The Journal of European Psychology Students – A decade of student-organised scientific publishing as peer-education
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Meeting/Interview
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Computer animation
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Meeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
It is my great pleasure to introduce our second distinguished guest for this morning. Leonard Volz is with the Journal of European Psychology Students in the Netherlands. And let me first check. Leonard, are you there? Can you hear me and see me? Yes, I can hear and see you. Fantastic. Very good. The Journal of European Psychology Students,
00:20
is it JEPS Leonard or J-E-P-S? What do you prefer? JEPS. JEPS. Okay. Just wanted to check. JEPS is a student-run journal providing an opportunity for bachelor's and master's students to gain publishing experience. Today, Leonard's talk entitled The Journal of European Psychology Students,
00:40
A Decade of Student Organized Scientific Publishing as Peer Education, really centers around the journal's founding ideals, how it developed, and how JEPS implements open science in publicizing student research and specifically how peer education can add value beyond a
01:01
traditional university education. So, Leonard, quick question. If I'm not mistaken, you are in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, correct? Yes, correct. Could you tell us maybe a highlight? You mentioned in our warm-ups that you arrived in Amsterdam in the lockdown and haven't had a chance to explore so much. But anything
01:20
you're looking forward to exploring, shall we say, in Amsterdam? I guess just in general, the city. I've heard it's pretty nice. So far, it feels quite empty, but I hear that that's usually a bit different. But yeah, I think just exploring the city in general, that's hopefully possible again. Well, I can just say enjoy the empty streets
01:42
because I'm sure once things do get better with corona and that will happen soon, the crowds will be back. So enjoy the peace and quiet in Amsterdam. A very unique experience. Good. Then without further delay, Leonard, the digital stage is yours. Yeah, thank you. Okay, there's me. Yeah, I have the honor to quickly present the
02:05
Journal of European Psychology students to you and try to incorporate a couple of points about open science and student research and connect that to open education principles as well. And then kind of touch on the challenges we face as a student-run outlet for publishing,
02:22
which might be familiar to many of you in open science or in other open science initiatives as well. Just quickly, to me, I am a research master's student at the University of Amsterdam right now. Just started earlier this semester, so just last year. My focus is on statistics
02:45
and methodology more broadly and kind of in my free time, I am somehow got interested in open science publishing and been doing that for a couple of years now as well. To quickly start off, I would like to quickly introduce Japs, what we do. So we are a scientific journal
03:05
that is fully run by students in order to publish research by other students. Specifically, as David already said, on the level of bachelor's and master's students. So that's kind of the focus here. And we focus on psychology. That's kind of where our background
03:25
comes from. But we also publish research from adjacent fields, which kind of connect to psychological questions, be it neuroscience, behavioural economics. And also kind of open science questions around research. We have a couple of papers that look at how, from a more meta
03:50
perspective, how research is done in psychology. We publish both empirical research and literature reviews. And we're also happy to publish the report since 2016 as, I think,
04:06
the only student journal that does that. Japs is part of the European Federation of
04:21
National Students' Organisations in Psychology. So we do have access to a larger network of students all over Europe, which is also nice in doing what we do. But yeah, we kind of want to start off with the foundation. So Japs now exists since 2009,
04:41
so a bit over a decade by now. Kind of already 12 years, time flies by. And yeah, there's kind of this question of why is there a need for Japs or student journals in general? And I think those connect very closely to open access principles, where as student research often, or specifically WASP still is often lost in the abyss,
05:12
so to say, not accessible to others, kind of just on some local computers. Which is unfortunate because oftentimes students conduct interesting research,
05:25
conduct high quality research, and there are considerable benefits to that being accessible as well to other students, but also to the research community more broadly. And on the other hand, this work then also goes unrecognised by the community at large.
05:42
That's at least to me one of the key aspects of open science, that the effort you put into scientific research should be recognised as a valuable contribution, specifically for early career researchers as well. And another important thing there is that public publication as a very
06:05
crucial step in the research process is probably the thing that is touched on in curricular education the least. You seldomly go this last step of actually getting your work out there.
