What the Heck is Post-Positivism?

If you are someone who knows a lot about philosophy of science (or pretends to), then this post is not for you. Stop reading now, because you will just get mad at my oversimplistic explanations. You may even say I am “wrong.” Guess what, this post is not for you, so I don’t care[1].

This post is for the many, many, students and professors of psychology who have essentially zero working knowledge of philosophy of science. If you hear someone say, “yeah, but that is such a post-positivistic approach” or “from a critical perspective we think about that quite differently,” and are wondering what the heck those people are talking about, then this is for you. That’s all you will get here, the “heck” without any of the elaboration or nuance. I find it astonishing and concerning that we do not even ensure heck-level training in these issues among our undergraduate students, let alone our graduate students. But so it goes.

Philosophy of science is a multi-layered labyrinth of schools of thought, terms, and debates, and I have no intention of covering anywhere near all of it here. Rather, I focus on a constrained set of what are often referred to as paradigms, meta-theoretical orientations, or even sometimes just philosophies of science: positivism, post-positivism, constructivism, and criticalism[2]. These four paradigms serve as broad meta-theoretical orientations that correspond with particular philosophies of science (see, all three terms are useful!).  

Just about every scholar in psychology is situated within one of these four paradigms, whether they know it or not. This is one of the reasons this issue is so important: most don’t actually seem to know that they are approaching their research and teaching from a particular philosophy of science. But just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean that it is not there, lurking in the background, having an influence over your approach to science. Additionally, for some, conflict with colleagues, systems, or even within their own beliefs can be traced back to conflicting underlying paradigms. Although this knowledge does not solve the conflict, it does provide better direction for potential resolution.

Yeah so anyway, what the heck is post-positivism? I will contrast the four approaches along four commonly-used “ologies”: ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. Yes, yes, more terms that you may need to learn. Depending on your familiarity with them, you will have at most eight terms to learn (four paradigms by four ologies)—eight. That is within 7 +/- 2, so you should be good[3].

Briefly, ontology relates to the nature of what can be known (truth/reality), epistemology to the relationship between what can be known and the person doing the knowing, axiology to the role of values and beliefs in the knowledge-generating process, and methodology to the process through which knowledge is acquired.

There is near complete non-overlap in the nature of these four ologies across the four paradigms[4]. Rather than bore you further with my prose, I will bore you with a table:

Ok great, so what to do with all of this information? First, it would be a useful exercise to locate yourself in the table (your present and/or past selves). Perhaps you align perfectly with one of the paradigms; if you work in “mainstream psychology,” then chances are high that you align pretty well with the positivistic or post-positivistic paradigms. This is how “the field” tends to like to position itself, and most prestigious institutions, journals, and funding bodies are squarely planted within these approaches.

If, on the other hand, you do not identify much with mainstream psychology and feel like you tend to do things a little differently, you are probably aligned with the constructivist paradigm, and if you really feel like your approach is out there, and take issues of societal power/oppression/privilege seriously in your work, you are probably aligned with the critical paradigm.

But most likely if you feel you are out of the mainstream, you do not actually align perfectly with constructivism or criticalism, but rather blend a little bit from more than one paradigm. This could especially be the case if your approach has changed over the years. This tension of paradigms is well explained by the fact that psychology is dominated by positivism/post-positivism, but the subject matter, and how people want to study it, lends itself to all four paradigms. And because very few of us are actually educated on these matters, we have had no opportunity to sort it all out.

Some of these conflicts are evident in contemporary discourse around the role of race and racism in psychology (and science more broadly). In particular, they reflect disagreements about the place of axiology within our field. From a mainstream positivistic/post-positivistic perspective, we can and should make every effort to separate our values from our work. When people say to judge individuals by their scientific contributions and not their personal beliefs or character, they are arguing from a positivistic/post-positivistic perspective. Calls for the field to be explicitly anti-racist, on the other hand, are calls to not only inject values into the scientific process, but to surface the role of racist values and beliefs that have been there all along. These are calls to bring a critical paradigm to the field, and therefore it is no surprise that many/most in the field become uncomfortable with such a call.

