Supplementary Material Guideline

PsychArchives is a disciplinary repository preserving a variety of digital research objects (DROs) e.g., preprints, articles, research data, code, measurement instruments, preregistrations, multimedia. It provides easy and free access to these DROs according to the FAIR principles, which implies the commitment to ensure that digital research objects are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

To fulfill the submission criteria for PsychArchives:

  • Please confirm in your cover letter that you and your co-authors agree to publish these materials in the PsychArchives repository under an appropriate open license. In most cases this is a CC-BY license, however for some types of research objects like code other license are more appropriated (see PsychArchives on which license is used/recommended for which kind of research object).
  • Please provide a short description of the contents of your supplementary materials (it will be used for the "Supplementary Materials" section of the article linking to the repository)
  • Should you provide research data, please complement those with a codebook containing all essential information about e.g. variable names, structure of data, layout of the data collection
  • Should you provide files with dense and complex content, try to add explanatory information within the file, if possible
  • Should you provide several files with different types of content, please complement those with a file guide, featuring a descriptive table of content of all files associated with your supplementary materials submission

PsychArchives offers the following benefits:

  • Permanent availability and linkage with article. Providing access to supplementary material via PsychArchives will guarantee the future availability as well as the linkage of the material and the article. PsychArchives is a product of ZPID - Leibniz Institute for Psychology. ZPID is an Open Science Institute for psychological research (founded in 1971), which is funded by the German federal and state governments. Therefore, ZPID is not vulnerable to commercial risks.

  • Persistent identifier (DOI) to the PsychArchives submission. Every submission on PsychArchives is provided with a DOI thus making your research output citable.

  • Comprehensive enrichment with metadata. Every PsychArchives submission is comprehensively enriched with metadata increasing discoverability and reusability - see examples: 
    — https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.2448
    — https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.13464

  • Strict user guidelines enforce quality standards. Our detailed metadata and user guidelines have been explicitly developed to avoid that PsychArchives becomes just another online dump for unspecified research related files. Comprehensible documentation shall ensure the re-usability of the provided data.