United in Promoting Diversity,Transparency,Innovation,and Expansion: Five Scholarly Associations Join Forces in Relaunching Personality Science

Personality Science was launched by the European Association of Personality Psychology as a pioneering journal in late 2020, with John F. Rauthmann as its inaugural editor. Due to John's tireless efforts and inspiring vision, the journal has built up a solid reputation of publishing rigorous, innovative, and high-quality research on personality. John relied on a stellar team of consulting and associate editors, as well as dedicated reviewers who volunteered their precious time to evaluate incoming manuscripts. Needless to say, I am both humbled and elated to take over the torch as incoming editor-in-chief, and I will do my best to carry on the journal's legacy. In this editorial, I will reaffirm the journal's scope and vision and how I want to pursue these, as well as outline some policy changes and why they are necessary. While doing so, I will introduce new partners of the journal (we have a new editorial team, a new publisher and are supported by additional learned societies!) and pay homage to important early supporters with whom we are parting ways in immense gratitude. Finally, I will discuss what I see as promising trends in personality science and academic publishing more broadly, and how I want to capitalize on these during my tenure as editor.

Carrying on the mission of Personality Science

Personality Science has been founded with several guiding principles, which John outlined in his original editorial (Rauthmann, 2020). In the following, I would like to reaffirm these principles and outline how the journal continues to implement them.

Personality Science wants to expand as a sprawling scientific hub

First, Personality Science was founded to publish research on personality science in the broadest sense of the word. Not for nothing, John's original editorial opened with a quote from Allport (1946, pp. 133–134): “No doors should be closed in the study of personality. ” These doors will remain wide open during my tenure. This means that the journal aspires to be a hub for research focusing on different domains (e.g., traits, abilities, attitudes, narratives), causal influences (e.g., biology, culture, social relationships), theoretical perspectives (e.g., trait theory, psychodynamic theory, self-determination theory), research designs (e.g., lab experiments, self-reports, experience sampling and mobile sensing), statistical analyses (e.g., structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, machine learning), and more.

The breadth of this scope means that Personality Science explicitly welcomes scholars who do not self-identify as personality psychologists. Many (perhaps even most) social and political psychologists study individual differences in dimensions (e.g., social identity; political orientation), and so do educational (e.g., ability; mindset) and clinical psychologists (e.g., mentalizing ability; coping). Developmental psychologists study how individual differences develop over time, and cognitive neuropsychologists what mechanisms might underlie them. Personality and individual differences are also key themes being studied in other fields, such as sociology (Spenner, 1988), economics (Almlund et al., 2011), computer science (Kosinski et al., 2013), historical analysis (Simonton, 1998), biology (Sih et al., 2004), medicine (Denollet, 2000), and many more. During my tenure, I will actively seek out such contributions from areas beyond the traditional realms of personality psychology.

Sage is our new partner to ensure open access for all

Second, Personality Science will remain free of charge for both authors and readers (i.e., Diamond open access). This has always been an essential aspect of broadening the journal's reach. In traditional publishing models, articles are easily accessed only by those with a journal subscription (either directly or indirectly, via their institution). In many open access models, articles can only be published by authors who pay an article processing charge (APC; i.e., Gold open access). Some journals have APC waivers or discounts based on the country where the researchers are affiliated, special deals with countries or institutions, or on a case-by-case basis (https://www.inlexio.com/waiver-policy-guide/). In another model (i.e., Green open access), authors can upload an unformatted version of their accepted manuscript to a repository, sometimes after an embargo period has passed. However, while these measures can contribute to removing some (or all) of the financial costs to open access publishing, they still pose barriers (e.g., bureaucracy, lack of services) to publishing research for researchers who lack sufficient funds (Zhang et al., 2022).

While Diamond open access removes all barriers, somebody still needs to pick up the tab for services provided. Important services include the online infrastructure to submit and process manuscripts, stipends to editors, and costs to copy-edit, format, and host the manuscript. A recent analysis (Grossmann & Brembs, 2019) calculated the cost of those services to lie between US$200 and $1000, depending on factors such as the rejection rate (more selective journals have to process more manuscripts for each published paper) and the quality of the provided services. Previously, the manuscript submission portal and the type-setting were provided to Personality Science as services by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID), funded by German taxpayer money. Without this generous support, Personality Science could never have been launched, and we are immensely thankful not only for that but also for the extremely pleasant collaboration with members of ZPID (e.g., Armin Günther).