So yeah, these paradigms matter. They matter for understanding not only what we do, but also for how we might want to change. A proposal for an anti-racist psychology that situates itself firmly within a positivistic/post-positivistic paradigm is likely to be much more well-received than one situated within a critical paradigm. But is doing so desirable or even possible? That is a topic for another day.

Thanks, as always, to Kate McLean for ensuring this post was (reasonably) coherent. This post is essay no. 8 in the series, “I Got a Lot of Problems with Psychology.”

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[1] Really, I don’t care, so find some other clouds to yell at.

[2] A reviewer of a paper once did not like me using “criticalism” because this paradigm is more commonly known as “critical theory.” I prefer the “ism” form to stay parallel with the other paradigms and, like most psychologists, I would prefer not to get into a serious discussion of what constitutes a “theory.”

[3] Yes, memory people, I understand that this is not how it works.

[4] It is the case that quantitative research is often considered positivistic/post-positivistic and qualitative research considered constructivist. I cannot get into it here, but this is false. Methodologies tend to align with paradigms in practice, but are not essential to them.

A Workflow for Dealing with the Dread of Revising and Resubmitting Manuscripts

(Note: This post was updated on 8/5/20, 10:00pm CDT, in response to helpful comments from Sanjay Srivastava, Bobbie Spellman, Jennifer Pfeifer, and Fred Oswald). 

You find a message in your inbox with the subject “Development Psychology - Decision on Manuscript ID 2020-8561” or the like. You anxiously open the email, simultaneously reading too slowly and too quickly while searching the editor’s terse prose for keywords that signal your fate: reject, accept, revise, resubmit. You finally exhale with glee upon determining that you have been invited to revise and resubmit. You read the editor’s comments, which seldom provide anything helpful at all, and then begin reading the reviewer comments. Quickly you wonder if they read your article very carefully, and soon you wonder if they read it at all. And who is this person, and do they even know this area of research? How could Reviewer 2 be so off-base? You angrily forward the message to your co-authors to share the “good news,” indicating that you will follow-up with a plan before long. Your day is shot as you ruminate on the stupidity of the reviewers (not just the comments, but the entire existence of the reviewers) and the futility of possibly addressing their comments. A few days pass—maybe a week—and you re-read the decision letter. You realize that the reviewers actually made some important and thoughtful points, and the revisions will not be so bad after all. With some hard work the paper will get published. All you have to do is start addressing the comments. No problem. What was the deadline again? You have plenty of time to work on that later.

I wrote the above in the second person, but I was describing my reaction to every revise-and-resubmit I have ever received. My guess is that many of you respond in the same way. These are the seven universal stages of the revise and resubmit[1]: Anxiety, Anticipation, Elation, Confusion, Anger, Acceptance, and Dread.

That is the emotional process that we all go through, and all should go through—there is nothing wrong with it and I am not interested in altering it. My aim here is to outline a workflow that addresses the Dread stage: how to make progress on revising a manuscript when you are overwhelmed by the comments and necessary revisions? I have found this method to be highly effective, and those I have shared it with have agreed, so I figured I would write it up.

The main goal of this approach is to reduce feeling overwhelmed by the necessary work through breaking down the tasks bit by bit and clearly marking the progress made. A secondary outcome of this approach is that it is efficient, as you prepare the cover letter at the same time as you make the revisions, rather than treating the two as separate tasks.

There are seven steps[2] to this process:

Step 1: Copy and paste the full letter into a new document. I like to use Google Docs because it facilitates sharing with co-authors, but I also know that sharing can be accomplished in many different ways. Use whatever you want, this is not important. Just create a new document.

Step 2: Delete all extraneous information unrelated to the revision. Most of what is included in the Editor’s portion of the letter is stock language that has no relevance to what you need to do. Delete this. Reviewers sometimes provide summaries of your paper, or make other general comments that do not have implications for the revision. Delete these. If there is no action to be taken, then it should not be in this document. That said, it can be strategic to leave praise from the reviewers in the letter to remind the editor of the value of the paper. In such cases, your response can be a brief "thank you."

