Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A cognitive psychology lab posts a working paper on PsyArXiv ahead of journal submission so collaborators and the field can cite and comment on it via its DOI while formal peer review is still underway elsewhere.
- Is an instance
A research team deposits a registered report's Stage 1 protocol on PsyArXiv as part of an open-science workflow, alongside data and materials hosted in a linked OSF project.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Describing a PsyArXiv preprint as "peer reviewed" based on its presence on the server — pre-moderation screens for scope and completeness, not for methodological or scientific rigor.
- Not an instance
Treating a preprint that was later formally published in a journal as unchanged from its PsyArXiv version — journal peer review frequently produces revisions between the two.
Editorial commentary
If you arrived here looking for a PsyArXiv login page, there isn’t one. PsyArXiv has no account system of its own. It is a service running on the Open Science Framework (OSF), so you sign in with an OSF account at osf.io and reach the server at osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv. The same credentials cover your OSF projects, registrations, files and any other OSF-hosted preprint service, and there is no separate PsyArXiv password to reset. The blog at blog.psyarxiv.com is where policy announcements are published; it is not the submission interface.
What changed in 2025 and 2026, and what it means for your submission
The most consequential recent change for authors is the moderation switch. PsyArXiv moved from post-moderation to pre-moderation on 19 August 2025. Before that date a deposit went public the moment it was uploaded; since then a volunteer moderator has to approve it first, so there is now a queue between “submitted” and “publicly citable”. SIPS has described the change as a response to low-quality and AI-generated material accumulating on the server, and has been explicit that pre-moderation costs a substantial amount of volunteer time.
The moderation policy was revised again in March 2026. The revision added a check that the submitting author has complied with the service’s terms of service, and allowed moderators to weigh an author’s past publication record when judging scholarly expertise for non-empirical formats such as reviews, critiques, commentaries, case studies and opinion pieces. In practice that means an empirical report from an unknown author is treated differently from a sweeping review from an author with no publication history in the area.
None of this is peer review, and the operational definition above is deliberate on that point. Moderation is a threshold check on scope, scholarliness and internal consistency. It does not assess whether a design is sound, an analysis is correct, or the conclusions follow from the data.
How to post a preprint: the submission workflow
Submission runs entirely through OSF. From the OSF preprints discover page, or from your “My Preprints” page, you pick PsyArXiv from the list of preprint services and then work through a single submission form. What it asks for:
- Title and abstract, typed or pasted into the form. You cannot upload an abstract as a file, and OSF enforces a minimum length of 20 characters – PsyArXiv’s moderators separately expect it to be long enough to actually represent the contribution.
- The manuscript file, uploaded from your computer or selected from an existing OSF project.
- Metadata: contributors (registered or unregistered, each assigned read, read+write or administrator permission, with a drag-to-reorder author list that determines citation order), a licence, affiliated institutions, subjects, optional tags, and – if the work has already appeared in a journal – the publication DOI, date and citation.
- Author assertions: whether the data behind the analyses are publicly available (with URLs), whether the study was preregistered, and any conflicts of interest. The conflict-of-interest assertion is made on behalf of every listed author, and selecting “no” is itself an assertion that none exist.
- Supplements, an optional step connecting an OSF project holding data, code or protocols. See the OSF Projects phase-out below, because this step is going away.
Pressing submit does not publish. The deposit enters the moderation queue, and PsyArXiv states that under normal operations moderation takes 24 to 72 hours – for a new version as well as a new deposit.
Two things speed that up, both from PsyArXiv’s own March 2026 moderation notice: state author affiliations clearly on the first page, and make the title, author names, author order and abstract in the PDF match the metadata you typed exactly. A mismatch between the paper and the submission form is the single most common reason a deposit sits pending. For submissions reporting primary or secondary data, putting the institutional review board record at the start also shortens the review, and PsyArXiv asks that supervisors of student work be added as co-authors with their permission and a CRediT statement.
What moderators check, and what is out of scope
Moderation is a fixed checklist, not a review. Moderators confirm that the contribution is scholarly and is psychology; that the title accurately describes the content and matches the metadata exactly; that every contributing author is named on the paper, in the same order as the metadata; that a contact email address appears on the title page; and that an abstract is present in the metadata and consistent with any abstract in the PDF. They also check the submission against the terms of service, under which you assert that the content is yours or posted with permission, that it is the author’s version and not the publisher’s copyrighted version, that the work was conducted ethically, and that any use of AI or large language models has been disclosed.
