New open-access journals aplenty, usually nothing to get too excited about. Just a few minutes ago, I received an invitation to submit a paper for a special issue of the open-access International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. For just E850 I would have the honour of contributing to this 0.33 impact factor journal (somewhat surprisingly it has an impact factor)—A clear case of straight-to-spam.

Yet today I read an article on the Nature website about a new open-access initiative that seems very promising. It is called PeerJ, and is founded by Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt. These are credible names, previously linked to PLoS ONE, the most successfull open-access journal, and Mendeley, a free reference management service.

Essentially, PeerJ is a members-only peer-reviewed open-access journal. Members-only, because in order to submit you have to become a member of the journal. Peer-reviewed, because papers are refereed by experts. And open-access, because all papers are freely released under a Creative Commons license.

So far nothing remarkable (aside perhaps from the membership), but there are two things that set PeerJ apart from the competition. The first is the pricing. Authors pay for a lifetime membership that allows you to publish one, two, or unlimited papers a year. For respectively, $99 (US), $169, and $259 per lifetime! There are no additional fees, so once you are a member, publishing a paper is free. Compare this to the $3,000 per paper that Elsevier charges for sponsored articles, and even the $1,350 …

Cogsci.nl supports the open-access model of academic publishing. A journal is open-access when its content is free of charge, easily accessible, and available for re-use with the sole restriction that attribution be given to the source.

See this article for a perspective on the difference between open-access journals, and journals that offer content for free, but under restrictive licenses.

Below you can find a list of open-access journals (and open-access options in journals that are not exclusively open-access) in the broader field of cognitive science and neuroscience This list is obviously incomplete. Please feel free to post suggestions!

• Behavioral and Brain Functions focuses on behavioral aspects of neuroscience and on behavioral dysfunction.
  
• BMC Neuroscience focuses on all aspects of neuroscience.
  
• Brain and Behavior covers a wide range of topics within the broader field of neuroscience.
• Elsevier Sponsored Articles is an open-access option that is available for many journals published by Elsevier.
• i-Perception is the open-access sister journal to Perception. As the name suggests, the focus of the journal is on perception research.
• Journal of Eye Movement Research is a young journal that focuses on eye movement research.
• Journal of Neuroscience is the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience that offers an open-access (Open Choice) option.
• Journal of Vision focuses on vision and eye movement research. (Note: free content, but not open-access)
• Frontiers in Psychology is a collection of journals, each focusing on a different aspect of psychological science
  
• Open Biology is a journal of the Royal Society that …

Let's face it, psychological experiments tend to produce flimsy data. As a result, it often happens that experimental psychologists fail to replicate the results of others. You can deal with a failure to replicate gracefully, defending your results if necessary, and ultimately admitting you were wrong if indeed you were. Since psychologists are wrong all the time there really should be no shame in this.

Recently(ish), there were two high-profile non-replications that attracted considerable attention. I think these two cases illustrate the different ways in which scientists can interact. And I won't be coy about passing moral judgement here: There is a good and a bad way.

The first case is kind of amusing, I think. It concerns a study by Daryl J. Bem that purportedly proves the existence of precognition, clairvoyance, or whatever you want to call it. From the abstract:

"This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by 'time-reversing' well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur."

The fact that this was published in a serious scientific journal is bound to draw scepticism. I hear the taxpayer wondering: "Is this what you guys are doing with my money?" Well... yes.

But on the other hand you could also argue that the publication of this paper demonstrates that researchers can be quite open minded. Bem's study may be silly, but it's not flawed in any obvious way, so it deserves …

Over the past month and a half or so, I ran a user poll on the OpenSesame documentation website. The goal of this poll was to find out who the OpenSesame users are and what they would like to see improved.

I received responses from 250 individual users, who answered on average a bit more than two questions each. Since I estimate the number of active users to be around 1000, I was pleasantly surprised that such a large proportion of users took the time to participate. If you are among those 250, thank you!

The results are shown in full in the graph below, but I will briefly highlight the most noteworthy (to me) results:

Most users are young researchers, who have not been using OpenSesame for very long. Perhaps this is not too surprising, because the project started only a little over a year ago.

Furthermore, most users feel that stability should be the main focus of development, although it's a reasonably close call with the other options. This fits with the fact that most users describe their experience with OpenSesame as 'mostly smooth'. This is not too bad, I think, but the goal is obviously to have the majority of users report a 'smooth' experience. Particularly users who require non-Latin alphabets are likely to run into issues, which is also reflected by the fact that a substantial number of respondents feel that development should focus on this aspect. For those who have had a bumpy ride using …

In the video below you see two lines that are alternately shifted a bit to the left and the right relative to each other. Or are they? When the lines are presented continuously, you can clearly see that they are not shifted at all. They are perfectly aligned!

This is a variation of the Flash Grab illusion, designed by Patrick Cavanagh and Stuart Anstis, the same duo that is responsible for this illusion. Below you can see another animation, which shows the same Flash Grab illusion in a very different way. This one is more like the original, in which the two lines appear to be alternately rotated slightly clockwise and counterclockwise, even though they are perfectly horizontal/ vertical.

So what's going on here? According to Cavanagh and Anstis, there are two phenomena that together result in the illusion. It's a bit of a challenge to follow the logic, but here we go.

The first factor is illusory trajectory shortening: We tend to perceive movement trajectories as being a bit shorter than they really are. In the case of the first video, this means that we perceive the background figure to reverse its direction just before it actually does. In the case of the second video, this means that the disc appears to rotate slightly less than the 90 degrees that it actually rotates.

The second factor is assimilation: The flashed lines are assimilated by the moving background figure. They somehow melt into a single percept. This effect is particularly …