Publications and Communications Board: 2019 Annual Report

In 2019, the Publications and Communications Board (P&C) and the American Psychological Association (APA) Publishing Directorate addressed challenges and opportunities surrounding changes in the field of scholarly publishing. With the goal of fulfilling APA's mission to advance psychology to benefit society and improve people's lives, APA Publishing disseminated an array of psychological science resources to communities across the globe. These resources included APA Journals, APA Books, the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Academic Writer, PsycLearn, PsycInfo abstracts, PsycArticles full-text, PsycTests, PsycTherapy, PsycBooks, PsycExtra, PsycCritiques, and PsycNet platform.

• The P&C Board made 12 editorial appointments in 2019, naming the following editors to 6-year terms, beginning in 2020 as the editor-elect year (and 2021 as the debut masthead year).  
  1. Behavioral Neuroscience — Geoffrey Schoenbaum, PhD
  2. Journal of Applied Psychology — Lillian Eby, PhD
  3. Journal of Educational Psychology — Panayiota Kendeou, PhD
  4. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes — Colin Wayne Leach, PhD
  5. Psychological Bulletin — Blair T. Johnson, PhD
  6. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors — Katie Witkiewitz, PhD
  7. International Journal of Stress Management — Luo (Jessica) Lu, PhD
  8. Psychology of Popular Media Culture — Karen Dill-Shackleford, PhD
  9. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology — Dana S. Dunn, PhD
  10. School Psychology — Robin Codding, PhD
  11. Stigma and Health — Patrick Corrigan, PsyD
  12. Translational Issues in Psychological Science — Daniel J. Weiss, PhD
• The P&C Board authorized the creation of APA Open, an innovative platform for APA's new open access journals. All articles will be funded by article processing charges and made available to the public, with licenses designed for easy reuse in the classroom or professional settings. Additionally, the new platform will empower authors to move beyond traditional, static article design by incorporating multimedia features, interactive tables and graphs, and easy sharing options for their research. The first journal released on this platform is Technology, Mind, and Behavior, led by inaugural editor Danielle S. McNamara, PhD, professor of psychology and director of the Science of Learning and Educational Technology Lab at Arizona State University. The journal will showcase research about human-technology interaction and development and address the full range of contemporary and emerging technologies. [https://tmb.pubpub.orgopens in new window]  
• The P&C Board's Open Science and Methodology (OSM) Committee, chaired by Dr. Steve Kozlowski, met for the first time in spring 2019. The committee developed an agenda for its first year: reviewing data management guidelines issued by bodies like the German Psychological Society in light of U.S. funder requirements and institutional review board guidelines, mapping challenges to data sharing across subfields of psychology in hopes of developing practical guidelines for data sharing, and developing a comprehensive definition and typology of replication types for APA Journals.
• At the behest of the P&C Board, OSM member Dr. Fred Oswald and Dr. Rose Sokol-Chang, publisher, APA Journals, serve as APA representatives in a collaboration with the British Psychological Society and the German Psychological Society to develop psychological standards for preregistering research.
• At the request of APA's Policy and Planning Board, the P&C Board conducted a self-study and review of activities spearheaded by P&C Board since 2015. It was concluded that the decision-making process is efficient, collaborative, and collegial and that substantive dialogues reflecting differing points of view are openly discussed. It was also noted that the high visibility and high regard for APA publications stand as testimony to the impact of the program.

APA Journals produces an array of scholarly periodicals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology.

• In 2019, Journals published more than 64,000 pages across 91 journals, with more than 5,200 articles in 510 journal issues.
• After a nearly 3-year process, APA Journals released the updated reporting standards for quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The publication standards in "Journal Article Reporting Standards [JARS] 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 American Psychologist and were made available via open access for all readers.
• In 2019, APA Journals published more than 62 special issues or journal sections on topics such as race, trauma, and opioids. The following are examples of special issues and sections:
  1. Racial Trauma and Healing: Theory, Research, and Public Policy
  2. Responding to the Opioid Crisis: Perspectives, Challenges and Directions
  3. The Prediction and Prevention of Suicide: Focus on Military and Veterans
  4. Trauma-Informed Care of Children and Families
  5. New Approaches to the Measurement of Personality: Translational Thoughts to Applied, Educational, and Clinical Settings
  6. Children's and Adolescents' Understanding and Experiences of Economic Inequality: Implications for Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice
  7. Master's Level Accreditation in Health Service Psychology
  8. Indigenous Psychology: What's the Next Step?
  9. PROMIS® Methods and Applications in Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine Research
  10. Advancing the Practice of Pediatric Psychology With Transgender Youth
  11. Advancing Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Health
  12. Somos Latinxs: Fostering Pathways of Resilience and Authenticity Among Sexual and Gender Diverse Latinxs
  13. Leadership Development in Academic Medical Centers: A Case Study of Executive Coaching from the Client's Perspective with Commentaries by Senior Leaders and Senior Consultants
  14. APA Clinical Practice Guidelines for PTSD and Innovations in Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

