LAUSR

It has now been 1 year since I started my editorial term at EJP, and despite the amount of work that goes into this job, I am delighted and grateful to be able to contribute to our field in this way. It is inspiring and extremely rewarding to work with a wonderful team of associate editors, motivated authors, and constructive reviewers with the common goal of making personality science as good as it can possibly be. The guiding principles of my editorship continue to be high-quality control in the science we publish, openness in the scientific content and formats, and curiosity about what authors and reviewers have to offer. We as editors at EJP want to publish excellent contributions to personality science and provide profound conceptual and methodological quality control. At the same time, we are well aware of and open to the wide variety of recipes that can produce an excellent paper, and we are curious to learn about new ways to conceptualize, assess, and analyze various aspects of personality. We are also curious about and willing to take chances on novel publication formats to see what they can offer. In this editorial, I will briefly comment on some of the recent developments at EJP as well as those ahead of us. I thank Maarten von Zalk—who had to quit his term as Associate Editor—for his committed contribution to EJP. A warm welcome goes to new Associate Editors Erika Carlson, Malgorzata Fajkowska, and Odilia Laceulle who joined Joshua Jackson, Christian Kandler, René Mõttus, and Cornelia Wrzus on January 1st, complementing our team of Associate Editors. I also want to introduce our new Research Communications Editor, Joanne Chung, who joined the editorial team last summer. Joanne is happy to help authors communicate their work, and she is hosting EJP’s social media accounts, including the EJP blog (www.ejp-blog. com). All personality psychologists who are interested in contributing to our blog are warmly invited to do so. Finally, I thank the European Association of Personality for supporting the ongoing development of EJP. For those who care about numbers: They have remained stable, which means they are pretty good. With a 2-year Impact Factor of 3.71, EJP consolidated its strong position as one of the leading journals in our field. We desk-reject about 55% of submitted papers, and the overall rejection rate is around 90%. Papers that enter the review process have a fair chance of being published in EJP, particularly if the authors are truly responsive to the constructive comments made by both editors and reviewers. With a mean overall time to first decision of around 20 days, we continue to provide a very fast turnaround. There are also a number of papers for which we invite the authors to resubmit a new manuscript that is based on a more substantive reworking and additional data. Such invitations are rendered either at the initial stage of submission (i.e., in the form of a desk-rejection) or after review, and in both cases, these are serious invitations. That is, if you as an author decide to go the extra mile and collect additional data and/or rework your paper substantially, thereby providing a more substantive contribution, the paper has a pretty good chance of ultimately getting accepted. One of the major changes we implemented last year was the mandatory confirmation of so-called transparency statements during the submission process. That is, for a manuscript to be considered further, the authors have to confirm that it explicitly deals with open science issues. Whereas we allow authors to solve these issues differently (e.g., to make the data openly accessible or not), we ask them to be transparent about their choices. As one exemplary clarification, I want to emphasize that being transparent about the data does not mean including a sentence stating that readers are welcome to contact the authors to ask for access (of course they can). Instead, authors should either provide a link to the data in the main manuscript or include a sentence in the main manuscript explaining why they are not willing or able to do this. We encourage authors to consider providing as much transparency as is possible. I also want to be clear about the fact that it pays off to include open science practices in one’s original submission. When we evaluate the relative merits of each paper submitted to the journal, we consider open science practices to be on a par with other major criteria such as scientific rigor, creativity, and relevance. Being transparent about your research can help you get above the threshold for publication at EJP. I was also very happy to see that our new guidelines have already led to a major increase in the transparency of published papers. In fact, almost all published empirical papers that have been submitted since the introduction of our new guidelines have earned Open Science badges from the Center for Open Science. To facilitate a smooth process, I encourage all authors to take a close look at our detailed Author Guidelines prior to submitting a paper to EJP. If you have questions about these guidelines, you can contact me. I am also happy to receive suggestions for how to further improve and/or clarify our guidelines and the submission, editorial, and review process. I would like to add two notes regarding issues that come up repeatedly. First, please note that EJP will of course consider submitted articles previously available as preprints on noncommercial servers such as PsyArXiv. Similarly, authors are encouraged to share their accepted papers via such preprint servers in line with Wiley’s Self-Archiving Policy. Second, please note that we now allow authors to ask for a streamlined review. To this aim, authors should indicate their request and the journal the paper was rejected by in the cover letter and add copies of the original (i.e., unaltered) decision European Journal of Personality, Eur. J. Pers. 32: 3–5 (2018) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.2141