Publications and Communications Board: 2020 Annual Report

APA Publishing serves two important functions, as a content provider of important research, and as APA’s primary source of income. Total revenue for APA’s core scholarly and professional publishing program (APA Journals, APA Books, Publication Manual, Academic Writer, PsycInfo abstracts, PsycArticles full-text, PsycLearn, PsycTests, PsycTherapy, PsycBooks, PsycExtra, and PsycNet platform) totaled over $100 million in 2020.

The P&C Board is pleased to have made eleven editorial appointments in 2020, naming the following Editors to six-year terms, beginning in 2021 as the Editor-elect year (and 2022 as the debut masthead year).

• American Psychologist– Harris Cooper, PhD
• History of Psychology– Christopher Green, PhD
• Journal of Family Psychology– Arin M. Connell, PhD
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes & Individual Differences– Richard Lucas, PhD
• Psychological Assessment– Julie Suhr, PhD
• Psychological Review– Elena Grigorenko, PhD
• Journal of Occupational Health Psychology– Sharon Clarke, PhD
• Journal of Threat Assessment and Management– Tyson D. Bailey, PsyD, ABPP
• Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment– Joshua D. Miller, PhD
• The Psychologist Manager– Elizabeth Blickensderfer, PhD & Elizabeth Lazzara, PhD
• Psychology of Men and Masculinities– Y. Joel Wong, PhD

In 2020, the P&C Board also opened five searches for the following journals; incoming editors to begin in 2022:

• Developmental Psychology
• Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
• Motivation Science
• Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology

APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology. Journals published more than 58,000 pages in 2020 across 89 journals, representing more than 4,800 articles in 512 journal issues.

The APA Journals program launched the new Open Access Platform, APA Open, at the end of 2019 with the new journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior. The journal received 100 submissions in 2020 and accepted 15 articles for publication. Twelve articles and an editorial are available in issues one and twoopens in new window, and calls for papers have been created for special issues on Technology, Work, and Inequality; and Innovations in Remote Instruction: Impact on Students’ Socioemotional and Cognitive Outcomes.

A multi-society collaborative launched the Psychological Research Preregistration-Quantitative (PRP-Q) Templateopens in new window. This Joint Psychological Societies Preregistration Task Force consisted of P&C Board appointed members from American Psychological Association (APA) joined with members from the British Psychological Society (BPS) and German Psychological Society (DGPs) and was supported by the Center for Open Science (COS) and the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID). The goal of the Task Force was to provide the psychological community with a consensus template for the preregistration of quantitative research in psychology, one with wide coverage and the ability, if necessary, to adapt to specific journals, disciplines and researcher needs.

The P&C Board adopted the APA Publishing  Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Framework at the end of 2019 (), and as part of this broader initiative, the Journals program launched a partnership with Bowie State University to spotlight Student Researchers of Color in psychology.

In 2020, APA Journals published more than 57 special issues or sections of journals.  The following are examples of special issues and sections: Social Justice Training in Health Service Psychology, Groups in a Dangerous Time: Virtual Work and Therapy in the Era of COVID-19, Climate Change, Resilience, and Trauma, Clinical Approaches to Address Health Disparities in Pediatric Psychology , Fundamental Questions in Emotion Regulation, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy's online only special issue on COVID-19, Education and Training in Substance Use Disorders and Addictions: Coordinated Special Issue With Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, International Implementation of Individual Placement and Support, Substance Use Disorders and Addictions: Coordinated Special Issue with Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Obesity: Psychosocial and Behavioral Aspects of a Modern Epidemic, Parental Socialization of Emotion and Self-Regulation: Understanding Processes and Application, Its Role in Learning, Development, and Psychological Functioning, Aesthetic Appreciation of Visual Art, Rethinking Adult Development: New Ideas for New Times, Psychology in Higher Education: Pedagogy, Policy, and Practice, New Approaches to Exploring Processes of Change in Counseling Psychology, Addressing the Mental Health Needs of Protective Service Workers: Strategies and Solutions, Predictive Processing & Psychopathology, Uncovering the Developmental Experiences of Minoritized Populations Across Contexts, Altered States and Enhanced Functioning, COVID-19 Pandemic Dreams, Diversity and Inclusion in Education and Training, Innovations in Education and Training, Who Was Little Albert? The Historical Controversy, Prehistoric Psychology, Aging and Inhibition: The View Ahead, Evidenced-Based Relationship Variables Within Sexual and Gender Minority Populations, The Science of Behavior Change: Implementing the Experimental Medicine Approach, Clinical Advances in Pediatric Integrated Primary Care, Psychology's Role in Addressing the Dual Crises in Chronic Pain and Opioid-Related Harms , Measurement-Based Care and Psychological Assessment in Mental Health Services, Future of Evolutionary Psychology, and Advocacy in Public Service Settings.

