What does a future archive of scientific psychology look like?
Helena Paterson, Anna Butters, Brendan Schuetze
In 2025, PsyArXiv instituted a pre-moderation system where uploads have to be accepted before they become visible to the public. This process ensures more consistency, but also places the responsibility of shaping the archive into the hands of a small number of volunteers. Moderators have to define what counts as scientific psychology to decide which submissions are within scope. Because some more generalist archives have closed due to an overwhelming amount of AI-generated submissions, authors whose work does not neatly fall into a specific discipline are shopping around and some are testing the waters to see if PsyArXiv fits. In this hackathon, we will explore how to best define scientific psychology for the purposes of PsyArXiv, balancing preserving integrity while not closing it to alternative voices. What are the minimal standards we should expect a preprint to have in order that it can contribute to scientific discourse?