Several categories are excluded outright: joke submissions; incomplete submissions such as a reference list or a book’s table of contents; a publisher’s version of a paper; student coursework and class assignments; and standalone supplementary materials – questionnaires, protocols, data dictionaries, proposals – which belong in an OSF project or another repository rather than on the preprint server. Preregistrations and study plans belong in an OSF registration. Since the March 2026 revision, slide decks, note-form working papers, research proposals and manuscripts with incomplete methods are also out of scope, on the stated ground that they are not complete enough to be an independent contribution; Stage 1 registered reports remain in scope.
PsyArXiv’s AI policy permits LLM use for proofreading, sentence restructuring and grammar checks, but requires explicit disclosure of any substantive use, and treats extensive undisclosed use as a violation that will be rejected or withdrawn. A rejection normally comes with a reason and, in most cases, an invitation to resubmit; repeatedly resubmitting without addressing the moderator’s point is itself a policy violation. Where a deposit was rejected without an invitation to resubmit, or withdrawn, there is a separate appeals form that a moderation supervisor reviews.
Versioning: each version carries its own DOI
COS implemented DOI versioning across all of its OSF-hosted preprint services, PsyArXiv included, following the recommendation of Crossref’s preprint metadata advisory group. The consequences are practical:
- Every accepted version of the manuscript file is minted a distinct DOI, with the versions linked to one another through Crossref.
- Every version, including the first, carries a version suffix in its URL –
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/abcde_v1, then_v2, and so on. - Editing only the metadata does not mint a new DOI. Only uploading a new file creates a version.
- Under pre-moderation, each new version must be accepted by a moderator before it becomes public, and only administrator-level contributors can create one.
- Each version accumulates its own views and downloads, so the analytics attached to a
_v1are not the figures for the work as a whole.
OSF registers these DOIs through Crossref using a preprint-specific metadata schema, and sends an isPreprintOf relationship linking the deposit to the journal article when you supply a publication DOI – which is the mechanism that lets indexes connect a preprint to its version of record, and a good reason to go back and add that DOI once a paper is accepted.
The scope is wider than the word “preprint” suggests
PsyArXiv’s stated scope covers author versions of preprints and postprints of original qualitative and quantitative research reports, Stage 1 and Stage 2 registered reports, books, book chapters, reviews, critiques, posters and research commentaries. That makes it usable as a subject repository for an accepted author manuscript, which is a green open access deposit route, as well as a place to post work before submission. Whether a given deposit satisfies a funder or institutional open access mandate depends on that policy’s requirements for version, licence and embargo, none of which PsyArXiv sets on the funder’s behalf.
Citing a PsyArXiv deposit without misrepresenting it
Every accepted deposit gets its own DOI, which is what makes a PsyArXiv preprint citable in its own right rather than as grey literature. Two habits keep that citation honest. First, cite the specific version you read. Since COS introduced DOI versioning across its OSF-hosted preprint services, each accepted version of a deposit is minted its own DOI and carries its own URL suffix, so there is a precise identifier for the exact text you used – a generic reference to “the PsyArXiv preprint” now points at a set of separately identified objects rather than one. Second, if the work has since appeared in a journal, cite the version of record rather than the preprint, or cite both and say which claim came from which; peer review routinely changes results sections and abstracts between the two.
Withdrawal is narrower than most authors expect
PsyArXiv states that an accepted deposit can be withdrawn only where there is a legal obligation to do so. A withdrawal does not delete the record: the deposit is replaced by a tombstone page that preserves the original metadata and the reason for withdrawal and locks the item against further modification, following the pattern described under DOI tombstone. Authors who treat a preprint server as a scratch space they can clear later are working from the wrong model. Post when you would be content for the deposit to be a permanent part of your public record.
Three refinements matter in practice. A submission still pending moderation under the pre-moderation system may be freely withdrawn by its authors for any reason, because it has not yet been published or assigned a DOI – the narrow legal-obligation test bites only once a moderator has accepted it. A withdrawal request attaches to a specific version, so clearing a multi-version deposit means requesting each version or going to COS support. And for the ordinary case, where authors are simply no longer confident in the findings, PsyArXiv’s stated route is not withdrawal at all: post a new version consisting of a single page announcing the withdrawal and asking readers not to cite or distribute the earlier versions, which stay available in the version list. PsyArXiv also reserves the right to withdraw at its own discretion in narrow circumstances – legal concerns, public safety, or terms-of-service violations – and handles copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through the COS terms of use.
