Format-Free Submissions in Psychology-Related Journals

Scientists have a duty to spend their time, and hence public money, in an efficient manner. One particularly wasteful task concerns the formatting of articles submitted to academic journals. Around a decade or so ago some academics began to challenge this inefficiency and a small number of articles have been published advocating for change. There has, however, been little progress, particularly within psychology. In the present article, we advocate for what is sometimes referred to as the Format-Free Submission. In order to quantify progression, we also examined a sample (n = 500) of psychology-related journals to determine which offer this. Results showed that only 73 (i.e., 14.6%) have formatting requirements that are relatively flexible for initial submissions. We suggest that the current system within psychology publishing is unethical, in that it wastes a huge amount of taxpayers’ money, and that change is needed.