Step 3: Parse the letter into substantive comments. Make a new paragraph for each substantive comment made by the reviewers, with spaces in between. Sometimes reviewers make multiple different points in the same paragraph, so it is good to separate these into distinct paragraphs. Each chunk represents an action item. It can be helpful to number these comments, even if the reviewers did not do so, for ease of referencing throughout the letter (e.g., "As stated in the response to Reviewer 5, Comment 57....").

Oof, lots to do here!

Step 4: Mark all of these comments in bold and highlight them in yellow (or whatever color you like). The bold indicates that these are editors/reviewer comments (vs. your own) and the yellow indicates that the comments have not been addressed. 

Step 5: Make notes. Underneath each comment write some quick notes about how to handle the issue, using all caps or some other method to clearly signify that these are notes. These comments should be un-bolded and un-highlighted. Focus these notes on whether you will or will not revise, which section of the paper needs to be revised, and who on the team should handle the task. I also use these notes to express frustration and anger, because I find that helps. Maybe that is just me! You do you. As you make your notes about how to proceed, remember you do not have to make all of the requested changes--in fact, editors do not expect you to do so. Sometimes reviewers make mistakes or provide just plain bad advice. In such cases, provide a reasonable justification for why you are not making the change. 

Step 6. Start small. Start the revision process in this document, which will become the cover letter you submit with the revision. Go through and find the super easy stuff to take care of. You will always have a reviewer who loves to point out typos[3] or supposed violations of APA Style[4]. Take care of these first. They take almost no brain power and will instill a sense of progress. Below the reviewer comment, first replace your all-caps notes with a normal written response of what you did, THEN go into the manuscript and make the associated change. This will be a general principle to follow: change the cover letter document first, then the manuscript. Although this may seem backwards, developing your rationale for the change can help you think through how to actually make the change. This is a principle, however, not a law, so sometimes you will make the change in the manuscript and then summarize it in the letter. When responding, include the page numbers where readers can find the changes, and consider quoting the exact text of the change when relevant. 

Look at that progress!

Step 7: Un-highlight the reviewer comment to indicate that the issue has been resolved. This is the best part of the approach. As you take care of reviewer comments you can clearly see what has been done and what remains to be done. As you progress, the document becomes less and less yellow. Taking care of all of the easy changes will lead to a bunch of un-yellowing. Oftentimes reviewers will bloviate about a banal point—take care of this quickly and get yourself a massive wall of un-yellow. Multiple reviewers often make the same point. Make notes about the response the first time the point is raised, then write “see response to Reviewer 1” and go ahead and un-yellow. You make progress without doing any work at all, and THAT, my friends, is living the dream. 

Ah, the best

Before long, all of the yellow highlighting will be gone and you will be finished. As noted, a bonus of using an approach like this is that the cover letter is finished when the revision is finished. They are part of the same process. Slap some greetings and gratitudes at the beginning and then steel yourself for the fresh hell of navigating the online submission portal.

Kind, to the point, and no begging

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[1] To be clear, I don’t believe in stages.

[2] Steps are not stages, so they are totally fine

[3] Reviewers, don’t do this.

[4] Don’t do this either.

Managing Preprints across the Publication Pipeline

(Note. This post was updated 05/10/20 to include the section, Be clear about the publication status)

The @PsyArXivBot Twitter account tweets out preprints posted to PsyArXiv (https://psyarxiv.com/), an OSF-hosted preprint server focused on psychological science. The bot was quiet for about 10 days in mid-April, and manual searches on the PsyArXiv site were not turning up new preprints. Something was wrong with the system, which was disruptive for a project I am working on, but more than that it brought a simple fact into stark relief: I have become dependent on preprints.

I felt like I was being shut out from learning about the latest research. In recent years I have switched from primarily learning about new articles via journal table of contents alerts to primarily learning about new articles via preprint servers. A large majority of papers of interest that I see in journals, or that colleagues send to me, I had read many months earlier as preprints. At the same time, for the last several years I have posted just about all of my own papers as preprints, and have (slowly) been posting older articles of mine on preprint servers. Preprints have really changed the way I interact with the scientific literature, and more simply, how I practice science.

