Journals > Advances in Psychological Science Open > Advances in Psychological Science Open Submission Guidelines

Advances in Psychological Science Open Submission Guidelines

Updated July 14, 2025


Advances in Psychological Science Open (APSO) welcomes submissions that communicate advances in psychological science that arise specifically from interdisciplinary working. APSO welcomes work from across the broad field of psychological science and related disciplines—including Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, sociology, computer science, engineering, law, politics, and more. Submissions that push scientific and methodological boundaries are encouraged, provided that they would be relevant and of interest to a broad readership.

The journal publishes a range of article types—empirical, theoretical, conceptual, and technical advances. As a general audience journal that aims to connect psychological science with adjacent fields, APSO articles must be written in an accessible style that is understandable by research scientists, not just psychological scientists.

Please see the most recent editorial for more information.

Manuscript Submission

APSO aims to offer a flexible platform to showcase your work in the best way possible and make submissions quick and easy for authors. To facilitate this, most formatting requirements will be managed at the final stages of the publication process.

Is APSO the right outlet for your work?
To evaluate whether your manuscript would be a good fit for APSO, we recommend that you read the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Rachael Jack’s interview in the APS Observer.

Pre-submission inquiries
If you think your manuscript is a good fit for APSO, we encourage you to send a pre-submission email inquiry to the Editor-in-Chief for feedback. Please send a 1–2 paragraph summary of the work, explaining how it fits the journal’s remit, to [email protected]. The Editor-in-Chief may involve members of the editorial board to respond to your inquiry. Though the editorial team may provide inputs and suggestions on the manuscript prior to submission, this does not guarantee that it will be deemed appropriate for APSO or that it will eventually be accepted for publication. Pre-submission inquiries are not mandatory, but very much encouraged.

Submission
If you do decide to submit a manuscript to APSO, please consider which Article Type would best fit, the Minimum Submission Requirements, and the APS Publications Committees’ latest editorial policies.  

Article types
APSO accepts manuscripts that report empirical, theoretical, conceptual and technical advances in psychological science based on interdisciplinary work. APSO offers the following formats:

  • Empirical—reporting results of an empirical nature
  • Conceptual—highlighting theoretical and epistemological issues
  • Technical—showcasing new technologies; can be accompanied by video tutorials
  • Review—timely perspectives on the development and future of psychological science
    • Dialogue option—for all above article types, authors can elect to open their paper to commentaries from selected members of the community; this can take a written and verbal format (e.g. online discussion event or at APS Convention)
  • Commentaries—unsolicited commentaries from the community on any article type; original authors have right of response. Format can take Dialogue Option.
  • Registered Reports—empirical research protocols peer-reviewed before data is collected


Minimum submission requirements
Submissions should follow the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) for references, abbreviations, and symbols. After acceptance, authors will need to provide a high-quality version of each figure for production purposes. Once you have decided which Article Type is best suited to your work, please ensure that your manuscript meets the following minimal criteria:

  • Written in standard English (any kind)
  • Includes the following:
    • Title page with author names and affiliations, as well as contact information for the corresponding author
    • Abstract
    • Keywords
    • Funding information
    • Potential conflicts of interest
    • Main text
    • References
  • For Empirical Articles, the main text must include the following:
    • Abstract
    • Background/introduction outlining the state-of-the-art
    • Methods detailing the approach taken
    • Results, including statistical details such as effect sizes for quantitative work
    • Discussion
    • Conclusions
    • Link to open science data repository (unless data cannot be shared)
  • All articles can be any length, though we strongly encourage conciseness and the use of accessible language

Optional manuscript features

APSO aims to provide a flexible platform to showcase your work in the best way possible. To enable this, manuscripts of any article type may also include:

  • Figures, tables and/or videos in the main text
  • Supplementary material—including text, figures, tables, videos, or data
  • Additional sections (e.g. Acknowledgements)
  • Any other features that would enhance the presentation and accessibility of your work. If in doubt, please contact the editorial office at [email protected].

Submission to journal
Once your manuscript is ready for submission, please submit it through the APSO submission website, https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/apso.

During submission
Editor and reviewer recommendations: Please recommend at least one Action Editor to handle your manuscript and at least three reviewers, including a brief justification for each recommendation.

All recommendations must exclude all authors’ former mentors and mentees, colleagues at the same institution or university, current or recent (within the past four years) collaborators, family members or close personal relationships, and anyone else who would reasonably be perceived as having a conflict of interest with any of the authors.

Authors may also list any opposed reviewers, including a brief justification for each. In the event that the manuscript is sent for external review, the handling Action Editor will consider all recommendations but cannot guarantee that they will be honored.

Manuscript Review Process

Initial screening. Once you have submitted your manuscript, the APS editorial team will conduct an initial screen to ensure that it meets the Minimum Submission Requirements. If the manuscript does not pass initial screening, it will be sent back to the corresponding authors to revise it accordingly. If the manuscript does pass initial screening, it will be sent to the Editor-in-Chief for initial evaluation.

Internal evaluation. All manuscripts passing initial screening will be evaluated internally by the Editor-in-Chief and a suitable Action Editor. Together, they will determine whether the manuscript contents fit the scope of APSO. Given the interdisciplinary focus of the journal, more than one Action Editor may be involved in the internal evaluation.

