Publications and Communications Board: 2018 Annual Report

The Publications and Communications Board (P&C) and the Office of Publications and Databases (OPD) addressed challenges and opportunities surrounding changes in the scholarly publishing field.

With the goal of fulfilling APA’s mission to advance psychology to benefit society and improve people’s lives, OPD disseminated an array of psychological science resources to communities across the globe.

Total revenue for APA’s core scholarly and professional publishing program (APA Journals, APA Books, Publication Manual, APA Style CENTRAL, PsycINFO abstracts, PsycARTICLES full-text, PsycTESTS, PsycTHERAPY, PsycBOOKS, PsycEXTRA, PsycCRITIQUES, and PsycNET platform) totaled nearly $97 million in 2018.

The P&C Board made seven editorial appointments in 2018, naming the following Editors to six-year terms, beginning in 2019 as the Editor-elect year (and 2020 as the debut masthead year).

• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition – Andrew R. Delamater, PhD
• Neuropsychology – Keith O. Yeates, PhD
• Psychological Methods – Douglas L. Steinley, PhD
• Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice – Joel E. Ringdahl, PhD
• Decision – David V. Budescu, PhD
• Journal of Rural Mental Health – Timothy G. Heckman, PhD
• Spirituality in Clinical Practice – Thomas G. Plante, PhD

In 2018, the P&C Board created a new, advisory role for the journals program, titled Open Science and Methodology (OSM) Chair. The chair will oversee an ad-hoc committee, working with editors, the P&C Board, and the Publisher, APA Journals, to maintain policies related to open science and methodology. The chair will also serve as a resource for authors, reviewers, editors, and the Chief Editorial Advisor in cases related to open science. After a public search, Dr. Steve Kozlowski of Michigan State University was named as APA’s first OSM Chair.

The P&C Board also committed to a collaboration with the German Psychological Society and British Psychological Society to head a work group aimed at creating standards for preregistration of research design in psychological science.

APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology. Journals published more than 57,000 pages in 2018 across 90 journals, representing more than 4,690 articles in 512 journal issues.

After nearly three years of preparation, APA Journals released the updated reporting standards for quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The publication standards “Journal Article Reporting Standards for Quantitative Research in Psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force Report” and “Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Primary, Qualitative Meta-Analytic, and Mixed Methods Research in Psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force Report,” were published in the 2018 January issue of the American Psychologist and were made available via open access for all readers.

APA Journals works diligently to publish articles immediately after finalization via “Online First Publication”. With the goal of finalizing articles within 30 days after accepted manuscripts have been received at APA, these are designated as the “versions of record” and chronicled in PsycARTICLES. More than 3,650 articles were released as Online First Publication between January and December 2018, and approximately 3,416 articles “graduated” to bound issues in this same time frame.

Also in 2018, APA Journals published more than 57 special issues or sections of journals.

The following are some examples of special issues and sections:

• Cardiovascular Disease: Psychological, Social, and Behavioral Influences
• The Prediction and Prevention of Suicide; Psychosocial Approaches to Improving the Military-to-Civilian Transition Process
• Bullying and Peer Victimization of Vulnerable; Marginalized, and Oppressed Youth
• Evolution of Cognitive Mechanisms; Social Movements and Political and Social Transformation
• Advances in Psychological Research on Marijuana
• Atheism, Agnosticism, and Nonreligious Worldviews
• Teaching and Learning Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology at the Undergraduate Level
• Evidence-Based Psychotherapy Relationships III
• Hate and Violence: Addressing Discrimination Based on Race, Ethnicity, Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity
• Transgender Youth
• Special Section Article: Grief and Loss in Children and Adolescents
• Special Section on LGBT issues across the Spanish/Portuguese-speaking Americas
• Special Section: Professional Issues in Canadian Cognitive Science
• Special Spotlight Section on the Digital Humanities and the History of Psychology
• Special Section on Guilty Pleas
• Special Section on Machiavellian Intelligence
• Special Section on Campus Culture Wars: Is Psychology at the Front Lines?

APA publishes books to meet the needs of scholars, clinicians, researchers, and students in all areas of psychology. The product lines encompass an array of resources, including the APA Books®, APA LifeTools®, and Magination Press® imprints, and APA Videos®. 

In 2018 APA Books released 45 scholarly titles, 2 LifeTools (APA’s self-help imprint), 3 reference handbooks, and 22 Magination Press (APA’s children’s book imprint) titles.