But I realize that is not the case for everybody. Some of you reading this may not even know what I mean by this word preprint. Others don’t really know how to use them, as authors or as readers. Still others think they know how to use them, but don’t really follow best practices. This post is intended to be useful for all comers.

Preprints have become increasingly popular across the sciences (Abdill & Blekhman, 2019; Lin, 2018), and the COVID-19 pandemic has not only resulted in an uptick in use, but also heightened discussion of their benefits and potential liabilities (see this Nature Biotechnology editorial). There are many useful articles that elaborate on the myriad reasons why researchers should post preprints (e.g., Bourne et al., 2017; Publons, 2018; Sarabipour et al., 2019; Soderberg et al., 2020; Speidel, 2018). Accordingly, I will not rehash the motivational arguments. Rather, my intention here is to provide some practical advice on how to manage preprints across the publication pipeline. I focus on PsyArXiv, but most of my suggestions apply equally to other preprint servers.

First, a note on terminology. The term “preprints” traditionally referred to versions of manuscripts that were publicly posted or circulated prior to submission to a journal for peer review, with the primary purpose being to receive helpful comments and catch errors prior to submission. Preprints can also refer to manuscripts that are currently under review, and sometimes to author-formatted versions of manuscripts that have been accepted for publication. This latter category is more accurately referred to as “post-prints” or more colloquially as an “open-access (OA) version,” because preprint servers are not protected by paywalls. These technicalities aside, preprints have come to mean any document that is posted on a preprint server, and thus the term alone does not tell you much about the status of the paper (i.e., draft, under review, accepted). These variations also suggest that authors can make use of preprints across the publication pipeline.  

Posting a Preprint Prior to Submission to a Journal

Posting a preprint and circulating it for comment is a great way to receive critical feedback prior to submission. There is some debate about what shape the manuscript should be in when posted for feedback. Some researchers post complete drafts that have not been read by anyone outside of the authorship team, whereas others wait until they have a solid version that has been vetted by trusted colleagues prior to sending it out to the world. Not only do some vary in these practices, but they also vary in their endorsement of prescriptive norms about what researchers ought to do.

I recommend that you block out that noise; when to post a preprint is up to individual preferences and may depend on the paper in question. Do whatever feels right to you and works best for your workflow. Regardless of your view, if you post a preprint you should be ready and willing to receive comments, including critical ones. That said, the vast majority of preprints are posted silently in the night, never to be thought about again.

A common worry about posting a preprint prior to and/or during submission to a journal is that a journal will consider the preprint as a “published” version of the paper and thus ineligible for submission. For the majority of journals this is not the case. However, before posting a preprint you should absolutely consult Sherpa/RoMEO, which has a simple journal search function to determine what is permissible.

Posting a Preprint Upon to Submission to a Journal

An alternative approach is to post a preprint version of your manuscript at the same time as you submit to a journal. PsyArXiv now has a pilot program where authors can submit their preprints to certain APA journals, thereby integrating the posting and submitting steps.

Posting a preprint upon submission to a journal can still yield helpful comments and feedback that can be integrated during the revision process, but posting at this phase is a bit more focused on dissemination. The journal review process is slow, and posting the preprint version is one way to get work out more quickly. Again, you would be wise to consult Sherpa/RoMEO to see what is permissible by the journal.

Posting a Preprint (Post-print) Upon Acceptance to a Journal

Posting versions of accepted articles has many benefits, most notably that they allow for quicker dissemination and wider access. Be sure to check Sherpa/RoMEO before doing so, but just about every journal permits posting of author-formatted versions of articles (i.e., the final version created using your word-processing software), whereas very few will allow public posting of publisher-formatted versions (i.e., the final typeset version).

Uploading a post-print version of a book chapter is an excellent way to increase access. Book chapters are notoriously difficult to access, which is one of the reasons they are often maligned, but in my view the unconstrained format often leads to more interesting and stimulating reads. Again, you will want to check the contract to be sure that you are legally permitted to post an author-formatted version, but I have found that in nearly all cases it is allowed. So post your chapters and let your wild ideas run free!