Scale, funding and sibling servers
Marking PsyArXiv’s tenth anniversary on 15 August 2026, SIPS reported that the community has published over 58,000 preprints, and that the service now takes in roughly 100 submissions a day, handled by a volunteer moderation pool of more than 100 people. Those figures are as reported by SIPS and were not independently counted by CASRAI; treat them as an order-of-magnitude indication rather than citable statistics. There are no author-facing or reader-facing charges: costs are covered by contributions from member institution libraries, which is why the service carries no article processing charge of any kind. PsyArXiv sits alongside other discipline-specific servers on the same OSF infrastructure, including SocArXiv for the social sciences, and the general behaviour of that infrastructure is described under OSF Preprints.
On discovery, PsyArXiv’s member advisory board listed in November 2025 where its content is indexed: Google and Google Scholar, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Dimensions, The Lens, CORE, the aggregated OSF Preprints search, Crossref Metadata Search, ORCID (where you associate the deposit with your ORCID iD) and Clarivate’s Preprint Citation Index. Two absences are worth knowing because researchers routinely assume otherwise: PubMed Central does not index PsyArXiv content, and although Scopus began indexing preprints from selected sources in 2023, PsyArXiv is not one of them.
The OSF Projects phase-out does not move PsyArXiv
This is the change most likely to be misread, and it is the reason to check the hosting arrangement rather than rely on an older summary. In August 2026 the Center for Open Science announced it is phasing out OSF Projects, the tool researchers use to post data, code and materials. SIPS responded on 11 August 2026 with a clarification worth stating plainly, because the two services are easy to conflate:
- PsyArXiv is not being phased out. OSF-hosted preprint services are separate from OSF Projects, and only OSF Projects is affected by the announcement.
- PsyArXiv remains hosted on OSF. Authors still upload through OSF and readers still download from the OSF website.
- PsyArXiv is run and maintained by SIPS volunteers, not by COS or OSF. Policy is set by the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board, whose members are approved by the SIPS executive committee, and SIPS pays the hosting costs from member institution and donor funds. COS supplies the platform; it does not operate the service.
- The one concrete loss for authors: once the phase-out concludes, you will no longer be able to connect an OSF Project to a PsyArXiv preprint. Linking data, code and materials hosted elsewhere will still work, so the supplements step in the submission form becomes a link-out rather than an OSF integration.
- SIPS states that existing deposits are unaffected and that preprints approved by a moderator are maintained indefinitely.
How journals and funders treat a PsyArXiv deposit
The prior-publication question is what stops most psychologists from posting, and for the discipline’s largest publisher it is settled. APA’s publishing policies treat a preprint as prior dissemination to be disclosed, not as prior publication that disqualifies a submission: authors who have already posted to an archive such as PsyArXiv are asked to include a link to the preprint in the author note, and after acceptance may post the accepted manuscript to a preprint server, institutional repository or personal site. The duplicate-publication rule APA does enforce is about publishing the same data more than once in the journal literature, which is a different act from posting an author manuscript.
That is APA’s position, not a universal one. PsyArXiv’s own guidance is to check the specific journal, and it points authors to Jisc’s Open Policy Finder (formerly SHERPA/RoMEO) for publisher and journal archiving policies. The one hard constraint PsyArXiv imposes itself is that you may post the author’s version but never the publisher’s typeset, copyrighted version – and that complying with the journal’s copyright policy is the author’s responsibility, not the server’s.
Funder open access mandates are a separate question with a less convenient answer: a PsyArXiv deposit generally does not satisfy one. As PsyArXiv’s member advisory board set out in August 2026, NSF and NIH public access policies now require peer-reviewed publications to be made freely and publicly available immediately on publication, with no embargo, in designated repositories – which a preprint that has not been peer reviewed does not meet, although nothing in those policies prohibits preprinting. Under Horizon Europe the obligation likewise attaches to the published version or the final peer-reviewed accepted manuscript, so a preprint alone does not discharge it, even though preprints are explicitly encouraged there as good scientific practice. UKRI’s policy also encourages preprints while stating that they sit outside its scope. The workable posture is to post to PsyArXiv for speed, priority and access, and to satisfy the mandate separately with the accepted manuscript through the route the funder specifies.
Related terms
- Preprint – the general object class this server holds.
- OSF Preprints – the hosting infrastructure PsyArXiv runs on.
- Open Science Framework (OSF) – the platform supplying the account you log in with.
- SocArXiv – the sibling social-science server on the same infrastructure.
- Version of record – what a preprint is not.
- Green open access – the deposit route a PsyArXiv postprint can satisfy.