Still, after careful deliberations it was decided to partner with Sage Publishing for the relaunch of our journal. This offers various benefits, such as using the widely known submission platform ScholarOne, the reliance on Sage’s experience with typesetting articles and marketing them to academic audiences, and their knowledge of the publishing industry. Furthermore, we are no longer held to our previous annual page limit of 450, although our agreement with Sage does include a limit of 50 articles per year. ² Important reasons to partner with Sage (instead of another publisher) include fair per-article pricing, a history of good and reliable cooperation with key staff members at Sage, and a belief in their mission and ownership structure. Regarding the latter, Sage states that its mission is “to build bridges to knowledge through educational and research publishing”, and the establishment of a trust will prevent that focus from being sidetracked by “shareholders’ or investors’ financial goals” (Sage Publishing, 2021). In addition to learned associations (see below), it is my conviction that mission-driven organizations like Sage will continue to have a future in scientific publishing, even if the academic community succeeds in curbing the high profit margins of major academic publishers (Larivière et al., 2015).

We remain committed to the strictest open science standards

Third, open science has been a key focus of the journal from the very start. Supported by expert methodological consultants (Daniel Lakens, Daniel Leising, Felix Schönbrodt) and the unwavering commitment by the previous editor-in-chief, John Rauthmann, Personality Science has obtained a very high compliance score with the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines. Because transparency is a key prerequisite of open science, I will uphold the corresponding standards and even seek to expand them where possible. One aspect of transparency pertains to the pre-registration of hypotheses, which fortunately is becoming increasingly common (Nosek et al., 2022) and also applies to aspects of exploratory and/or qualitative research (Haven et al., 2020). A particularly rigorous type of pre-registration is the registered report, which not only specifies hypotheses, data collection, and statistical design a priori (just like a pre-registration does), but also writes out the theoretical framework that has given rise to them. Reviewers then evaluate the quality of the specified procedures and the importance of the potential findings – regardless of the particular pattern of results (e.g., whether a hypothesis is confirmed or not). Personality Science eagerly solicits registered reports because of the various benefits that they confer, not only in terms of transparency but also in terms of efficiency (e.g., papers are no longer rejected because a certain pattern of results is not deemed “important” enough, and reviewers’ feedback can make a difference before data have been collected or analyzed).

One novel format that Personality Science will adopt is to accept registered reports from the corresponding “Peer Community In” (PCI) platform (https://peercommunityin.org/). This platform organizes researchers in a specific field (e.g., neuroscience) to peer-review submitted pre-prints, which receive a stamp of approval from the community if they meet specific standards. With this stamp, authors of an approved pre-print can claim certain privileges granted to them by editors of more traditional journals. Authors can either have the pre-print published in such a journal without further review, or their manuscript is considered on a preferential basis (e.g., more rapidly). With PCI-registered reports, the principle is similar: A report that knowledgeable peer reviewers approve will be treated preferentially by editors of affiliated journals (now including Personality Science), who either accept the registered report without further review (a journal that commits to this is called a “PCI-RR friendly” journal) or reach out to its corresponding author to invite a submission (a journal that commits to this is called a “PCI-RR interested” journal). Together with the associations that are involved in Personality Science (see below), I am eager to engage with PCI-RR and similar (future) initiatives that promote innovations in peer review and academic publishing that promote inclusion, transparency, and fairness. We will keep the community informed about the status of these initiatives via the journal Web site.

A final point about Personality Science’s approach to open science is that it should be made as easy as possible. Despite heroic efforts of institutions like the Open Science Framework and others to develop common transparency standards, submission systems still differ between journals and require authors to answer similar sets of questions each time they resubmit their paper to a new journal after rejection. Personality Science wants to play a role in standardizing the open science workflow – although this can only be achieved in coordination with other journals and publishers. For example, it has adopted the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) standard for establishing authorship contributions. This standard specifies to which part(s) of the author's research process has substantially contributed. Using the web-application “tenzing”, authors can specify the various contributions and then generate a summary report, which they need to upload when submitting a manuscript. Similarly, Aczel et al. (2020) published reporting standards and created the Transparency Checklist web-application to document adherence to these standards via a report (https://www.shinyapps.org/apps/TransparencyChecklist/). Finally, van ’t Veer and Giner-Sorolla (2016) have created a template (link) that helps authors create a table that lists deviations from pre-registrations. Personality Science wants to be at the forefront of adopting smart and standardized solutions that help authors to comply with evolving open science standards, ideally in cooperation with like-minded journals.