Suggestions for Managing Preprints across the Publication Pipeline

Keep it current - Regardless of when you first post a preprint, it is good practice to post a new versions with every substantive update—as new drafts are prepared, following a revision resubmitted to a journal, upon acceptance, etc. Preprints are easily editable, so you can be sure that the most current version is always available. Moreover, preprint servers have version control built in, so the earlier versions remain available and preserve the history of the paper.

Put the date on it – The version date of the manuscript should always be included on the cover page. This is especially important if you will be updating the preprint across the publication pipeline. One potential downside of updating preprints as the paper develops is that there could be multiple versions floating out there in the world. Someone sees a preprint, downloads and saves it to their reference library (side note, use Zotero), and does not keep up with how the paper has been updated. There is little that authors can do to control this problem, but including the version date on the cover page would allow readers to know what version they are working with.

 

Add the DOI for the published version – Preprints are assigned their own DOI (Digital Object Identifier) upon posting, and this DOI is maintained across updates. Once the article is published, however, a new DOI will be assigned by the publisher and associated with the published version. PsyArXiv includes a field labeled “Peer-reviewed Publication DOI” where this information can be entered. Taking this small step once the paper is published helps to keep the research record organized.

  

Be clear about the publication status - There is much hand-wringing about the possibility of the media reporting on preprints that have yet to be peer-reviewed. Whereas I agree this could be a problem, the argument often implicitly suggests that peer-reviewed research can be trusted, which is clearly not the case. Nevertheless, it is good practice to have a clear statement about the publication status on the title page of the preprint. This can be changed at the same time as uploading an updated version, changing the date, etc: "Not yet submitted for publication," "Submitted for publication," "Re-Submitted for Publication," and "Published (including full citation)," are simple statements that can be added that increase transparency about the status of the work. 

Consider the preprint file name – I have come across preprints on PsyArXiv with file names such as “final draft.docx” or “dreaded.paper.FINAL.ACTUAL.REAL-ms-kcm-comments-FINAL.pdf.” These are not good file names. In general, you and you lab should have clear file naming conventions for all files. For preprints, this could include the first author last name, version date, and something brief but informative about the substance of the paper (e.g., Syed&Fish,2018-EriksonRace-05.07.20.pdf). Not long ago each version of the preprint on PsyArXiv was required to have the same file name, but this is no longer the case, so you should definitely embed the date in the file name.

Merge citations in Google Scholar – One of the advantages of preprints is getting the work out more quickly so that it can be of use to other scholars. This means that it could potentially be cited more quickly initially and gather more citations in the long run (Fraser et al., 2019), which can be of particular interest to graduate students and early career researchers. However, this also means that you will potentially have two sets of citations, one for the preprint and one for the published version. Thankfully this is easily managed. PsyArXiv is indexed by Google Scholar, so both versions should appear in your profile. Follow this guide to merge the two citations together.

Make a #prettypreprint – Some authors do not enjoy the unsightly appearance of a document created using default settings in word-processing software. Brenton Wiernik has created a set of templates for type-setting preprints to make them look similar to the layout used by major publishers (https://osf.io/hsv6a/). This is particularly useful for articles that have been accepted for publication, as the author-formatted version will look very similar to the publisher-formatted version, but will not violate copyright law. To be honest, I have been too lazy to do this myself, but you should definitely give it a try. If you do, be sure to cite Brenton for his work (the OSF page has a DOI) and include the #prettypreprint hashtag if sharing the paper on Twitter.

There are of course many other issues to consider, but following these suggestions will make effective use of preprints. Go post a paper RIGHT NOW!