06:22
And we feel like this is important to provide to students. And then lastly, as a quick utilitarian point, it is also a career opportunity being able to get published for application processes, for example, for PhD applications after your masters to have some
06:45
evidence of research activities and writing skills. So that's kind of why there is this need, but I don't want to touch on how we do this specifically, because there of course are some
07:02
issues around publishing student research, given that the experience is not that often just not that pronounced yet. And how we implement that is specifically with a two-stage process where we divide it into what we call technical review and content review, technical review, which is done by our editorial board, which I'm as editor-in-chief in JEPs
07:25
currently heading, which consists of students on both bachelor's and master's level who do a initial review looking at does a manuscript comply with our publishing criteria and give
07:42
content feedback as well as we can to improve the manuscript to a stage where we feel like it's ready to go into a proper peer review process where we as student editors then hand over to our associate editors, usually PhD students or kind of research
08:01
other postdocs stage. However, that's called the specific countries and they then handle the actual peer review where the manuscript then as you are aware of kind of gets out to external reviewers and they then make the editorial decisions. So that hopefully then leads to a
08:25
period process that is as good as with any other journal, possibly even better since there are just more eyes looking carefully over the manuscript given there are two stages.
08:43
Yeah, and so that also provides kind of an opportunity for us to engage with ECRs beyond the student level to kind of provide this opportunity for PhD students to gain some editorial experience which they might otherwise only have at a later point in their career
09:00
as well. So that's another nice educational benefit there. Yeah, then I quickly want to touch on a couple of benefits students then gain from publishing and again kind of to what I touched on already is this aspect of dissemination of research. It is openly accessible, more visible since we kind of have this network and it's also been indexed
09:26
in scientific databases which helps it be accessed by other researchers as well. So that's like pretty important in its own right. But on the other hand for students specifically it's a considerable learning experience. Kind of doing research or kind of learning about research
09:46
by doing it practically applying it kind of going through this whole process with publishing as well gives you much more possibility to engage with the different steps and then also through the peer review you get some feedback on what you're doing how you can improve.
10:04
And on the other hand also kind of provides this education about the publishing process which you oftentimes wouldn't get in other circumstances as a student and hopefully that's what we're trying to implement more and more also various other open science practices kind of gaining
10:24
experience with data sharing for example which is something again you wouldn't consider as a student if you didn't try to get your research out there. But the most important point there for for me at least is that this gives an opportunity for early careers to start off early with
10:45
properly going through the whole research process gaining the necessary research skills for to do good research and do it up practically as well. So on the other hand then also not hopefully not learning some practices they later need to unlearn when you suddenly meet
11:07
other challenges in open research in an open research environment which specifically with if you have supervisors that are not as open towards open science practices might be an issue.
11:24
And the last point there is also again more personal notes it's also noticeable how former editors within JEPs are active within open science communities and try just to actively strive towards promoting open science more broadly which is pretty nice nice to see and we hope to
11:47
yeah kind of to more concretely on open science practices I think one of the kind of again one of the founding principles what is open access JEPs has been an open access journal since its
12:01
inception somewhat out of necessity somewhat also to like it doesn't make sense to promote student research that then is not accessible to other students but yeah it's kind of in the spirit of everything being accessible as well which to students in many other contexts also
12:24
becomes an issue as well. And then with this theory process we're by design also an open educational platform kind of this it's very ingrained in how we do a peer review that it's it is a learning experience we don't have desk projections because it that's not something that
12:43
makes sense in a student research context so we rather go through iterative review processes to get as much educational value across to these students who submit to us and that is kind of important kind of on the other hand also because doing research
13:05
for students specifically means that every step is kind of new you learn new skills along every step of the process. And yeah then on the well I touched upon earlier as well we
13:21
are very proud to offer registered reports for students kind of specifically again this experience of pre-study conductance peer review so you can actually gain some feedback on the process of your study by experienced researchers in the field and so on your plans not
13:42
not getting some getting some comments back on what you could have improved if you knew earlier on. That is a great opportunity again for students to get the most out of research projects like theses as well and we hope that that's something we can provide more broadly to students
14:01
in the future as well. And lastly kind of it's trying to continuously improve these specific open science practices and how we do publishing kind of connected to open materials open data open code where we try to get that across as early as possible to students that it
14:27
is open to share the entire research output. You have both to be just transparent about the research you do but also to provide valuable resources for other people trying to work with these potentially work with these materials as well. But beyond that we also try to
14:48
do this aspect of peer education more broadly. We as an editorial team try to actively do open science outreach kind of reach both within the community of EFSA the
15:03
the federation and its 28 member countries. Specifically right now in this environment it's much easier to attend student conference for example and give some workshops on open science practices so that's one of the benefits of everything being online right now.
