Increasing Submission Rate, Promising Impact Figures, Open Access Option

Abstract

Social Psychology continues on its successful course, as witnessed by a number of indicators. The submission rate has increased to more than 20 manuscripts per quarter, so we are likely to just about reach the mark of 100 for 2009, as I had predicted in the Editorial to issue 1 of the current volume. There is wide variability in first authors’ countries of origin, with submissions received in 2009 to date originating from 16 different countries, which attests to the journal’s international character. Given this positive trend in regular submissions, we will reduce the number of special issues to approximately one per year in the long run. This should ensure that the time between acceptance and publication of an article will usually be less than 8 months. Impact factor and other citation statistics for 2008 have now been published by Journal Citation Reports®. The data show that articles that appeared in Social Psychology in 2008 were cited by other journals six times within the same year. Among the citing journals are leading outlets such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2 citations) and Psychological Review. Because of the recent change in the journal’s title, there is no impact factor for Social Psychology as such yet, as its computation would involve citations of articles that appeared in 2006 and 2007 (when the journal did not yet exist under that name). However, the impact factor for the journal’s German-language predecessor, Zeitschrift fur Sozialpsychologie, is reported as 0.432. After 0.400 in 2007, the current figure is again higher than the impact factors of previous years. Readers visiting the journal’s Internet site will have noticed that Social Psychology now offers its authors the option of publishing articles as open access papers, under an initiative named Hogrefe OpenMind. This option involves a fee to be paid by the author (or the author’s institution or funding agency), which ensures that an electronic version of the article is accessible to everyone free of charge. Details on Hogrefe OpenMind can be found on the Internet (www.hogrefe.com/openmind) and in a publisher’s message in the final pages of this issue. For the editorial team, it is important to note that authors’ decisions about which publishing option they choose – open access or traditional, subscription-based access – will be made only after a manuscript has been accepted for publication. So all articles will continue to be treated the same, will be peer-reviewed, professionally produced, and published in both print and electronic form.