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Cognitive Science: eJournals & Open Access

http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/cogsci

Preprint and Postprint Servers

Preprint servers allow researchers to make their findings available to the public prior to publication in a peer reviewed journal. This allows researchers to receive feedback from their research community prior to publication, to "test the waters," and to "stake their claim" on a topic prior to publication. Some journals, however, will not accept articles that have appeared on a preprint server -- check the publications policy for the journals to which you hope to submit your paper.

Listed below are notable preprint servers for psychology research but there are many other preprint servers in other fields, including medicine and biological sciences.

  • PsyArXiv: Maintained by the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Sciences (SIPS) and the Center for Open Science. Established in 2016.
  • SocArXiv; Papers: open access platform for social scientist to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. Established in 2016.

Postprint Servers: Another way to make research available to the public is to post previously published works in an online postprint repository. eScholarship is the University of California's open access publishing platform that allows UC researchers to post the final author version of their articles. For more information see UC Open Access Policies.

Open Access in Psychology: for Readers and Authors

Why Open Access (OA)? Open Access literature is free and available to anyone. Researchers anywhere in the world ccan read the scholarly output that has been made available in an open-access journal. This means that a local social worker or therapist who does not have access to all the journals subscribed to by UC Berkeley can read the research findings disseminated in an OA journal.

How OA journals support themselves: Rather than charging readers a subscription fee, OA journals often use the "author-pays" model in which they charge authors and article processing charge (APC). The UC Berkeley Library offers Berkeley authors reimbursement for their APCs through the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII). For more information and an application for funding, consult the BRII website

OA Journals: This selective list of high-quality journals; the journals listed below are peer-reviewed and online.

  • BMC Psychology: covers all aspects of psychology, human behavior and the mind, including developmental, cliniical, cognitive, experimental, health and social psychology, as well as personality and individual differences. Author fee: $2145.
  • Collabra: Psychology: the official journal of the Society of the Improvement of Psychological Science published by the University of California Press. Includes seven sections representing the broad field of psychology including: Cognitive, Social, Personality, Clinical, and Developmental Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Methodology and Research  Practice. Author fee: $975.
  • Frontiers in Psychology: This multidisciplinary open-access journal "publishes the best research across the entire field of psychology." Includes 28 subsections including: Cognitive Science, Environmental Psychology, Perception Science and Quantitative Science and Measurement. Author fee: $450-$2950.
  • Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science: covers the broad array of content areas within cognitive science, using approaches from cognitive psychology, computer science and mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, comparative psychology and behavioral anthropology, decision sciences and theoretical and experimental linguistics. Author fee: $950.
  • SAGE Open: publishes original research and review articles in all areas of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. Author fee: The UC Berkeley Library has a partnership with SAGE that subsidizes author fees for papers accepted to SAGE Open. Any UC Berkeley author whose paper is accepted in SAGE Open will be able to publish for free.

In addition to these fully open access journals, most traditional subscription-based journals also allow authors to pay an additional fee to make their articles open access. These are known as hybrid journals. Keep in mind that the BRII program does not reimburse authors publishing in hybrid journals.