Personality Science is an inclusive science

Last but not least, Personality Science is firmly committed to increasing the diversity of research in all its forms. This diversity includes geographic, cultural, and ethnic differences, as well as variations in sexual identity and gender identity, and any other underrepresented or marginalized aspects that contribute to the rich tapestry of human experience. Diversity is not only relevant to the composition of researcher teams, editorial staff, research samples, and methodological and theoretical perspectives. It also includes the use of language sensitive to social-historical connotations of research terminology and traditions, and a skeptical attitude towards research that can be used to justify existing social-economical injustices. For example, research that can be used to justify systemic inequalities by invoking biologically deterministic reasoning will typically not be publishable in Personality Science.

Wanting to increase diversity in representation is easier said than done, however. To get a sense of the status quo, I extracted affiliations from all authors who contributed to an article that was published in Personality Science between 2020 and 2023. This resulted in 269 authors divided over 51 articles. Around 75% of authors had an affiliation in either Germany or North America. Only a single author had an affiliation in what some call the Majority World: an author from Morocco who contributed to a wonderful study (led by a German first author) of how working in a cooperative predicts a more long-term time perspective of Amazigh Women. Note that this underrepresentation of Majority World authors occurred despite the best intentions and efforts of the editorial team, which had been selected to be representative of the various world regions and were firmly committed to increasing diversity.

The underrepresentation of important world regions merits some reflection. On the one hand, Personality Science is a novel journal founded by the European Association of Personality Psychology. Historically, personality psychology's visibility has been more prominent in Western Europe and North America. Also, the new journal still lacks some traditional prestige aspects (e.g., it does not yet have an impact factor, which will still take some time). Once Personality Science is established, authors from other world regions will hopefully become more motivated to submit their work to the journal. Yet hope alone is seldom sufficient, and proactive measures are needed. I am therefore excited to announce a new international initiative to involve researchers from around the globe in our journal, which I outline in the following section.

Organizing personality researchers across the globe

The new opportunities to increase the diversity of our field in general, and Personality Science in particular, stem from an exciting development. Instead of being hosted by a single learned association (the European Association of Personality Psychology; EAPP), four additional learned associations have now joined the force (in alphabetical order): the Australasian Congress for Personality and Individual Differences (ACPID), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the Japan Society of Personality Psychology (JSPP), and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). ACPID primarily organizes scholars in Australia and New Zealand, JSPP does so for Japanese scholars. ARP, EAPP, and SPSP have members in various countries of the world, with ARP and SPSP having their roots in North America (where they hold their conferences) and EAPP in Europe (where it holds its conferences).

It is a wonderful sign of progress that five associations – now linked to Personality Science – have come together under a banner of shared values. Our editorial team feels fortunate to have the support of these associations and sees manifold opportunities to leverage this to increase diversity. The first way that this has worked is that I have asked each association to nominate an associate editor (AE). This had immediate benefits for diversity: It resulted in an AE from North America (Erika Carlson), Japan (Atsushi Oshio), Europe (Sointu Leikas), and two from Australia (Carolyn MacCann and Jeromy Anglim). Because this selection did not yet include an associate editor from South America, I contacted Cristian Zanon, an active regional representative for EAPP.

This example clearly shows the benefits of mutual collaboration between associations representing different academic communities (regional, some supra-regional), historical traditions, and interdisciplinary linkages (e.g., SPSP links personality with social psychology). Through their combined resources (e.g., newsletters and fora), Personality Science will be able to communicate directly with their respective members to discuss the most important methodological and theoretical developments that should get a prominent place in the journal. Furthermore, their respective conferences can serve as vibrant fora for discussing the position of the journal as well as key developments in personality science as a whole. Personality Science could serve as a springboard to experiment with innovations that are of consensual interest to all involved parties, and could spur a supra-regional dialogue on what key aspects of the discipline should be, and how to involve other regions in the discussion that have been hitherto underrepresented (e.g., Africa).

What the future brings for Personality Science

A famous Danish proverb states ¹ that “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” This is also true for science due to its partly stochastic nature (Simonton, 2003). Still, several emerging trends and priorities can be discerned, and I want to ensure that Personality Science is well positioned to capitalize on them. In the following, I would like to outline some of these trends.

