Diversity Policy

SPB is committed to promoting standards of open-science, supporting an integrative approach to all aspects of social psychological science, and discussing current issues of high societal importance. Therefore, since the beginning, in SPB we have the ambition to implement state-of-the-art policies benefiting the quality of scientific discourse. With this overarching goal in mind, we acknowledge that scientific innovation and quality breeds also the inclusion of diverse perspectives representing both diversity in the world and in our field. In order to address one aspect of this diversity, and following a notion that the presence of women in decision-making bodies may limit the implicit bias against women, we recommend that guest editors of special issues maintain a gender diversity within their teams. We hope that with this recommendation we will further contribute to creating an open, inclusive, and innovative community of researchers, thus benefiting readership and societies. 

Preprint Policy

As part of SPB's submission process, authors are required to confirm that the submission has not been previously published, nor has been submitted (or will be submitted while under consideration at SPB). However, prior to submitting their article and prior to acceptance and publication in SPB, authors may make their submissions available as preprints on personal or public websites. "A preprint is a draft of an academic article or other publication before it has been submitted for peer-review or other quality assurance procedure as part of the publication process. Preprints cover initial and successive drafts of articles, working papers or draft conference papers" (SHERPA. (n.d.). Glossary of open access abbreviations, acronyms and terms. Retrieved from http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/glossary.html). Published conference presentations, posters etc. are considered preprints, provided they do not appear in a peer-reviewed, published conference proceeding. After a manuscript has been published in SPB we suggest to link to the final article version, using the assigned article DOI in this way: https://doi.org/DOI, e.g. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v15i2.1623

Publication Ethics

The responsibilities of SPB's editors, reviewers, and authors concerning publication ethics and publication malpractice are described in PsychOpen's Guidelines on Publication Ethics.

Permanency of Content

In accordance with generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing SPB does not alter articles after publication: "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible" ( STM, 2006. Preservation of the objective record of science). In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct SPB publishes corrections, expressions of concern and retractions (see below).

SPB participates in the CrossMark scheme, a multi-publisher initiative that has developed a standard way for readers to locate the current version of an article. By applying the CrossMark policies, SPB is committed to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur. Clicking on the CrossMark logo (at the top of an SPB article or the article landing page) will give you the current status of an article and direct you to the latest published version; it may also give you additional information such as new peer review reports.

In order to maintain the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record, the following policies will be applied when published content needs to be corrected.

• there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation),
• the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication),
• it constitutes plagiarism,
• it reports unethical research.