APA publishes books and videos to disseminate psychological science and standards and meet the needs of scholars, students, practitioners, and the general public. Imprints include APA Style, APA Books, Magination Press, APA Videos, APA Handbooks, and APA LifeTools.

• The biggest highlight of 2019 was the release of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition. Published in October, it is the culmination of many years of work by the APA Style team, the P&C Board's Task Forces on Publication Manual Revisions (chaired by James Campbell Quick) and on JARS (with Mark Appelbaum as chair of the Quantitative Working Group and Heidi M. Levitt as chair of the Qualitative Working Group), and dozens of other experts inside and outside APA. The Concise Guide to APA Style, tailored to meet student needs, was published in December. Response to the new works has been quite positive, as exemplified by the following review posted to Amazon in December 2019:
  1. I teach science writing. This new version of the manual is much more user-friendly and has modernized all the right things. It's not just that the changes in APA [Style] are better — it's that the editor of this edition put together a truly improved version of the handbook — better paper, better layout, better examples, so many little extra touches to make it simple to use the manual. I love how even the inside covers have at-a-glance listings.
  The guidelines for bias-free language have won favorable notice on social media and in publications ranging from The New York Times to Rolling Stone. With APA Style now the style of choice by writers in many disciplines around the world, and with the prior edition dating back to 2009, this new edition was highly anticipated. Numerous foreign publishers are eager to translate the books, and we expect to obtain those rights in 2020. Another recognition of APA Style's growing reach was the decision by the British Psychological Association's The Psychologist to endorse JARS-Qualitative instead of developing their own standards.

• In addition to the APA Style books, we released 39 scholarly/professional books, three textbooks, and two reference handbooks under the APA Books and APA Handbooks imprints, with subjects spanning the breadth of the field. The American Association of Publishers recognized APA Books with two 2019 Prose Awards for professional and scholarly excellence: The APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women, edited by Cheryl B. Travis and Jacqueline W. White, was named the best Multivolume Reference in the Social Sciences; and Living on Death Row, edited by Hans Toch, James R. Acker, and Vincent Martin Bonaventure, was named best book in the Psychology category. The American Library Association's Choice recognized Cognitive Dissonance, Second Edition, by Eddie Harmon-Jones, as an Outstanding Academic Title. Other 2019 titles included Suicide Prevention: An Ethically and Scientifically Informed Approach by Samuel J. Knapp; Psychology of Prejudice: From Attitudes to Social Action, Second Edition, by Lynne M. Jackson; The Aging Brain: Functional Adaptation Across Adulthood by Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin; and Dissertations and Theses From Start To Finish, Third Edition, by Debora Bell, Sharon L. Foster, and John D. Cone. Published in various digital formats, as well as in print, APA Books content is available in PsycBooks; library ebook platforms such as ProQuest Ebook Central and EBSCO; and ebook stores such as Kindle, VitalSource, and RedShelf.
• To provide scientifically sound resources for children, teens, and the adults in their lives, we published 21 new Magination Press books in 2019. Our 2019 list included picture books, workbooks, and chapter books on a wide range of subjects informed by psychology. Examples include Stand Up: Be an Upstander and Make a Difference by Wendy L. Moss; Trans+: Love, Sex, Romance, and Being You by Kathryn Gonzales and Karen Rayne; What to Do When Fear Interferes: A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Phobias by Claire A. B. Freeland and Jacqueline B. Toner; and Rainbow: A First Book of Pride by Michael Genhart.
• Complementing a robust book publishing program in clinical psychology, APA Books supports the instruction and continuing education of clinical psychologists with demonstration videos. In 2019, we released 15 individual video titles in both DVD and streaming format and added 24 new titles to the PsycTherapy collection. New titles included Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy Over Time with guest experts Diana Fosha; Cognitive Processing Therapy with Patricia A. Resnick; Cultural Humility in Therapy with Cirleen DeBlaere and Jesse Owen; and Treating Mood Disorders in Children with Mary Fristad.