15:25
But also beyond this this network trying to attend conference provide expertise be be partners for other student organizations to educate about open science specifically.
15:42
We try to also through our separate blog the just bulletin provide resources on open science both kind of community wise what are interesting open science initiatives and it's always connected to psychology of course but more broadly as well.
16:02
And just research skills in general and then lastly we also try to have other collaborations on with other student open science initiatives. I want to mention both SCIUS here in Amsterdam and so CIP, a German-wide network within psychology where we collaborated on projects
16:24
in the past and hope to do so in the future as well. So it's kind of beyond publishing just trying to create an active open science community with students. But as I mentioned a
16:41
few times already there are a couple of challenges in providing publishing infrastructure as students and you might be familiar with some of them. I think one general issue is an open science publishing infrastructure. So we are self-publishing so we need to somehow provide a platform to be hosted and given that we have relatively little financial backing and are all volunteers
17:06
as students also studying full-time on the side sometimes having other other jobs or other engagements is hard and we kind of hope to partner up with other organizations there
17:22
to make it more easy on ourselves to provide a better service for students. But on the other hand this kind of this volunteer status of our enterprise also means that there's a high fluctuation in people who are responsible for the journal. As a student it's hard to be
17:40
long engaged in such a project for many years because at some point you just aren't a student anymore. So that opens up a couple of questions around how do we keep expertise within the team even though the people in a change like expertise people individuals build up needs to somehow stay within the organizations and that's specifically relevant
18:05
to how we provide quality assurance and good feedback to students and how we are consistent in the principles we apply in our reviewing process. And one way we try to do that is also through this two-stage peer review where we have longer standing external reviewers or associate
18:25
editors oftentimes stay on for multiple years or people who were in the student editorial board then move on to being associate editors later on. So they are our points of contact but it's still kind of kind of the first point of contact always our student editors and somehow need to
18:46
have this internal education processes of how do we handle technical questions about around publishing. But yeah then other crucial issues are around open science kind of how do we how do we how do students have access to open science resources which is also kind of very
19:06
different between countries and less privileged universities for example we do have a at least nominal APC but many students don't have access to funding for publications so we kind of more or
19:22
less waive most of our APCs in that context. And then also how do we reach students who as teachers might not be supportive or knowledgeable about open science practices and education to those students specifically. But yeah how do we
19:41
how do we in general acquire this expertise about open science and how do we have our submitting students acquire knowledge about open science that often goes beyond the research skills you've learned within education. Yeah so to quickly follow up on that what does that
20:01
mean for what we have to do as a service so on the one hand we need to we want to improve our direct service of the publishing experience for students. By yeah and then more broadly how do we implement open science practices what I talked about beforehand in this process as well but then beyond that how do we more efficiently
20:24
more broadly than we already do build a community about open science and promote open science to students in general in the context of psychology. Let us start to jump in just wanted to give you the one minute warning because we have a lot of questions coming in there. Yeah that is why I'm at the summary. Yeah so to quickly summarize kind of it is
20:50
very important to promote and reward student research and specifically open student research and we want to educate students by directly applying open research skills in that context
21:01
that's why we provide this platform and through that also then provide commitment for open science as early on in the scientific education as possible but there are a couple of challenges in this enterprise structural so how do we design this for the needs of students
21:22
infrastructurally how do we implement this design for students lastingly in a working process and then as a last point kind of how do we provide this education to students to be able to do open research in a sound manner. Yeah and then I have a last slide
21:46
here please do meet me at the meet the speakers event in 15 minutes and there are a couple of contact details on there as well both kind of the twitter of Japs and also kind of a bit of self reckless self-promotion on the right side with my twitter you can also see the link to our
22:05
website japs.fsa.org the direct link to our journal page and you can reach us via mail at journal at fsa.org so that's it from me I'm happy to receive some questions now.
