Policies

As a general rule, Measurement Instruments in the Social Sciences (MISS) follows the policies and guidelines established by the PsychOpen GOLD program (please see details here). Published articles reflect the opinions, views, and statements of the authors. The journal, its editors, GESIS, and ZPID assume no responsibility for opinions, views, and statements by the authors of published articles.

Ethics Policy

General Guidelines

PsychOpen journals require that all manuscripts comply with PsychOpen's Guidelines on Publication Ethics. The journals implements clear editorial policies for ethical publishing, ensuring fair, unbiased, and swift reviewing, handling possible conflicts of interest (of authors, reviewers, and editors), preventing research misconduct (including fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism), and promoting research transparency.

Plagiarism Screening

This journal uses Similarity Check, a multi-publisher initiative to screen published and submitted content for originality. Similarity Check uses the iThenticate software, which checks submissions against millions of published research papers (the Similarity Check database), documents on the web, and other relevant sources. These submitted papers are not retained in the Similarity Check system after they have been checked.

Read more at Crossresf's Similarity Check & Reseachers page.

Openness and Transparency

Infrastructure

To facilitate consistency in standards, the development and improvement of PsychOpen GOLD services, and monitoring of open science practices, MISS agrees to use the products and services offered by ZPID to implement open science practices. “Supporting Information” published with an article (e.g., data, scripts, materials, measures, methods, workflows), study protocols for Registered Reports, etc. must be deposited (non-exclusively) at ZPID’s repository PsychArchives. Persistent identifiers (usually DOIs) provided by PsychArchives are used within articles to refer to these resources.

Enhancing Openness and Transparency

MISS encourages and supports certain paper formats that enhance openness and transparency in research, replicability, and early publishing:

MISS accepts the submission of Registered Reports (RR). To ensure protocol transparency, accepted Registered Reports (study protocols) are registered as a "Preregistration" at ZPID’s repository PsychArchives or another institutional registry supporting study preregistration (i.e., publication of immutable, time-stamped records of study protocols).
MISS accepts the publication of carefully conducted replications as well as meta-analytical approaches to foster cumulative research and research syntheses.
MISS supports the publication of preprints (i.e., non-peer-reviewed draft versions). Publication of preprints prior to submission is accepted (for details, see below).

Preprint Policy

As part of MISS's submission process, authors are required to confirm that the submission has neither been previously published nor submitted elsewhere (and will not be submitted elsehwere while under consideration at MISS). However, prior to submitting their article and prior to acceptance and publication in MISS, authors may make their submissions available as preprints on personal or public websites.¹ Published conference presentations, posters, etc. are considered preprints, provided they do not appear in a peer-reviewed, published conference proceeding. After a manuscript has been published in MISS, we suggest to link to the final article version, using the assigned article DOI.

TOP Guidelines

MISS implements the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. All empirical papers reporting data need to comply with these guidelines. For details, please consult our information here.

Open Access

MISS provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. MISS also charges no author fees for submission or publication of papers. Thus, publishing in MISS is completely free of charge and open to anyone regardless of their financial resources. Neither authors nor readers are expected to pay anything.

Dissemination

MISS permits and encourages authors to post accepted or published articles on public websites, social media, repositories, and other platforms, while providing bibliographic details that credit its publication in MISS. This practice is consistent with the Copyright policy explained above.

Permanency of Content

In accordance with generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing, MISS does not alter articles after publication.² In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct, MISS publishes corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions (see below).

MISS participates in the CrossMark scheme, a multi-publisher initiative that has developed a standard way for readers to locate the current version of an article. By applying the CrossMark policies, MISS is committed to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur. Clicking on the CrossMark logo (at the top of a MISS article or the article landing page) will yield the current status of an article and direct to the latest published version; it may also show additional information such as new peer review reports.

Corrections

In cases of serious errors that affect the article in a material way (but do not fully invalidate its results) or significantly impair the reader's understanding or evaluation of the article, MISS publishes a correction note that is linked to the published article. The published article will be left unchanged.

Retractions (Expressions of Concern)

In accordance with the "Retraction Guidelines" by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), MISS will retract a published article if

there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g., data fabrication) or honest error (e.g., miscalculation),
the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission, or justification (i.e., cases of redundant publication),
it constitutes plagiarism,
it reports unethical research.

An article is retracted by publishing a retraction notice that is linked to or replaces the retracted article. MISS will make any effort to clearly identify a retracted article as such. If an investigation is underway that might result in the retraction of an article, MISS may choose to alert readers by publishing an expression of concern .

Archiving

This journal ensures the long-term availability of its contents by partnering with CLOCKSS. The CLOCKSS system has permission to ingest, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit.

Copyright

Authors who publish with MISS agree to the following terms:

Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Under the CC BY license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors grant others permission to use the content of publications in MISS in whole or in part provided that the original work is properly cited. Users (redistributors) of MISS are required to cite the original source, including the author's names, MISS as the initial source of publication, year of publication, volume number, and DOI (if available).
Authors may publish the manuscript in any other journal or medium, but any such subsequent publication must include a notice that the manuscript was initially published by MISS.
Authors grant MISS the right of first publication. Although authors remain the copyright owner, they grant the journal the irrevocable, non-exclusive rights to publish, reproduce, publicly distribute and display, and transmit their article or portions thereof in any manner.

^{1. A preprint is a version of an academic article or other publication before it has been submitted for peer-review . ↩}^{2. "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible" ( STM, 2006. Preservation of the objective record of science). ↩}