The Journal of Research in Personality recently announced that they will begin encouraging authors to attach their R code files (and, presumably, the data that goes with them) to their submissions, which will be accessible to readers through the online version of the publication. They just put out a call for papers for a special edition that will show off the new feature. The full announcement from ARP can be read after the jump.

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Data sharing and replication of previously published work are topics currently high on the agenda for many of us. Besides increased transparency and quality control, these initiatives promote better understanding of published work. In addition they allow authors to receive a quality stamp not only on their hypothesis and results, but also on their statistical methods and actual data.

The editors of the Journal of Research in Personality recently published an editorial discussing these topics in an attempt to set new standards for JRP (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661300069X). As a next step, JRP is now working on developing a tool that will allow authors who use the statistical package R to supply their underlying code with their published article. The R code will then be made visible (with R-code highlighting) on Sciencedirect, embedded within the article itself. For some analyses, the code may actually be able to run in a special module on Sciencedirect (though the technical developments are ongoing at Elsevier).

We are looking to collect a number of high quality articles to be presented as a special issue that demonstrates these new features. This issue will be used as a showcase for this initiative, will be made Open Access (at no cost to the author) and will hopefully encourage future authors to take advantage of this new resource. Articles submitted for this special issue should address some topic related to personality psychology and should meet JRP standards for publication. Authors should submit well-documented R code that can be published alongside the article. Ideally, authors who submit an article for this special issue will also be able to make their data publicly available.

Papers should be submitted through the JRP portal (http://ees.elsevier.com/yjrpe/) by February 1st, 2014 (though if you have an idea for a paper that cannot be completed within this time frame, please contact Richard Lucas, the editor-in-chief (lucasri@msu.edu). Any other questions can also be directed to the editor. We anticipate that the special issue will be published in late 2014.