New publication formats,call for special issues,and a new transparency and research data policy

Acta Sociologica has been an important outlet for sociological research of general interest from all sub-fields of the discipline during the past seven decades. While founded by scholars from the Nordics, today Acta is an international journal publishing articles from all around the globe on topics of general sociological interest. However, sociological research, scholarship, and publishing are not static. To accommodate new needs in dissemination of research and emerging new standards for research transparency, we have – in collaboration with Sage and close consultation with the board of the Nordic Sociological Association – introduced new publication formats, launched a running call for special issues, and adopted a new transparency and research data policy for quantitative research. These initiatives aim to ensure that Acta will continue to be an outlet for contributions from all corners of our diverse discipline. Below, we will briefly outline the new opportunities for publishing with Acta and the new policy on transparency and data sharing.

Publication formats and special issues

Acta Sociologica now has six different formats for publications, three for peer-reviewed research articles and three for comments and book reviews reviewed only by the editors. The new formats aim to accommodate the diversity of sociology and ensure that Acta can continue to be a quality outlet.

Long research article of up to 10,000 words. We have experienced that more authors struggle to make their case within the common 8000 word research article format due to the rising complexity of many scientific arguments, be it theoretical discussions (e.g. Rogenhofer and da Silva, 2024 in this issue), extensive qualitative studies (e.g. Trinidad et al., 2024 in this issue), advanced statistical designs (e.g. Borgen, 2024; Uggla et al., 2024 in this issue), or complex mixed methods research (e.g. Segersven, 2024 in this issue). In many such cases a little more room to present and ground the key findings of a field work, cover the full scope of relevant theoretical arguments and perspectives, or adding appendices with supplementary empirical results will increase the quality of disseminating results. Thus, while 8000 words still is suitable for many arguments, the long article format introduces a little more flexibility and thus better accommodates our goal to include contributions from all strands of sociology. But why have a word limit in the first place? We do not want to abandon a word limit altogether because we experience that a word limit helps to achieve succinct communication of the article's argument, to limit the scope of alterations, and to develop manuscripts during the review process. Thus, it serves both to ensure a speedier publication process and, more importantly, to focus the paper on its core argument.

Short research articles of up to 5000 words. This format is motivated by the two last concerns: focusing the argument and ensuring speedy publication. Sometimes, it does not take up to 8000 or 10,000 words to argue a point. Adding unnecessary expansion on secondary issues often just takes away focus from the central point of a paper with a simple, clear-cut contribution. This can be the case for both empirical research (e.g. Blaabæk and Jæger, 2024 in this issue) and theoretical arguments (e.g. Heidegren, 2024 in this issue). Short articles should still make contributions of general interest and live up to the field's quality standards. Thus, short articles are not a format for less important or more inconsequential arguments, but simply a format that helps structure the editorial process to accommodate the fact that some conclusions do not need as many words to be argued throughly.

Registered reports of up to 5000 or 10,000 words. Registered reports help ensure transparency and replicability of empirical results. Publishing articles in the form of registered reports is a two-step process. First, the registered report containing the framing of the research question and detailing the research plan is submitted and undergoes review before the empirical research is carried out. The review process is similar to that of a standard submission and concludes with either a ‘reject’ or an ‘in-principle acceptance’. Second, when an in-principle acceptance is obtained, the authors can go ahead and conduct the empirical research and submit the full manuscript, including the results, discussion, and conclusion in addition to what was contained in the registered report. The full manuscript will also undergo peer-review to ensure quality, but irrespective of the results, the results will be published so long as the research was carried out according to the in-principle accepted manuscript.

In addition to the three article formats that undergo double-blinded peer-review, Acta also has three formats aimed at enhancing academic deliberation and discussion of new developments in the field. To ensure speedy publication, these kinds of contributions only undergo internal review by the editorial team.

1. Comments of up to 1000 words. This format has been a part of the journal since its very first volume. Comments are short pieces where scholars can discuss current affairs and recent developments of general interest for the discipline of sociology (e.g. Ahlstrand and Sausdal, 2024 in this issue) as well as comment on arguments and results published in Acta. Comments are reviewed only by the editors and they should not contain original empirical analysis.

2. Book reviews of up to 1000 words. This is another classic format in Acta, which offers readers a quality summary and assessment of recently published important books.

3. Review essays of up to 5000 words. This format offers an opportunity to discuss and summarise developments in a sub-field based on a selection of recent, major monographs and anthologies in the area.

Finally, Acta has launched a running call for special issues on topics of general interest (see Andersen and Hansen, 2024 in this issue for one such current call). We encourage proposals to take full advantage of the range of formats to compose issues that present both original research as well as reflections and commentaries to foster creative, stimulating, and inspiring academic exchange.

Transparency and research data policy

A growing number of researchers and institutions in the social sciences and sociology are embracing new standards for transparency and sharing of data. These new standards aim to ensure openness and collaboration among researchers as well as heighten quality by enabling reproduction and validation of results within computational and statistical research (Weeden, 2023).

To accommodate and reinforce these new norms emerging in the quantitative research milieus in sociology, Acta Sociologica has adopted a new policy of transparency and sharing of research data for publications using statistical and computational methods. Hitherto, Acta has strongly encouraged authors to share data and code. The new policy goes a step further and requires that, subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, a replication package containing data, code, and other materials must be shared in a public data repository before publication and linked to in the article's data availability statement. In case data cannot be shared due to ethical or legal considerations, code and other relevant materials must still be deposited in a public repository. The reasons data cannot be shared must be detailed in the data availability statement. This basically means that the journal shifts from a policy where the authors can choose to share data for reproducibility purposes if it is legally and ethically possible, to a policy where the authors must share data and code unless there are valid ethical or legal reasons for not being able to do so, in which case the requirement to share data will be waived. Thus, the policy does not aim to exclude anyone from publishing with Acta but makes it mandatory to share data and code if possible. It is also worth noting that Acta only requests authors to share for reproducibility and replication purposes and leaves it to the authors of the datasets to define for what other purposes the shared data can be freely or conditionally used.

These requirements do not apply to qualitative analysis. In general, Acta aims to adapt to and support when researchers and scholars in different sub-fields develop new standards and norms which are in agreement with general scientific principles. It is our assessment that the new policy reflects an emerging norm in quantitative sociology that has wide support among researchers, despite it still not being adopted by the majority of journals and institutional actors. The topic of transparency into the empirical research process is also a central issue in qualitative research (e.g. Reyes, 2018), but the consensus is different. Due to concerns regarding feasibility, epistemology, and research ethics, the general consensus in qualitative sociology is that more flexible options are needed with regard to the sharing of empirical materials and analytical procedures (Tsai et al., 2016). Thus, while sharing of all kinds of empirical materials, procedures of analysis, and data collection is welcome, it is crucial to us that Acta remains an outlet for all strands and sub-disciplines of sociology. Therefore, it is still optional rather than mandatory for qualitative researchers to share empirical materials and analytical procedures.

With these new initiatives, we aim to better accommodate the new standards developing in sociological research and ensure that Acta Sociologica will continue to be one of the discipline's most influential outlets known for publishing high-quality research from all areas of sociology.