issues I say nothing, but when I do say something I always give my honest view, and provided that opinion isn’t libelous I would say exactly the same thing if you asked me in a one-to-one conversation, in a media interview, or in the question time of a talk. When I respond to you on twitter I imagine that you are sitting in front of me. I don’t censor my own speech online except to avoid ending up in court. “But that’s a bad strategy!”, exclaim the professors. “You are attacking the people who have power, rather than diplomatically trying to change their minds” – as another professor put it to me in an email. NO. Again, you’re confusing me for a politician who uses social media to persuade people to agree with them. I use social media to explain to people what I think, and to learn what they think, not to tell them what I believe they should think. 

2.    As a general rule, I tend to avoid criticizing individual scientists for their statements or practices, not because I have any problem with people who do (provided they aren’t  abusive or threatening I think this is a vital and much under-valued function in science), but because most of my interests lie in how groups behave and changing large-scale systems. I do make exceptions to this, e.g. as recently in my response to Brian Wansink.

3.    I don’t have an “internet persona”. The very thought of this makes me cringe. For better or worse (probably worse), what you see on here is exactly what I’m like in real life.

I’m happy to take personal criticism. Maybe it's an Australian trait, but as I said to one professor, I actually hugely appreciate this criticism, especially when it’s personal. In the past, this kind of criticism has given me pause. That said, I prefer it to be public because that better serves the purpose of why I joined twitter in the first place – to pull back the curtain on academia. I don’t really see the point in having extensive one-on-one debates with senior academics about what I say on twitter. Let’s have these debates outside and then those who are interested can learn something about what senior academics care about and how they interact. As I was discussing with Tracy King last night, there is a huge web of senior power in academia that is invisible and intractable to most people. Let’s reveal it.

Now you may well say that my approach on social media works against the broader “strategic goals” of open science but - brace yourself - I don’t really care if it does, and there’s not much point trying to convince me otherwise. The day you convinced me of that would be the day I left twitter because it wouldn’t be me anymore doing the tweeting – it would be some faceless “open science” entity named Chris Chambers.

And although it's not the point of this post, while we're on the subject: from a "strategic" point of view I think we’re doing ok. Registered Reports have hit nearly 150 journals and appear to be working as intended; we’ve launched the TOP guidelines across 5000 journals and organisations; the PRO initiative is changing journal policies to favour open data and materials; we’ve launched a new Accountable Replications policy at Royal Society Open Science (and had two submissions already in the last two weeks); we’ve established the UK Reproducibility Network and the UK Network of Open Science Working Groups; we’re working with the British Neuroscience Association to advance their impressive agenda in supporting reproducibility and transparency; I spend a lot of time helping people (on twitter and privately) with their Registered Reports submissions, policy launches and other open science challenges, and much more. We are steering the ship literally every day toward more rigorous, reliable science, so that the next generation can be rewarded and required to do high quality work. To most (not all) of the professors who email me to complain about my tone: remind me again what you're doing to further this mission?

Perhaps this is all in spite of me being on social media and my tone. If so then so be it – my tone on here is who I am. But I doubt it. Within reasonable bounds, I doubt anything I say on here matters very much in the grand scheme. What each of us does out there is so much more important. We’re witnessing a remarkable passage in the history of science, and for better or worse my words are just one human’s humble observations of that history as it unfolds. Onward.