In addition, APA Books released 46 E-titles to ProQuest Ebook Central, EBSCO, OverDrive, RedShelf, and VitalSource, and 48 titles to Amazon Kindle.

Book awards bestowed upon APA titles are generous.

Included here is a list of awards received for APA Magination Press titles.

• Independent Publisher Book Awards: I See You (Gold) and Feminism From A to Z (Gold)
• National Parenting Product Awards: Bee Still, Something Happened in Our Town, Marvelous Maravilloso, Sewing the Rainbow
• Moonbeam Awards: King Calm
• Teacher’s Choice Awards, Box of Butterflies
• Mom’s Choice Awards: Bee Still (Gold)
• Foreword INDIES: I See You (Gold), Feminism From A to Z (Silver)

The Video division of APA Books released 15 individual video titles in both DVD and in streaming format (through our distributors), including

• Affirmative Counseling With Transgender and Gender Diverse Clients with guest experts lore m. dickey and Anneliese Singh
• Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with Steven N. Gold
• Emotion-Focused Couple Therapy with Rhonda N. Goldman
• Emotion-Centered Problem Solving Therapy with Arthur M. Nezu and Christine M. Nezu
• The Dynamics of Power and Privilege with Malin Fors.

The Video division also released 32 videos into PsycTHERAPY, APA’s database of streaming psychotherapy videos.

The December 2018 issue of CHOICE Magazine quoted a very positive review of PsycTHERAPY that appears in ccAdvisor:

“PsycTHERAPY on APA’s PyscNET platform is an affordable, high-quality resource providing streaming videos and corresponding transcripts of filmed sessions between well-known therapists and individuals, couples, and families,” wrote Leanne M. VandeCreek. “The ability to observe well-known experienced professionals in-session with clients, while simultaneously analyzing body language, tone of voice, and dialog (audio or via transcript) between therapist and client is invaluable to those in training.”

APA’s platform (PsycNET) and databases (PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycEXTRA, PsycTESTS, and PsycTHERAPY) are supported by the Product Management and Content Management departments within OPD.

In 2018, the APA PsycNET platform added several new features to its growing suite of researcher tools.

Implementation of Google's Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) provides researchers, students, and academics with seamless off-campus access to APA’s journal content discovered via Google Scholar, with no additional off-campus authentication on any device. Search results on the platform are now enhanced with images. Users can preview the complete set of figures and tables in the article and save full-size images as slides to use in lectures and presentations.

Annotation technology from Hypothesis has been layered over content on the APA PsycNET platform to allow authors, students, and other user groups to engage in private and public post-publication discussions, interactive classwork, content curation, and collaborative research.

On mobile devices, integration with Google's Quick Abstracts enables users to quickly swipe through search results from APA publications on Google Scholar, read abstracts, and then link to full-text articles on APA PsycNET.

The Content Management department oversees and implements policy and program development in all matters related to content for the PsycINFO and PsycTESTS databases. Initiatives to ensure the quality of the PsycINFO database included an ongoing re-evaluation of journals on the coverage list and a tight screening of books added to the database, primarily to weed out predatory publishers. 

More than 138,000 records were released into the PsycINFO database in 2018, bringing the total number of records in the database to more than 4.5 million: of these 424,305 have ORCID IDs and 144,926 are open access.

In addition, the database contains almost 110 million cited references.

The number of journals covered by PsycINFO at the end of 2018 was 2,320 — 158 were dropped during the ongoing journal re-evaluation process and 47 new ones were added.

PsycINFO also includes the metadata records for the PsycARTICLES and PsycBOOKS databases:

• More than 5,000 metadata records were added to the PsycARTICLES database, bringing the total records to 209,245.
• Approximately 700 APA book and chapter records were added to PsycBOOKS. At the end of the year, PsycBOOKS contained 70,683 book and chapter records.

The PsycTESTS database grew by 5,169 new records, totaling more than 55,000 records by the end of the year. Approximately half of the metadata records are accompanied by full tests.

The PsycEXTRA database has been transformed into an archive for APA and APA-related content only. More than 1,500 such archival records were added to PsycEXTRA in 2018, including abstract collections and presentations from the 2018 APA Convention.

Approximately 3,600 website pages were indexed in 2018 for APA’s public website, www.apa.org. Much of this content is also archived in the PsycEXTRA database.