Supplementary Material Guidelines

To permanently host supplements to papers, CPE partners with PsychArchives which is a disciplinary repository preserving a variety of digital research objects (DROs), with different publication types (preprints, primary, and secondary publications), research data, tests, pre-registrations, multimedia, and code. It provides easy and free access to DROs according to the FAIR principles, which implies the commitment to ensure that research and research data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

Any supplements to the paper (e.g., materials, data, code, analyses, codebooks, additional information, pre-registrations etc.) will need to be uploaded together with the main article text. Once an article has been accepted and all supplements have been submitted to the journal submission system, PsychOpen staff will upload them to PsychArchives and insert links to them in the copy-edited paper. This means that currently you do not have to upload your supplements to PsychArchives yourself; this will be done for you.

To fulfill the submission criteria for PsychArchives, you will need to do the following:

  • confirm that you and your co-authors agree to publish these materials in the PsychArchives repository under a CC BY 4.0 license (the same license as used for the article)
  • provide short descriptions of the contents of your supplements (it will be used for the "Supplements" section of the article linking to the repository) within the Supplements & Badges template form
  • provide a single guide (preferable as a PDF file) to all files, data, documents, materials, scripts, code, syntax, etc. (please ensure the re-useability of all of your materials)

PsychArchives offers the following benefits:

  • Permanent availability and linkage with article: Providing access to supplements via PsychArchives will guarantee their future availability as well as the linkage between them and the article. PsychArchives is a product of ZPID - Leibniz Institute for Psychology. ZPID is an Open Science Institute for psychological research (founded in 1971), which is funded by the German federal and state governments. Therefore, ZPID is not vulnerable to commercial risks.
  • Persistent identifier (DOI) to the PsychArchives submission: Every submission on PsychArchives is provided with a DOI.
  • Comprehensive enrichment with metadata: Every PsychArchives submission is comprehensively enriched with metadata (see an example of this here) which increases online discoverability.
  • Strict user guidelines enforce quality standards: Detailed metadata and user guidelines have been explicitly developed to avoid that PsychArchives becomes just another online “dump” for unspecified research related files. Comprehensible documentation ensures the re-usability of the provided files.
  • Integration of PsychArchives in the complete spectrum of (free-to-use) ZPID products: ZPID offers and develops free-to-use products to support psychologists during the whole research process (see here). These products are interconnected and enable researchers, for example, to find specific research data in PsychArchives, open these data in PsychNotebook, and perform analysis directly there.