• Academic Writer is APA's premier tool for teaching and learning effective writing. Formerly known as APA Style CENTRAL, the digital product was rebranded in January 2019 and launched into the higher education market. The 2019 development cycle focused primarily on alignment with the guidelines in the Seventh Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, as well as features to facilitate higher education adoptions. These included assignable lessons on APA Style that automatically populate student progress into learning management system (LMS) gradebooks. In 2020, customer communication and research will continue with the aim of providing further enhancements to Academic Writer, particularly with respect to LMS integration.
• PsycLearn is an immersive digital learning experience that uses interactive technology to deliver personalized content to undergraduate students in courses across the psychology curriculum. It is a textbook replacement for student use outside the classroom. PsycLearn's content is authored, in accordance with learning science principles, by psychologists with extensive experience teaching at the undergraduate level and is delivered on an adaptive learning platform developed by our partner, CogBooks.
  
  In spring 2019, PsycLearn: Research Methods was successfully piloted on campuses, and in the fall, APA got its first adoptions of PsycLearn. Throughout 2019, development continued on versions of PsycLearn for Introduction to Social Psychology and Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. In fall 2019, three modules of PsycLearn: Introduction to Social Psychology were beta tested with students.
  
  2020 will be a year of growth for PsycLearn, in sales, market development, and product development. PsycLearn: Research Methods is actively being sold; PsycLearn: Introduction to Social Psychology is currently in beta testing with full class pilots set for the fall; PsycLearn: Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences will be beta tested in the fall; and authoring of the next product for the undergraduate psychology curriculum, PsycLearn: Abnormal Psychology, will begin mid-year.

• APA PsycNet, the platform which hosts all of APA's content for members and subscribers, introduced a series of enhancements and access improvements designed to increase discoverability and use. Additional highlights from 2019 follow.
  1. Building on the success of the seamless authentication flow between Google Scholar and APA PsycNet, implemented with Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA), Universal CASA now delivers immediate off-campus access to researchers, students, and academics, whether they start their APA content discovery on PubMed, Google Scholar, or another site.
  2. Users with access to APA content on other vendor platforms or via individual subscriptions have a new option to check their entitlements, instead of hitting the paywall when they follow links to APA articles and books from social media, Google, or other search engines.
  3. In addition to articles from APA journals, APA books and chapters are now discoverable on Google Scholar, driving increased visibility and usage of APA content on the platform.
  4. The revamped tests and measures database PsycTests provides a simplified and streamlined user experience on the platform, making it easier for researchers and practitioners to find information about a test, its development, administration, and use.
  5. Following the Seventh Edition of the APA Publication Manual in October 2019, platform users can build bibliographies, display, email, and print citations for articles, books, tests, video therapy sessions, and other document types in the new APA Style 7 format.
  6. In support of the latest industry standard for scholarly content usage reporting, APA PsycNET delivers COUNTER 5-compliant reports. The new reports have an increased focus on consistency and clarity of usage metrics and allow platform customers to better understand and demonstrate the value of the electronic resources to which they subscribe.
• PsycInfo is the definitive abstracting and indexing service in the field of psychology. PsycInfo defines the field but also intersects with other disciplines, making it the premier interdisciplinary product in psychology. In 2019, APA Publishing began investigating ways to bring PsycInfo deeper into the workflow of researchers and faculty through services we develop around PsycInfo. Market analysis and evaluation will continue through early 2020.
  
  Initiatives to ensure the ongoing quality of the PsycInfo database include an ongoing reevaluation of journals on the coverage list and a tight screening of books added to the database, primarily to weed out predatory publishers but also to deploy additional automated technology to enhance the consistency and accuracy of the subject indexing.
  1. Nearly 150,000 records were released into the PsycInfo database in 2019, bringing the total number of records in the database to more than 4.7 million. Of these, 516,438 have ORCID IDs and 178,053 are open access. In addition, more than 6.2 million cited references were added to the PsycInfo database, bringing the total number of cited references in PsycInfo to more than 118 million.  The number of journals covered by PsycInfo at the end of 2019 was 2,291; 27 new journals were added over the course of the year.
  2. PsycInfo also includes the metadata records for the PsycArticles and PsycBooks databases:
     • More than 7,000 metadata records were added to the PsycArticles database, bringing the total records to 214,367.
     • Approximately 600 APA book and chapter records were added to PsycBooks. At the end of the year, PsycBooks contained 71,294 book and chapter records.
• The PsycTests database grew by 3,924 new records, totaling 58,894 records by the end of 2019.  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. Over 1,000 such archival records were added to PsycExtra in 2019, including abstract collections and presentations from the 2019 APA Convention.