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, APA Style, and APA Videos.

The first full year since the release of the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association was marked with several noteworthy achievements. With more than one million print copies of the paperback, spiral, and hardcover versions in circulation, the 7th edition is making an impact in academia. Throughout 2020, it was featured in several bestseller lists, including the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and Amazon. In addition to being widely used in psychology and nursing, it has also been adopted in more than 100 other academic disciplines with course adoption requests on the rise. To support dissemination of the new guidelines, the APA Style team conducted a series of webinars and conference presentations with a combined attendance of more than 15,000 international users. To date, translation licenses have been sold for the Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Greek, and Turkish editions.

In 2020 APA Publishing released 42 scholarly titles, two LifeTools (APA’s self-help imprint), one two-volume reference handbook, and 35 Magination Press (APA’s children’s book imprint) titles. In addition, APA Books released 41 E-titles to ProQuest Ebook Central, EBSCO, OverDrive, 42 books to RedShelf, and VitalSource, and 45 titles to Amazon Kindle. Magination Press partnered with the digital reading platform Epic! who offers free subscriptions to children, families, and teachers. Sixty MP titles are now available on Epic! Magination Press also published 68 front list and bestselling backlist books as ebooks on Amazon Kindle.

Book awards and honors bestowed upon APA titles are generous. Included here is a list of awards and honors received for APA Magination Press titles.

• Accordionly was named a finalist in the 2020 International Latino Book Awards. Marvelous, Maravilloso was named a finalist last year.
• Something Happened in Our Town debuts on the New York Times Children’s Picture Book Bestseller list at #10 in July 2020.
•  This Day In June made Publishers Weekly’s Banned Books of the Decade list.
•  Magination Press new releases received dozens of good reviews in trade publications, but five 2020 books received a starred review -- Papa Daddy and Riley (*Booklist); Lulu the One and Only (*Kirkus); My Maddy (*Booklist); You'll Find Me (*Kirkus); and Home for A While (*School Library Journal)
• Jacob’s Room to Choose, was named a 2020 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People; included on American Library Association’s 2020 Rainbow Book List; and named a Foreword INDIES Finalist
• Trans+ : Love, Sex, Romance, and Being You was a Foreword INDIES Finalist; included on the American Library Association’s 2020 Rainbow Book List; named a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year, Starred Outstanding Merit Title, and awarded an American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) Book Award
• Camilla Cartographer was also named a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year
• Several Mom’s Choice Award winners including Stand Up!; Doug’s Dung; A Feel Better Book for Little Poopers; Grow Kind; My Wandering Dreaming Mind: Lulu the One and Only; and Bee Heartful.
  

