Clinical Psychological Science Begins Awarding Open Practices Badges

Clinical Psychological Science (CPS) has become the second APS journal to adopt an Open Practices Badge program, following a model that Psychological Science pioneered more than 2 years ago.

All manuscripts newly submitted to CPS will now be eligible to receive up to three badges for meeting any or all of the following criteria:

• Open Data: The study’s data were submitted to an open-access repository.
• Open Materials: The study’s materials/measures were submitted to an open-access repository.
• Preregistration: The study’s results were reported according to an open-access design and analysis plan formulated prior to data collection.

New CPS Editor and APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Scott O. Lilienfeld of Emory University emphasizes that “preregistration” does not require that all or even most analyses be planned in advance. Instead, the journal merely requires investigators to state up front which analyses are confirmatory and which are exploratory.

“High-quality exploratory research is more than welcome in the pages of Clinical Psychological Science, just so long as authors explicitly acknowledge that the analyses are exploratory and, when relevant, acknowledge potential constraints on the replicability of these findings,” Lilienfeld said.

The Open Practices Badge program that Psychological Science launched in May 2014 was devised in partnership with the Center for Open Science (COS). In a recent article published in the online journal PLoS Biology, a team of COS researchers reported an overall 10-fold increase in data sharing in papers published in the APS flagship journal since the badge program’s debut.

The two APS journals are among only a few scientific publications to offer Open Practice Badges.