Open Access Policy

Social Psychological Bulletin (SPB) provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. SPB also charges no author fee for submission or publication of papers.

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

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.

Corrections
In cases of serious errors that affect the article in a material way (but do not fully invalidate its results) or significantly impair the reader's understanding or evaluation of the article SPB publishes a correction note that is linked to the published article. The published article will be left unchanged.
 
Retractions (Expressions of Concern)
In accordance with the "Retraction Guidelines" by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) QCMB will retract a published article if
  • 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.
An article is retracted by publishing a retraction notice that is linked to or replaces the retracted article. SPB will make any effort to clearly identify a retracted SPB may choose to alert readers by publishing an expression of concern .

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with SPB agree to the following terms:

Creative Commons License Articles are published under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Under the CC BY license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors grant others permission to use the content of publications in SPB in whole or in part provided that the original work is properly cited. Users (redistributors) of SPB are required to cite the original source, including the author's names, SPB as the initial source of publication, year of publication, volume number and DOI (if available).

Authors may publish the manuscript in any other journal or medium but any such subsequent publication must include a notice that the manuscript was initially published by SPB.

Authors grant SPB the right of first publication. Although authors remain the copyright owner, they grant the journal the irrevocable, nonexclusive rights to publish, reproduce, publicly distribute and display, and transmit their article or portions thereof in any manner.