22:23
Thank you very much Leonard fantastic presentation just amazing how much we're learning this morning we have a lot of questions very little time unfortunately so I'll read the questions as fast as I can and if you can brief answers and I'll make sure we get three or four in there Leonard the first one great presentation you said that the publication process
22:42
is hardly ever taught in universities I agree do you know any examples where it is taught? I think there are increasingly are open science there are there are some ways in which open
23:02
science is taught either kind of as part of courses or separate courses I know that we in our masters have this course good research practices where we touch on open science principles and also specifically how these apply to publishing some other courses it often includes kind of aspects on peer review how would students do peer review within courses so
23:25
that's kind of touching aspects of the publication but I think that is something that needs to be more broadly applied kind of how does the research process work specifically and kind of how does it work infrastructure wise as well it's definitely room for improvement there yeah
23:45
understood next question from Ruth King what services could publishers offer to support researchers with open science that's always an interesting question not entirely sure how like
24:06
I'm always skeptical about the role of publishers within this whole process but can I ask you why why are you skeptical about publishers yeah I mean it's issues around the for-profit for-profit publishing are probably more widely known I'm not entirely convinced
24:26
why this additional step needs to be taken but yeah kind of young but I think in the review process would be important to provide specific expert review of open science practices for
24:47
example code or a data review I think that such checks should be implemented on the other hand I think just more more modern publication portals would be nice as well kind of being able to
25:05
dynamically implement the data in websites because we're kind of still running on a bit of an older pdf-based publishing which might not be up to the needs of a modern
25:22
yeah modern science but I think there are probably other people who might answer these questions better than me okay fair enough time for two more quick questions a scientific journal for students by students is such a great idea did you did your interest in the journal lead
25:41
to your interest in open science if not how did you first hear about open science as a concept and I can only second that question because when I talked to a lot of colleagues and friends preparing for this many people said what a great idea we never even heard about this so how do we get the word out about that I mean for me it went very hand in hand kind of this interest
26:04
in in science kind of the scientific process as a very early bachelor students got me into this community that then also supported open science principles more broadly so yeah I think that's kind of the important thing I think in general the reception of towards open science
26:26
but with within the student community is relatively high as if kind of there are certain processes that feel quite counterintuitive early on kind of how publishing is set up which you then
26:40
kind of grow to learn as being usual in the in the process but just aren't that intuitive early on so I think there there is definitely some receptiveness and if you can approach people early on that definitely helps and I think most students just want to do their research properly
27:04
want to read proper research sound research and I think open science helps in providing that so yeah I think just reaching out as early as possible and I think that's one of the strengths as a student-run journalist that we kind of are on a more equal ground of engaging with
27:25
other students and might understand the needs and misconceptions of students better than it might be through teachers but of course it complements each other okay super we have time for one final question here
27:40
a scientific journal excuse me I did that one already let me continue here do you have any success stories on how the students have benefited from the editorial experience has this introduction to open science practices changed their views and deciding where to publish their work in the future I must say no concrete experience because that's unfortunately not
28:04
like not something we properly asked students in our process yet the kind of following up on the career trajectories of students is definitely something we would like to do more in the future um but at least some feedback we get is that is that the period of process is very educational
28:28
to students also by supervisors that it is a highly professional peer review process they go through and I think it's again kind of this being in in this process for the first time
28:45
it just gives you so many so many things you're learning about that that definitely is an educational process for students and hopefully by providing as much open science in that as we can
29:00
we hope to guide students towards doing that later on as well but yeah we'll have to see about that in the future I suppose fantastic Leonard first of all I wanted to thank you for a great presentation as a tradition we want to give you a virtual applause from around the world
29:23
super job there were still a few questions that we couldn't get to I can only say I apologize there are so many fascinating questions and comments on this subject but the people will have a chance to speak to you as well as the other speakers and posters and even with each other with other participants in the upcoming um speakers corner meet the speakers box
29:45
which starts in a few minutes