There is nothing as dull in a student’s life as badly made PowerPoint presentations. Using PowerPoint has become a rule, whenever you present something in an university setting or otherwise. Everybody does it. And even when you follow all the hints on ‘how to make a good presentations’, like the ones Maris talked about in our last post at the JEPS Bulletin, you end up with just a PowerPoint presentation. How to change that and spice things up?

Four years ago, the President of the American Psychological Association, addressed the ‘thorny debate of Open Access’ as she puts it. What is APA’s standing on open access?

Does APA, probably the most influential organization in psychology today, support the goal of open access to research? I am a bit confused as to an answer to that question, so I tried to write an informed perspective on APA’s policy on open access. You can find what my inquiry has elucidated in the rest of this post.

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If you ever attended even the most basic statistics class, you have been warned about data manipulation. Even more so,if somebody mentions data manipulation and statistics, your mind inevitably leads you to the media. Reporting on scientific results derived from statistics, reporters often omit the warnings and precautions the authors themselves expressed on any far-reaching conclusions based on their results. But a cautious, scientifically sound conclusion does not cut it as a headline. Despite this being a serious issue, especially for psychologists, what better way to illustrate it than with a joke?

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Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (Bailey, 2006). The JEPS Bulletin first introduced the topic of open access with the interview with Martin Uhl. The JEPS editorial team is a supporter of the OA movement and publishes JEPS as an open access journal. But we would like to do more in helping the cause of open access publishing than just publishing JEPS. That is why we will try to introduce you to the topic of open access movement, literature and publishing through the JEPS Bulletin.

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All psychology students around the world have problems with the nooks and crannies of APA style. Most of us (hopefully) know the basics without consulting a manual or asking a colleague, but there are always those obscure rules nobody really uses regularly. How to cite a TV series? How are appendixes handled? How to cite an unpublished manuscript? All these questions and many more have an answer – but the problem is, where to find it? Online, of course. Here, I offer a list of useful APA style resources and their short descriptions. Maybe this will help you sometime in the future, when you’re wondering how to use et al at 4 AM.

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The editors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have created quite a buzz when word got out that they are planning to publish a paper on extrasensory perception (ESP) in an issue of their journal. Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, is the author of this controversial paper that provoked reactions in mainstream media (e.g. an article in the New York Times) and also in the academia, with prompt criticism of the said paper by Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom and van der Maas (submitted) and Rouder and Morey (submitted). What are the implications of a distinctively parapsychology focused research paper being published in a mainstream psychology journal? Is this a failure of the review process or proof that current scientific review is truly unbiased?

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The people with the most thorough and the most comprehensive insight into the world of scientific publishing in psychology are probably the editors of the many scientific journals.  These are the people involved in every part of the way of a manuscript becoming a published article. From the first technical review when a manuscript is received, through the peer-review and to the final touches in layout editing, the editors take part in the process. This is why we have decided to include  interviews with peer-reviewed journal editors to the JEPS Bulletin. The first in this series of interviews will be the one with Dr. Renata Franc, a researcher at the Ivo Pilar Institute for Social Sciences in Zagreb, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for General Social Issues.

Dr. Franc offers comments and suggestions on how to write  compelling and top quality scientific papers, with this advice aimed especially for students who are usually new to the whole idea of publishing their work in journals. If you hope to someday publish a scientific article, or you wish to improve your writing, you will find the following interview with dr. Franc more than useful!

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