Magination Press partnered with several national organizations in 2020:

• Magination Press partnered with the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail program for a book giveaway to the National Diaper Bank (NDB) and the National Black Child Development Initiative (NBCDI) -- Potty! was distributed to 3000 toddlers in Nashville NDB; and 15,000 copies of Time to Go!, New Baby!, and Boo Boo! were distributed to NBCDI affiliates throughout the country for use in their parent education programs.
• Magination Press licensed the dramatic theatrical rights to Something Happened In Our Town by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard Children's Theatre Company (CTC) located in Minneapolis, MN is one of the nation’s largest and most acclaimed theatre for young people and serves a multigenerational audience.
• Magination Press published two free books to help kids cope with the pandemic as an ebooks here A Kid's Guide to Coronavirus and Unstuck! Things to Do to Stay Calm During a Pandemic

Academic and Professional Books also garnered recognition and praise, including:

• 2020 National Association for Gifted Children’s 2020 Book of the Year for The Psychology of High Performance: Developing Human Potential Into Domain-Specific Talent.
• Four finalists for 2020 PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publishers: Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, The Aging Brain, The Psychology of High Performance, and Threat to Democracy.
• APA Handbook of Contemporary Family Psychology and APA Handbook of Psychopharmacology both named Outstanding Academic Titles for 2020 by CHOICE (a review publication of the American Library Association).
• APA Handbook of Sport and Exercise Psychology was integrated into the Olympic World Library (OWL) (an initiative of The Olympic Studies Centre).
• Numerous accolades, press mentions, and author interviews for the well-timed new LifeTools title Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide, Skills and Strategies for Conversations that Work by Tania Israel including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, the Today show with Hoda and Jenna, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, and CNN (including a CNN article syndicated 67 times).

The Video division of APA Books released 11 individual video titles in both DVD and in streaming format (through our distributors), including Brief Strategic Family Therapy in Practice with guest expert José Szapocnik; Group Psychodynamic Interpersonal Psychotherapy in Practice with Samuel F. Mikail and Giorgio A. Tasca; Therapy With Diverse Couples with Shalonda Kelly; and Working With Trauma in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy with SueAnne Piliero.

The Video division also released 39 videos into APA PsycTherapy®, APA’s database of streaming psychotherapy videos.

APA PsycTherapy relaunched in August with a new look, new features, and new content. We switched platform hosts for this product from Alexander Street Press (where APA PsycTherapy was a white label product since its inception in 2011) to Cadmore Media, a company with the specific goal of working with scholarly and professional organizations to disseminate streaming video content. The new site has a clean crisp design and new features such as segmented videos, the ability to "favorite" videos and therapists, and educational content such as definitions of therapy approaches and presenting issues. The improved video player has tools integrated into the player itself, so you can access these whether the player is full screen mode or embedded in a Learning Management System (LMS).

APA’s platform (PsycNet) and databases (PsycInfo, PsycArticles, PsycBooks, PsycExtra, PsycTests, and PsycTherapy) are supported by the Product Management and Content Management departments in APA Publishing.

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. 

• More than 179,300 records were released into the PsycINFO database in 2020, bringing the total number of records in the database to more than 4.9 million: of these 665,420 have ORCID IDs and 209,278 are open access. In addition, the database contains more than 125 million cited references.  The number of journals covered by PsycINFO at the end of 2020 was 2,273 – 37 were dropped during the ongoing journal re-evaluation process and 21 new ones were added. 
• PsycINFO also includes the metadata records for the PsycArticles and PsycBooks databases:
  • Over 5000 metadata records were added to the PsycArticles database, bringing the total number of records to 219,624.
  • Approximately 510 APA book and chapter records were added to PsycBooks.    At the end of the year, PsycBooks contained 72,128 book and chapter records.
• The PsycTests database grew by 4,057 new records, totaling more than 62,900 records by the end of the year.   Nearly 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 1200 such archival records were added to PsycExtra in 2020.