If all readers decide that the manuscript is unlikely to be competitive for publication in APSO, the manuscript is rejected without review (“desk rejected”). Some common reasons for desk rejection include narrow scope, poor writing, insufficient methodological rigor, a mismatch between the research aims and the research design, a mismatch between the empirical results and the conclusions, and high risk of statistical inference error (e.g., false positive or false negative, inflated effect size estimate).

If at least one reader evaluates the manuscript as having a reasonable likelihood of ultimately being accepted for publication in the journal, then the manuscript progresses to external review.

Once the initial evaluation is complete, the corresponding authors are notified by e-mail that their manuscript has either been (a) rejected after internal editorial review or (b) sent to outside experts for external review.

Manuscripts rejected following internal evaluation will not be reconsidered except in rare circumstances (see the APS appeals policy).

External review. All manuscript passing internal evaluation will be assigned to a suitable Action Editor by the Editor-in-Chief.

The handling Action Editor is responsible for familiarizing themselves with the manuscript, selecting suitable expert reviewers, overseeing the review process, and making a final decision, including writing subsequent decision letters (accept, reject, or revise and resubmit).

The Action Editor will send the manuscript to two or more external experts for peer review. Action Editors may include a domain-specific Editorial Board member, plus—if required—a Statistics, Transparency, and Rigor (STAR) reviewer to evaluate the rigor of the statistical analyses.

Before conducting their review, reviewers are asked to consult the Guidelines for Reviewers. This includes evaluating, as appropriate to their expertise, the

  • significance of the advance
  • nature and extent of the interdisciplinary work
  • experimental rigor, and
  • accessibility of the article to a broad, interdisciplinary audience.


Once the Action Editor has received all reviews, they will send their decision letter (accept, reject, or revise and resubmit—major or minor) to the corresponding authors.

Rejected manuscripts: Manuscripts rejected following external review will not be reconsidered except in rare circumstances (see the APS appeals policy).

Revise & resubmit: Manuscripts requiring major revision are expected to be resubmitted within 4 months of the decision letter being sent to the corresponding authors. Manuscripts requiring minor revision are expected to be resubmitted within 4 weeks of the decision letter being sent. Manuscripts requiring revision may be sent to the original reviewers or to additional reviewers should the Action Editor need more guidance. The Action Editor may also act on the revision without further external review.

Accepted for publication: Manuscripts deemed acceptable for publication will progress to the production stage.

Other APS Journals

APSO does not compete directly with other APS journals, including Psychological Science, Clinical Psychological Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. The journals vary in terms of domain and manuscript formats.

Authors may submit manuscripts to APSO that have been previously rejected from a different APS journal; in such cases, the Editor-in-Chief and Action Editor(s) will be able to access editorial materials related to the previous submission, including editor comments, external reviews, and the editorial decision letter. Manuscripts rejected by another APS journal on the grounds of quality (e.g., flaws in methodology, data, or concept) are not eligible for consideration by APSO.

Publishing model

APSO is an open access journal, which means that all articles and related content are freely and publicly available on the journal’s website; all articles are published under a Creative Commons license. Thus, APSO is an online-only journal: print issues will not be produced, and articles will be published online immediately after completion of the copyediting and production process.

Under a traditional publishing model, the costs of production largely are covered by subscription fees paid to the publisher by individuals and university libraries. Open access means that libraries will not pay subscription costs for APSO. To offset the costs of production and publication, authors will be charged an Article Processing Charge (APC) of $2500 (APS members will receive a 25% discount) after acceptance of their paper. This fee does not reflect the actual costs of production to APS, which are substantially higher. APS subsidizes those additional costs in order to keep the APC charge as low as possible for authors. During submission, authors will be asked to acknowledge that they understand the article will be subject to an APC should it be accepted for publication. The APC will be discounted or waived for authors who can demonstrate that they lack funding from their institution, grants, or other sources to pay it (APSO APC Waivers Policy). You will not be required to pay using personal funds, but we do encourage you to explore possible sources of funding that might be available before applying for a waiver. To apply for a waiver, please send an inquiry to [email protected].

APC charges and waiver requests are processed by APS staff after acceptance of an article; the editorial team is not involved in the process—editors and reviewers are blind to all aspects of the processing of article charges. Nothing about the journal’s standards, rigorous submission, review, and editing processes is affected by it being an open access publishing outlet.

Preprints and Embargoes

Posting of a manuscript to a preprint archive prior to submission is permitted by APSO. Such preprints should be disclosed explicitly in the submitted manuscript. Similarly, content posted originally to a blog or other online site or appearing in a conference proceeding may be rewritten as a manuscript submission for APSO, provided that the manuscript discloses and cites the earlier version and adheres to all other submission guidelines.

APS does not have media embargoes for any of its publications. However, for submissions such as RRRs, in which the final result involves a meta-analysis across many replication studies, results from individual studies should not be made available until the complete manuscript is publicly available. That policy prevents piecemeal release of results that could bias ongoing studies in the project and also allows for a commentary or response from the original author to be included alongside the complete set of results.

Ready to submit your manuscript? Access the submission portal at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/apso.