One trend I see is that research in the social sciences and beyond is increasingly becoming interdisciplinary. My own scholarly background is not only in personality psychology, but also in developmental and social psychology, and many researchers have similarly crossed disciplinary boundaries (often much wider than my own; e.g., think of combinations of biology and personality, or history and personality). This intermixing of disciplines should bode well for personality science, which has been conceptually and empirically identified as a hub science (Morf, 2002): an intellectual space where insights from many disciplines are combined and disseminated to a vast network of relevant neighboring fields. This has allowed personality science to flourish in various settings where individual differences are relevant, even when researchers do not self-identify as personality psychologists. Revealingly, in the previously mentioned study (Denissen & Rauthmann, 2024), the keyword “personality” was endorsed by authors with a psychophysiology, psychometrics, or multidisciplinary profile. For Personality Science, this means that we will actively reach out to scholars from other disciplines, asking them to submit relevant work to the journal, including state-of-the-art reviews of how individual differences play a role in their respective fields.

Another trend is the increasing focus on reforming the academic enterprise itself. In many countries, principled discussions are taking place about the proper balance between individual versus team science; between exploratory versus confirmatory research; and between counting performance versus narratively summarizing it. One such discussion was started in our own journal by Leising et al. (2022), who argued that cumulative progress in personality science requires consensus about various research aspects, including its research goals, terminology, measurement practices, and current state of theory and evidence. I have invited Daniel and his co-authors to use Personality Science as a vehicle for consensus-building. He has agreed to write a road map of how such a process can be effectively organized. A key aspect includes polling the memberships of the various learned associations that are involved in Personality Science: What are the key questions and topics where consensus is most needed?

Following such a roadmap, it will be possible to pinpoint key research questions where there is vivid disagreement between opposing camps (e.g., whether personality can be represented by a network of behaviors; can be regarded as its own causal entity; or both). Such a process could give rise to publications that flesh out the controversy, ideally with the involvement of scholars from the opposing side of the debate. In other cases, a research question will be deemed consensually important, but a consensus has not been reached about the best method to study the phenomenon in question (e.g., the use of AI for personality research). Thus, mapping the key questions of our discipline will be crucially important in the coming decade, and Personality Science wants to be at the forefront of this development. Of note, this initiative does not mean that the journal will only devote space to such consensually important questions; there will also be space for research into more idiosyncratic and/or contrarian ideas, in line with our aim to broaden personality science.

A third trend, which is obvious for all to see, is the increasing speed of technological innovation relevant to personality research. It is becoming increasingly easy to measure individual differences without resorting to self-reports. For example, by relying on measured online behaviors, such as Facebook likes (Kosinski et al., 2013), or automatically sensed data (Stachl et al., 2020). During the coming years, AI will accelerate developments that have been in the making for many years. It will become relatively easy to extract personality-related features from various stimuli, including video images, written texts, smartphone logs (including GPS data), and much more. Furthermore, recent developments in whole-genome analysis will allow researchers with access to DNA data to extract polygenetic markers of important personality dimensions (Streit et al., 2022). These developments make it possible to create indices of personality without a dedicated personality assessment battery. In such a scenario, researchers may opt to use these indirect techniques to measure behavioral patterns and biological proclivities and reserve self-reports to investigate more complex and genuinely introspective phenomena, such as narrative identity. Personality Science wants to seize these opportunities, not only as an enthusiastic early adopter, but also as a critical friend that stimulates reflection about the psychometric quality of these alternative individual differences indices, the transparency and reproducibility of the methods to compute them, and ethical issues and dilemmas that can occur when people are no longer aware that their personality is being measured (Stachl et al., 2021).

Once it becomes easier to measure personality constructs automatically (note that this should ideally not happen without a person’s awareness), Cattell’s (1966) data box (consisting of measurement variables, time points, and individuals) will become infinitely larger. Some researchers might feel lost in such a large space and continue focusing on familiar corners. Still, I hope others will become excited and venture into hitherto unexplored regions of the cube. I hope that personality psychologists will recognize this moment as an opportunity to truly study “the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [their] characteristic behavior and thought” (Allport, 1937, p. 48). It is precisely this dynamic organization that separates genuine personality psychologists from researchers in other disciplines who study individual differences in a construct – say, aggression in children (Olson et al., 2011) or certain species of fish (e.g., Chang et al., 2012). Such a differential perspective remains important (and is explicitly welcome for publication in Personality Science). Still, the true Frontier lies in the integrative study of the within-person organization of the manifold relevant differences, and how they matter for a person’s well-being and adjustment to the environment. By focusing on this integration, our discipline might not only become more powerful at predicting relevant outcomes at the truly individual level (which is what counts for practitioners and certainly for individual people who need life advice), but also more faithful to Allport’s original definition of personality as the science of the individual.