Me and OpenPsych

OK, I feel like this is important enough to address here. I had been wondering whether I should or not and now I am convinced that people deserve to know what happened with regard to this subject.

So let's start from the beginning: despite the fact that I was very suspicious of many aspects of the OpenPsych journals (which I have criticized on this blog before), and of Emil Kirkegaard, the grad-school dropout who founded them, I still decided to submit a paper to one of these journals. Why? Why would I choose to associate myself with someone with views such as his (mainly because of his alleged support for child rape, as discussed in detail elsewhere)? The answer, basically, is that I thought I would be able to turn the journal around and get it to be taken seriously as a legitimate outlet for peer-reviewed research if I could get a well-designed paper published in it which did not conform to the hereditarian ideology of Kirkegaard and many other members of the journals' "editorial boards". I also hoped that there were other ways I could offer advice to make the journals more legitimate as peer-reviewed outlets should be, and allow Kirkegaard to respond to criticisms of the way they work.

As time went on, however, I decided that it was very unlikely that I would be able to move this journal from the category of scientific-racism echo chamber to that of respected new (albeit unusual) journal, and I didn't want my own reputation to suffer unnecessarily. Eventually I decided I should try to publish my paper (which can be viewed on OSF here) in a better journal: one that doesn't require me to come up with desperate justifications for associating myself with it. I haven't submitted it yet but I hope to do so soon.

I hope this is an adequate explanation of why I would associate myself with someone like this and with their ideological ilk. I certainly never agreed with the hereditarians behind this journal on almost any issues, but I was hoping to help them advance scientific inquiry in an unbiased manner; I no longer believe this to be possible enough to justify me working with them.