Steps for Submitting a Manuscript

1. Prepare your manuscript according to the general PsychOpen GOLD formatting guidelines based on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition (i.e., "APA Style"). In addition, authors must ensure their submission manuscripts comply with PsychOpen's Guidelines on publication ethics. Note that submissions are subject to plagiarism screening.
2. Make sure your work complies with our transparency guidelines, supporting reproducible, and open science.
3. Make sure you are submitting an article that fits the journal’s article types. Please consult the accepted article types before submitting and verify your article complies with the respective submission guidelines and limits for words, references, figures, and tables.
4. Submit your manuscript (incl. all relevant files, e.g., title page) via the journal's submission system (OJS).
   The manuscript submission process in OJS is split into the following five steps:
   
   • Step 1. Start
     • Select your article type and verify the submission checklist
     • Add comments for the editors if necessary
     • Agree to the copyright and privacy statement
   • Step 2. Upload Submission
     • Upload the article’s components
     • Review the details of your uploaded files
     • Add another file or complete and continue with Step 3
   • Step 3. Enter Metadata
     • Enter the article’s title
     • Include the article’s abstract
     • Include the articles’ keywords
     • If needed add contributors/(co-)authors to your submission
   • Step 4. Confirmation
     • Finish your submission
   • Step 5. Next Steps
     • Note the information about the next steps in the submission and review process

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• Original Work: The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently submitted to another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in “Comments to the Editor”).
• Acknowledging and Citing Previous Work: Previous or concurrent publications of the author(s) based on the same or closely related research are properly acknowledged and cited. It is made clear in the manuscript in which way(s) it represents a novel contribution to warrant consideration for publication. Note: Replications of previous work are explicitly welcomed if identified as such.
• Authorship: All authors of the submitted manuscript are named in the submission's title page. All authors of the submitted manuscript are aware of and approve its submission to the journal. Contributions that fall short of authorship are mentioned in the Acknowledgments section of the submission. For masked review, please upload the title page separately.
• Consent for Data Storage: All authors of the submitted manuscript consent to the storage of their personal data transferred in conjunction with the submission and in accordance with the journal's privacy statement.
• Ethical Standards: If applicable, all relevant ethical standards for research involving human or non-human (animal) participants have been met. The manuscript includes an ethics statement that provides the appropriate information (e.g., applied standards, institutional review, etc.).
• Data anonymization (if applicable): All research data have been fully anonymized.
• Use of Copyrighted Materials: No copyrighted material is used unless that material has also been made available under a CC-BY license.