Together with Daniel Holt and Andreas Fischer, I started a new project: to launch a new journal, starting in 2015! After talking with our university library, it turns out that they host the OJS software (Open Journal System) which is perfectly well suited for our purpose. The publisher therefore will be „Heidelberg University Press“ – a label that I have waited for since many years.
The name of the new peer-reviewed journal is „Journal of Dynamic Decision Making“ (JDDM) – see the new homepage at journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/jddm. BTW: We explicitely decided not to call it „Journal of Complex Problem Solving“ – CPS is a label used predominantly by German researchers and has not found so much echo abroad. But what is growing according to our impression is research on „naturalistic decision making“ (in the tradition of, e.g., Gary Klein), „dynamic decision making“ (in the tradition of, e.g., Berndt Brehmer, Coty Gonzalez, Dominik Güss), and „dealing with uncertainty“ (in the tradition of, e.g., Dietrich Dörner, Magda Osman).
Why do we think that another journal is needed? According to our impression, it is not so easy for researchers in this area to find outlets that accept non-experimental studies on DDM. And, yes, we are looking for laboratory experiments on DDM, but also for field studies and other scientific sound papers in this area. Papers about cognitive modelling, single case studies, literature reviews, theoretical position papers, reports on tools and methods, etc. are welcome, too! We explicitly encourage high-level replication-studies! We encourage also publication of non-significant results if power is given and the hypotheses were sound.
The American reserarcher Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote recently that there are two types of articles who wants to get published: those that try to be newsworthy (e.g., to be mentioned in The New York Times science section), and those that are important and make a significant contribution to the scientific question at hand. We are clearly interested in the second type of article. Because we have no commercial interests and no commercial publisher in the background, we can wait for good papers!
Another reason for this new journal is „community building“. We want to offer a platform for discussions and exchange: research collegues may comment on papers (e.g., in an online forum); research tools, cognitive models, and even data can be uploaded from there to foster transparent and replicable research.
What are the unique points that are important to us besides community building? The option to have an open-access outlet for research on DDM is important to us, also the fact that this outlet is free of charge for both readers and authors. And: no delays for publication! Articles will be published as soon as peer-review is successful finished. For sure, JDDM uses peer-review as the fundamental mechanism for quality control but our intention is not to have a high rejection rate but to reach high-quality articles in the sense of enabling discussions between experts in the field. Trying to improve a good paper and making it an excellent one – that is the mission for our reviewers.
We are happy that an international editorial board is supporting our work. Currently, the board consists of Beno Csapo (Szeged, Hungary), Dietrich Dörner (Bamberg, Germany), Coty Gonzalez (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), Dominik Güss (Jacksonville, FL, USA), Oswald Huber (Fribourg, Switzerland), Gyongyver Molnar (Szeged, Hungary) and David Tobinski (Essen, Germany). We will enlarge this board step by step soon.
We now hope and wait for interesting papers that will fill-up the first volume of this new journal – and for the comments of our reader that will help us sharpen the focus of JDDM! The first submission (besides our editorial statement) is under way already!