The Content of My Peer Reviews Did Not Change Once I Started Signing Them

I am a strong proponent of signed reviews, the practice of reviewers disclosing their identities by including their names in their peer reviews. I have explained my reasoning in a previous blog post and editorial when discussing open science practices at Emerging Adulthood. It is my personal opinion that any potential costs associated with the practice are outweighed by the benefits afforded through openness and transparency. People seem quick to cite the potential for retaliation, especially for early career scholars and those from under-represented communities. I am honestly confused by this response because it a) assumes the worst of our colleagues and b) as Hilda Bastian nicely articulated, if indeed there are instance of retaliation then as a community we should address the perpetrators directly rather than cower in fear. Moreover, masked review does not prevent retaliation, as authors may be certain they know who the reviewers are and may treat them accordingly, even though they may be wrong. Signing reviews brings these dynamics all into the open.

All of that said, my feelings and beliefs are likely to be of little interest to most people. Rather, what we all want are some data that speak to the issue. There have been some studies on the topic, but they are all limited in some way. For example, van Sambeek and Lakens (2020) found that authors were more likely to sign their reviews when making positive recommendations (accept/minor revisions) compared with negative recommendations. The majority of the data, however, came from manuscripts that were ultimately published, and thus their analyses were based on a biased sample. Moreover, they only examined the recommendation made by the editor or the reviewers, and not the content of the reviews. In a self-report survey study, Lynam et al. (2019) found that respondents believed that signing their reviews would lead to reviews that are less critical, more civil, and take longer to complete, all with rather small effects.

These studies collectively rely on self-report, a biased sample of reviews, or incomplete information about the content of the reviews. To address these limitations, I dug into my own archives to analyze the content of my reviews. Since my first peer review in 2008 I have kept a word file of every review I have completed. I am sure that I am missing some, but any missing reviews would not be due to any kind of systematic bias, rather just simple lack of organization. Whereas of course there are many limitations to analyzing reviews from a single person, there are also many benefits. Indeed, this analysis is a direct within-person behavioral test of the patterns reported by Lynam et al.

My archive includes 203 reviews completed between 2008 and 2019. I started signing my reviews in 2015, which resulted in 147 unsigned review and 56 signed reviews. I have fewer signed reviews because around the time I started signing is also when I became an Associate Editor and then Editor, and thus conducted a smaller number of ad-hoc reviews for other journals. My editorial letters are not included in this analysis, as those are a different beast altogether.

I subjected my reviews to the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to analyze the content of my reviews, and whether the content changed as a function of whether or not I signed the reviews. My version of LIWC is on the older side, so it is based on the 2007 dictionary. The data file includes everything from the dictionary, although clearly some features are more relevant than others, so I do not describe all of the data here. I only examine four features of the reviews that I thought were most relevant: word count, positive emotion words, negative emotion words, and cognitive mechanism words. The full LIWC results, R code, and the LIWC 2007 dictionary are freely available at osf.io/uf63k/. The raw reviews are not included in that data file since some people might feel that is a violation of privacy and the peer review process, but I have an identical file that includes the text of the reviews, which I am happy to send upon request.

I was interested in two questions:

Did signing my reviews lead to a change in the content of the reviews?

The answer is a pretty clear no. There were no differences between unsigned and signed reviews in terms of the length of my reviews (t = 0.41, p = .68), positive emotion words (t = -0.96, p = .33), negative emotion words (t = 1.07, p = .29), or cognitive mechanism words (t = -0.49, p = .62). These non-differences are clear in the violin plots:

It is worth noting, I think, that the frequency of positive emotion words is higher than the frequency of negative emotion words.

Signing my reviews is confounded with time; I started signing at a specific time and have signed almost every review since, with the exception of a couple I did not sign when I co-reviewed with a student. Thus, in many ways not-signed/signed is a binary version of what is a potentially interesting continuous variable: time.

Did the content of my reviews change over time?

The answer here is also a pretty clear no. For the most part. There was a negative correlation between time and word count (r = -.22, p = .002), indicating my reviews have gotten a little shorter over time. This is consistent with oft-quoted remark that length of review is negatively correlated with time in the field. However, looking at the scatterplot below shows that the association is quite noisy. The correlations between time and positive emotion words (r = .05, p = .45), negative emotion words (r = .002, p = .98), and cognitive mechanism words (r = .05, p = .48) were all very small.