APA PsycInfo is the trusted, authoritative abstracting and indexing service in the behavioral and social sciences featuring both global and multidisciplinary content. In 2020, APA released a new research notification service for researchers, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide a unique personalization experience. As a researcher engages with the content in notifications, the service adapts to the researcher’s preferences, resulting in an experience tailored to individual research interests and needs. Research notifications are provided via email on a weekly basis with content selected from journals, dissertations, preprints, and conferences. This new service supports the research process and brings APA PsycInfo deeper into the workflow of researchers and faculty, allowing for greater discoverability of the latest scientific research.

APA PsycNet, the platform designed to deliver APA's scholarly content to members and institutional subscribers, hosts more than 45 million user sessions per year. In 2020, APA PsycNet developed an effective access solution to create better user experience with this traffic flow. To ensure that subscribers to APA research databases on different vendor platforms do not hit a paywall when they follow links to APA articles and books from social media, Google Scholar, or PubMed, the new “Get access” option allows users to find out whether they have entitlements through their institution or an individual subscription. This authentication method starts with institutional IP validation to identify subscribers.
If an incoming IP is mapped to an existing APA account on any vendor platform, users receive an immediate PDF download link to the requested article or book chapter. If the incoming IP cannot be verified, users are directed to check entitlements with their institutional email. Authenticated users receive a link to the requested article or chapter PDF by email. More than half a million download links to APA articles and book chapters have been issued to subscribers since the release of this authentication method in May 2020. Getting access to APA content via IP validation or institutional email is another step in the evolution of the “no-barrier” access options for subscribers.

Academic Writer, APA's complete digital environment for scholarly writing, continued to evolve in the higher education market. All customer accounts were upgraded with the guidelines from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), including a new annotated bibliography tool. To better serve adopting instructors, more features were added to support product use through a learning management system (LMS). For example, new summative assessments were released to gauge student mastery of APA Style concepts. In addition, the past year saw the addition of features to help students become more effective and more confident writers. These included grammar checking capabilities and the ability to tag and organize references. Building on this trend, 2021 will focus on functionality to support students and further enhance their scholarly writing skills.

PsycLearn is an online course resource designed to immerse students into the content using interactive activities, instant feedback, and visualization tools that cannot be replicated in the flat format of a textbook. It is built in such a way to provide focused, chunked content that is easily consumable in an electronic format, since students consume content much differently in this electronic age.  It provides a personalized experience to ensure that highly successful students can easily navigate through the content without being bogged down with a lot of review material, and students who need more help will be offered an alternative path that provides that review.  Finally, it was designed to enrich the instructor experience by providing tracking tools allowing them to track the progress of students through the course and identify at-risk students via an instructor dashboard.

PsycLearn: Research Methods was the first course resource provided to instructors for use in their classes.  Version 1.4 was launched in August of 2020.  There were three primary points of focus to this update. The first was to increase the level of ADA compliancy.  We concentrated on the interactive components to ensure there was a keyboard activated experience available for those who are physically disabled, and inserted downloadable transcripts enabling screen readers for the visually impaired.  The second was to revise relevant content to reflect APA Style Manual 7e changes.  This was particularly important for Research Methods which covers content such as citing references and reporting research.  The third was to enable a randomization feature in all summative assessments to discourage student cheating.

Sales and the numbers of adoptions have been encouraging and PsycLearn has been particularly valuable to instructors now teaching their course online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  At the end of 2020, PsycLearn: Research Methods had over 4,000 users at 41 institutions.  We anticipate that these numbers will be at least four times higher next year due to large-enrollment classes starting in the Spring 2021 semester. Notable adoptions include the University of Maryland Baltimore County and large state systems such as the University of California and California State University.

PsycLearn: Introduction to Social Psychology was the second course resource provided to instructors for use in their classes. A beta test version was launched in January 2020 with 8 modules available to test for Spring and Summer sessions. The full version was launched in August of 2020 with 12 complete modules. This version also included updated content to reflect APA Style Manual 7e. During the Fall 2020 semester, two institutions piloted, and one institution adopted PsycLearn: Introduction to Social Psychology. In 2020, over 500 students benefited from this latest PsycLearn product.