The editorial team is pleased to release the second issue of volume 41 of Politics and the Life Sciences. This issue adds six articles to the journal’s quickly growing list of open access articles. It features five articles selected with a competitive call for proposals for research to be funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) on the broad topic of “Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues.” The call solicited proposals for registered reports that use “life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the study of the intersection of science and political attitudes.” The resulting articles address health data sharing behavior, attitudes toward environmental justice, links between physical formidability and views on the climate, racial and ethnic variation in negativity bias, and interoceptive sensitivity and political ideology. The guest editors provide an incisive overview and synthesis of the articles in their “Introduction” (Friesen et al., Reference Friesen, Ksiazkiewicz and McDermott2022).
These articles continue the journal’s and APLS’s commitment to the promotion of rigorous scientific practices through registered reports (RRs). RRs require researchers to clearly state their hypotheses and detail their analysis plans before beginning data collection and completing their manuscript. In addition, they require journal editors to accept a submitted RR for publication or reject it prior to knowing the results. The objective of this approach is to minimize bias in researchers, who face myriad consequential decisions during the research process, and in journal editors, who want the positive attention for their journals that comes with the publication of “novel” and “significant” results. Credible issues for consideration have been raised about registered reports, including in this journal (McDermott, Reference McDermott2022). But mounting evidence suggests that compared to non-RR research, RRs are resulting in significantly fewer supported hypotheses (i.e., more null and negative results), greater computational reproducibility (i.e., improved replication of quantitative results), and greater perceived article quality (i.e., better methodological rigor and overall quality) (Chambers & Tzavella, Reference Chambers and Tzavella2022).
This is the third round of registered reports that APLS has funded. Its commitment has been substantial. This round of funding brings the total awarded by APLS to more than $35,000, embodied in 16 published RRs, over the last three years. In a time of ongoing concern over the finances of academic publishing, this constitutes a large proportion of the revenues the journal has generated for the Association over this time period. APLS is a scholarly society that puts its money where its mouth is. And, consistent with Chambers and Tzavella’s (Reference Chambers and Tzavella2022) reporting on null and negative results, the investment has paid off with a number of unexpected findings in the RRs published in this issue and previously.
The commitment of the guest editors – Amanda Friesen, Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, and Rose McDermott – was also substantial. They professionally and gracefully guided the proposal and review processes to fruition through multiple submissions and re-submissions, enthusiastic reviewers and vanishing reviewers, as well as relentless deadlines and a pesky editor-in-chief. Thank you, Amanda, Aleks, and Rose.
The editorial team is also pleased to announce that starting with this issue PLS is awarding open science badges for open data, open materials, and preregistration. The intent of these badges is to promote scientific practices that enhance the credibility of published findings by improving transparency and facilitating independent verification of the findings. The badges, which appear in Figure 1, will be displayed on articles for which the authors have made their data and/or materials publicly available or for which the authors have preregistered their study design. To be eligible for one or more of the badges, authors must provide an open scientific practices statement that includes a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or other permanent path for accessing the specified documentation (e.g., raw data files, analysis coding scripts, and/or preregistration materials) in a qualifying repository. A qualifying repository is public, open-access, and committed to preserving the documentation and to keeping it publicly accessible via the internet in perpetuity. Examples of suitable repositories include the Open Science Framework (OSF), EGAP, AEA Registry, and the various Dataverse networks. Personal websites and most departmental websites do not qualify as repositories. Readers may note that all of the registered reports published in this issue have been awarded all three open science badges.
Open Science Badges
Among the remaining articles in this issue, two address topics related to pandemics - Lucero et al. (Reference Lucero, Diaz-Kope and Galadima2022) on U.S. state responses to COVID-19 and Chamberlain and Yanus (Reference Chamberlain and Yanus2022) on the 1918 influenza pandemic and extremism – and Ksiazkiewicz (Reference Ksiazkiewicz2022) proposes a far-reaching research agenda on chronobiology and politics in the journal’s new Letter format, which is intended to bring attention to emerging scientific issues in biopolitics in about 1,000 words.
The publication of this many articles requires a great deal of support. The editorial team thanks the dozens of reviewers who provided their expertise on the published articles in this issue as well as on the manuscripts that did not make it through the review process. The team thanks the authors who trust PLS enough to submit their work for evaluation and consideration. And, finally, the editors thank APLS and Cambridge University Press for their ongoing support of the journal and the scientific endeavor.
