Call for papers: Advancing Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Big Team Social Science (English)

Publicado el 2026-05-07

Description

Large-scale, multisite, and international collaborations grounded in Open Science principles, often referred to as Big Team Science (BTS), have profoundly reshaped how psychological and other behavioral sciences are produced, disseminated, and evaluated. BTS approaches within the behavioral social sciences have often been referred to as “BTSS,” referring to Big Team Social Science. Yet, despite these transformations, BTS initiatives generally, and BTSS in particular, continue to face substantial challenges related to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI). Indeed, existing articles have identified structural inequities, epistemic exclusion, and systemic barriers for researchers from equity deserving groups, including those from Latin America and elsewhere in the Majority World, early-career scholars, women, disabled and/or neurodivergent scientists, LGBTQ+ researchers, and linguistically minoritized communities (e.g., Adetula, A. et al., 2022; Corral-Frías, N. S. et al., 2023; Dáttilo, W., & Rivera-Núñez, T., 2025). These barriers can prevent these groups from leading, or even participating in, BTSS projects.

 

To date, however, these discussions have remained highly dispersed, typically appearing either as brief side notes in broader methodological or commentary papers about BTSS (e.g., Baumgartner et al., 2023; Coles et al., 2022; Miller et. al., 2025), or as individual articles tasked with covering the entirety of JEDI-related issues within a single paper (e.g., Ghai et al., 2025; Jia, 2026; Jeftic et. al. 2024; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Singh et al., 2024). These efforts are crucial, but can hardly do justice to the diversity of relevant sub-topics that exist, the likelihood that different groups and/or world regions will be impacted differently by them, or the breadth of potential solutions that must be considered for addressing them. Thus, this special issue aims to create a theoretically grounded and empirically informed dedicated forum on JEDI challenges in BTS, particularly as it pertains to the behavioral social sciences (e.g., psychology, comparative cognition, etc.). Specifically, our goal is to provide the first comprehensive examination of JEDI issues within BTSS, allowing us to move beyond broad, necessarily shallow overviews to deep, targeted engagement with specific problems and with concrete/practical solutions.

 

Submission types

We invite various submission types in psychological research pertaining to Big Team Social Science, including:

  • Theoretically informed commentaries, conceptual articles, or systematic reviews on specific JEDI-related topics in BTSS
  • Empirical studies examining issues of JEDI in BTSS and/or using BTSS methods
  • Case studies on how JEDI issues in BTSS have impacted and/or been addressed within individual settings/countries/regions
  • Tutorials and methodological innovations for addressing JEDI-related concerns in BTSS
  • Etc.

 

To the extent that discussions of BTS more broadly are relevant to issues in BTSS in particular, we would be happy to consider those submissions as well.

 

Topics

Topics we might imagine appearing in the special issue might include, but would certainly not be limited to: governance, project management, authorship and credit sharing, networking, funding applications and management, language and time zone barriers to participation, epistemic decision-making, the value of time and other forms of invisible labor, Majority/Minority World researchers, race/ethnicity, gender, and disability.

 

Timeline:

 

Proposals:

Researchers with an interest in issues relevant to the themes of this special issue are invited to submit an abstract outlining their proposed article via email to the editors; Dr. Sergio Barbosa de la Torre, Dr. Nadia Saraí Corral-Frías, Dr. Alma Jeftić, and Dr. Kiley Hamlin by July 31st, 2026. Questions prior to proposal submission are welcome.

 

Proposals should include the following:

  • Proposed article title
  • Author list and corresponding author contact information
  • Proposal abstract (maximum 750 words)

 

Given the interest in/relevance of JEDI in BTSS for the entire world, we welcome submissions from and/or about anywhere. That said, given our journal is based in Latin America, we ask that authors provide a brief note in their proposal describing their topic’s potential relevance to/intersection with the Latin American context.

 

Proposal review and submission invitation:

Following proposal review, official submission invitations will be sent by August 30, 2026.

 

If you are aware of any researchers who might wish to participate, or who might know of

anyone who does, please share this call with them; our intention is to maximize our global

reach. Proposals that come in after the official deadline may be considered to the extent that they

would serve to increase global and/or topical representation in the issue.

 

Full manuscript submission for review:

The deadline for full manuscript submissions will be August 30th, 2027 via the APL website (detailed instructions will follow). Submissions will be evaluated through a double-blind peer-review process. The APL journal makes use of the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, which is free for readers, and by policy, there are no costs involved for authors with regard to revision, peer review, or publication.

Submitted articles must follow the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (seventh edition, 2020, https://apastyle.apa.org/) and can be written in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.

 

Final paper publication:

Papers will be published and available online shortly following acceptance. They will officially appear in the August 2028 Special Issue.