So there you have it. Signing my reviews did not seem to change the content much, at least with respect to these few indicators that I examined. Yes, I could have analyzed more data, or analyzed these data more appropriately, but I did this work while avoiding several other more pressing tasks so was not looking to put in maximal effort. The data are available, dear reader, so have at it!

No More “Free Work” for Scientific Societies That Do Not Share My Values

Time is precious, so of course I have to be judicious about when and for whom I do “free work,” i.e. uncompensated activities that fall outside my specific job duties. I have historically devoted my free work time to advance two major goals: 1) enhancing the diversity of researchers and research topics in psychological science and 2) promoting open, transparent, and reproducible science. I have done this because diversity and open science are the two most central scientific values I hold.

The majority of my free work comes about in the context of professional societies. I have been very intentional about the societies with which I associate, choosing only ones that I feel align with my personal and scientific values. For example, I have long shunned the American Psychological Association (APA) because of their involvement with the U.S. Government’s detainee torture program, their aggressive issuing of take-down notices for researchers posting APA-published articles, and the myriad ways in which they unethically treat students (e.g., not allowing them voting rights, the structure of accredited programs that requires off-site internships), among many other reasons. I also have not been a member of the largest organization in my subfield, the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD), for nearly 10 years. My move away from SRCD was initially because I did not perceive them to value diversity in the field, and was subsequently reinforced by their tepid response to the detention and treatment of migrant children in the U.S. and their explicitly antagonistic views on open science. I am frequently asked to serve on committees or work on projects for both APA and SRCD, despite not being members of either, and always decline while providing the explanation that the societies do not share my values. I will not engage in free work for these societies.

This is all a long preface to say that I will no longer do any free work for the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA), a society for which I have been an extremely active member since joining in 2003. I have been to every meeting since 2004, have served on committees, chaired review panels, given countless presentations, and met many great friends and colleagues through the society. I owe much of my professional existence to SRA, which is why I felt such betrayal at their recent actions.

SRA, along with a number of societies and publishers (including APA and SRCD) signed on to this letter to the U.S. President urging him to delay executive action on open access of journal articles. Now, whether or not the President should take this action is not the core issue—I understand that this is a complex issue. But, signing on to this particular letter is inexcusable for a society like SRA. The letter is essentially publisher propaganda, containing mischaracterizations about the nature of intellectual property and the role of journals in the scientific process. Moreover, it is deeply nationalistic, prioritizing the benefits to the U.S. at the expenses of the rest of the world. This latter point should have been a deal breaker for any society that positions itself as valuing global science. The letter is a direct attack on two of my core values: diversity and open science.

I have communicated with several people about this issue, and they almost all give versions of the same two responses:

1) The issue is complicated, decisions about this kind of action have to be made quickly, and societies always have to balance multiple interests. I agree with all of this, but also maintain that SRA should not have signed that letter. It should have been an easy call to read the text of the letter and give a clear, not today Satan response. And there were options. There is another letter that, while I still disagree with the content, is much less offensive (SRA did not sign that one; APA did).

2) This demonstrates the need for me to stay involved in the society, work with them, and help educate and promote open science and diversity. I agree with all of this as well, but have chosen a different path. Time is precious, and I have to make sound decisions on how to allocate it. SRA is a society structured by the past, and is a society that is reluctant to change at the structural level, despite any veneers of change. I have decided that is a better use of my time to support new models for scientific exchange rather than try to change old, entrenched models. I was always baffled by colleagues who would say, “I don’t really like SRCD, but I just go because everyone else does and I like to see my friends.” This is not why societies or conferences should exist. We should do more and expect more, of societies and of our time. At SRA 2020 I was scheduled to run a preconference on open science and was a chair for an invited session on open science. I am withdrawing from both and will not attend SRA, devoting my energies to initiatives and organizations that I fully believe in.

Finally, I am not claiming to be a pure, virtuous actor on this topic. There are other initiatives to which I am devoting free work that might seem counter to my previous statements. There are always reasons, but those reasons do not violate my core values. Similarly, I will not judge those of you who decide to stay with SRA, which will likely be all of you. I just ask that you work to actually change and improve the way the society functions, rather than reinforce the status quo.