Sources checked 23 August 2026: the PsyArXiv blog’s About and policies page and its moderation-policy posts (blog.psyarxiv.com), which carry the 19 August 2025 pre-moderation date and the March 2026 policy revision; the SIPS post of 11 August 2026 on PsyArXiv and the OSF Projects phase-out; the PsyArXiv member advisory board posts of 13 August 2026 on preprints and public access policy and of November 2025 on discovery and indexing; the COS/OSF help documentation on creating, versioning and withdrawing a preprint; and the American Psychological Association’s publishing policies on prior publication and preprint posting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a separate PsyArXiv account to log in?
No. PsyArXiv has no account system of its own; it runs on the Open Science Framework, so you sign in with an OSF account at osf.io and reach the server at osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv. The same OSF credentials work for your other OSF projects and preprint services, and there is no separate PsyArXiv password to reset.
Is PsyArXiv part of OSF?
Yes. PsyArXiv is a discipline-specific preprint service running on OSF’s infrastructure, alongside sibling servers such as SocArXiv for the social sciences. The general behaviour of that shared infrastructure is described under OSF Preprints.
Is a PsyArXiv preprint peer reviewed?
No. Posting on PsyArXiv is not peer review. Since 19 August 2025 deposits go through pre-moderation, a threshold check on scope, scholarliness and internal consistency carried out by a volunteer moderator, but that check does not assess whether a study’s design is sound, its analysis is correct, or its conclusions follow from the data.
Does it cost anything to post on PsyArXiv?
No. PsyArXiv carries no article processing charge and there are no author-facing or reader-facing fees. Costs are covered by contributions from member institution libraries.
Can a PsyArXiv preprint be withdrawn?
Only in narrow circumstances: PsyArXiv states that an accepted deposit can be withdrawn only where there is a legal obligation to do so. A withdrawal does not delete the record; the deposit is replaced by a tombstone page that preserves the original metadata and the reason for withdrawal.
How should I cite a PsyArXiv preprint that was later published in a journal?
Cite the specific version you used, since authors can post revisions and the DOI resolves to the deposit rather than a frozen snapshot of the text you actually used. If the work has since appeared in a journal, cite the version of record instead, or cite both and state which claim came from which, since peer review often changes results and abstracts between the two.
How long does PsyArXiv moderation take?
Under normal operations PsyArXiv expects moderation within 24 to 72 hours, for a new version as well as a first deposit. The most common cause of a longer wait is a mismatch between the manuscript and the submission metadata – the title, author names or author order differing between the PDF and the form – which an author can fix by editing the file or the metadata to match.
Does posting on PsyArXiv count as prior publication for a journal?
For APA journals, no. APA treats a preprint as prior dissemination to be disclosed rather than prior publication, and asks authors to include a link to the preprint in the author note. Other publishers set their own rules, so check the specific journal – PsyArXiv points authors to Jisc’s Open Policy Finder, formerly SHERPA/RoMEO. What you may never post is the publisher’s typeset version; PsyArXiv accepts the author’s version only.
Does a PsyArXiv preprint satisfy an NIH, NSF or Horizon Europe open access requirement?
Generally not. Those policies attach to the peer-reviewed publication or the final accepted manuscript, and a preprint that has not been through peer review does not meet them – though none of them prohibits preprinting. Use PsyArXiv for speed, priority and access, and satisfy the mandate separately through the route the funder specifies.
Does each version of a PsyArXiv preprint have a different DOI?
Yes. Since COS introduced DOI versioning across its OSF-hosted preprint services, every accepted version of the manuscript file receives its own DOI and a version suffix in its URL (_v1, _v2 and so on), with the versions linked through Crossref. Editing only the metadata does not create a new version or mint a new DOI.
Is PsyArXiv affected by the OSF Projects phase-out?
The preprint service itself is not. SIPS confirmed in August 2026 that OSF-hosted preprint services are separate from OSF Projects and that only OSF Projects is being phased out. The one practical change is that after the phase-out concludes you will no longer be able to connect an OSF Project to a PsyArXiv preprint, though you can still link to data and materials hosted elsewhere.
Who actually runs PsyArXiv – SIPS or the Center for Open Science?
SIPS. PsyArXiv is run and maintained by SIPS volunteers, with policy set by the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board and hosting costs paid by SIPS from member institution and donor funds. COS supplies the OSF platform the service runs on; it does not operate the service or set its policies.
What gets rejected by PsyArXiv moderators?
Work that is out of scope or incomplete: joke submissions, reference lists or tables of contents, a publisher’s typeset version, student coursework, and standalone materials such as questionnaires, protocols or proposals. Since March 2026 slide decks, note-form working papers, research proposals and manuscripts with incomplete methods are also out of scope. Extensive undisclosed use of AI or large language models is a terms-of-service violation and will be rejected or withdrawn. Stage 1 registered reports remain in scope.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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