This is the latest of an ongoing series of interviews with people involved with our new Open Access journal, Experimental Results – a forum for short research papers from experimental disciplines across Science, Technology and Medicine, providing authors with an outlet for rapid publication of small chunks of research findings with maximum visibility. This is the second of our interviews with our Chief Editors.

What’s your background and what kind of research do you do?

I am an Associate Professor in Psychology and the Andrew J. McKenna Family Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame. My background is in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience. I currently direct the Sleep, Stress, and Memory (SAM) Laboratory, which right now consists of 2 postdocs, 4 graduate students, and 22 undergraduate students. We’re a busy lab trying to understand the independent and interactive roles of sleep and stress in various types of cognitive function, including memory, emotion, problem solving, and creativity, as well as in various mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders.

What motivated you to become an editor with Experimental Results?

The field of Psychology is facing a replication crisis. Various methodological problems, especially those concerning statistical power, have resulted in the publication of findings that turned out to be unreproducible. That, along with the bias toward publishing only positive results, has led many to wonder what is real and what is spurious in our field. That’s scary stuff, and, the way I see it, we scientists are at a crossroads. We need to change many things if the field is to thrive – from the way we publish and what counts as a valuable contribution to the literature, to how tenure and promotion decisions are made. If our science is to progress, it is essential, not only that we power our studies appropriately, but that all methodologically sound studies, not just selected experiments, are published and available to all. That’s the main reason why I took the job as Editor in Chief for Experimental Results Psychology. I am delighted to serve because the journal wants to ensure dissemination of all valid scientific results, regardless of their positive or negative outcome. Experimental Results exists to solve the problem of null, unexpected, or incremental findings never being published, and thus never making their way into the scientific record. Experimental Results is expanding the limits of the traditional publication model, and I am excited about the opportunity to help move this new journal forward. My hope is that this journal will become a repository for work that the field should really know about but that would not likely be published elsewhere.

What do you find most exciting about Experimental Results?

I think that most psychological scientists would agree about the importance of addressing problems associated with reproducibility and the positivity bias in publication. A way forward is through the creation of new journals like Experimental Results. My hope is that my fellow scientists will agree, and that they will support the journal by submitting to us.

Do you have any advice for authors submitting to Experimental Results?

Please just give us a try! We are a reputable open access venue where scientists can publish concise experimental findings that do not necessarily fit the traditional publication model. It is understandable if you are apprehensive about submitting something to the journal because it is new and because of the unique approach to publishing very short articles (we seek to be as concise as possible rather than not publishing manuscripts that include the full narrative of a traditional paper). But if you take a look at some of the published papers to inform the preparation of your own submission, I think you will see how Experimental Results might be an excellent outlet for quality work that you are not likely to publish elsewhere. Please consult the Instructions to Contributors for more information.

What are you most looking forward to seeing as Experimental Results publications begin to go live?

I’m excited to see what exists out there. It will be interesting to see what kinds of unpublished data have been buried in researcher files or exist as part of the gray literature that, until now, have not been accessible to the broader scientific community. I would bet that every one of us can think of at least one experiment that returned a null result or represented only an incremental contribution, and thus was never published. But these data are important for the field to know about and there should be a record of them somewhere. Although we may chat about these results with colleagues or mention them in conference presentations, until now it has been very difficult to disseminate this information. Experimental Results allows these hard-earned results to be shared more widely. Not only will researchers receive credit for their work, but scientific advancements will proceed more efficiently and effectively if the field has a more complete record of what experiments have been conducted and what the data from those experiments have to say.

Find out more about the journal here.