This year we are proudly celebrating the 10 Year Anniversary of The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS)! SIPS is a service organisation aiming to promote higher quality, more rigorous, more replicable, and more cumulative psychological science by pursuing activities including:
- Improving training and research practices
- Improving policies/norms
- Promoting metascience
- Increasing diversity, equity, and inclusivity in psychology
Five core values drive our efforts: self-improvement, transparency and openness, critical evaluation, inclusivity, and civil dialogue.
Here we provide a brief history of SIPS, as well as reflections on what we have achieved to date and what the future holds!
History of SIPS
Simine Vazire and Brian Nosek founded SIPS in June 2016 with support from the University of California, Davis, and the Center for Open Science (COS). We owe Simine and Brian a huge debt of gratitude for their critical roles in the creation of SIPS. SIPS was incorporated as a non-profit in July 2017, allowing us to begin collecting membership dues and to eventually become self-sustaining.
Our first meeting was held in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2016 with 100 attendees.
Following successful conferences once again in Charlottesville (2017) and then in Grand Rapids, Michigan (2018), we took the show out of the U.S. to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, for our first European conference (2019), drawing our highest ever in-person attendance (521).
In 2020, the pandemic hit, necessitating on-line only conferences for that and the following year. In both years we had massive on-line attendance (over 1000 at each). In 2022, we emerged from our living rooms to be once again face to face, this time in Victoria, British Columbia. We also began a continuing tradition that year of hosting both in-person and online conferences.
In 2023, we were back in Europe, in Padua, Italy, and then last year, in a truly groundbreaking development, we took SIPS to the Majority World for the first time, holding our conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in collaboration with the Busara Center.
Membership Growth and Social Media Following
The figure below shows our membership growth over time. After an initial period of growth, our numbers have now stabilized around 450. In addition, by the end of 2024 we had some 2,500 Bluesky followers and 899 Mastodon followers.
Conference Attendance
The figure below shows our in-person and online attendance over time. After initial growth, the pandemic moved us online with very high attendance. Following that unusual period, our attendance has declined, but remains respectable and roughly similar to pre-pandemic levels.
Note: Prior to 2020 conferences were in-person only, while in 2020 and 2021 they were online only. In 2022 and 2023 conferences were hybrid in-person/online while in 2024 they were separate events.
Signature Achievements
We have had many notable successes in our first decade. Here we highlight four examples: (1) Support for our members, (2) Collabra: Psychology, (3) PsyArXiv, and (4) Diversifying psychological science. Other products and achievements can be found here.
Member Support
Support for our members has taken many forms including, but not limited to, membership fee waivers, conference registration waivers and travel grants, and grants-in-aid for SIPS-relevant projects. The figure below shows growth in our financial support for these purposes over time. The dip in 2020 and 2021 reflects the fact that travel waivers were not needed because our conferences were fully online. The large increases in 2022 and 2023 reflects the introduction of our grants-in aid program.
Collabra: Psychology
Collabra: Psychology was launched in 2015 by University of California Press and quickly established as the official journal of SIPS. University of California Press is the non-profit, mission-driven publishing arm of the University of California system.
Led by Editor-in-Chief Don van Ravenzwaaij and a deep collective of Senior and Associate Editors appointed by SIPS, Collabra: Psychology publishes content across the broad field of psychology, as well as featuring a section focussed on methodology and research practice.
Collabra has championed numerous practices aimed at improving psychological science, including Open Peer review and Streamlined Review, as well as setting aside a portion of article processing charge (APC) fees to support publication by authors who otherwise lack publication funding.
The figure below shows impressive growth over time in Collabra publications. SIPS members are welcome and encouraged to submit to Collabra: Psychology – please visit online.ucpress.edu/collabra or see the journal’s Submission Guidelines for more information.
PsyArXiV
PsyArXiv is the free preprint server for psychology that hosts over 40,000 preprints, whitepapers, and other manuscripts. PsyArXiv makes it possible to disseminate and access academic research without paywalls and users do not pay to upload or download material. It was established by SIPS in 2016 with generous support from the Center for Open Science, and is hosted on the Open Science Framework. PsyArXiv is now financially supported by direct funding from SIPS and by generous contributions from member institutions, to keep this vital service up and running. The figure below shows the rapid growth over time in preprints posted to PsyArXiv per year.
Diversifying Psychological Science
Increasingly, SIPS has emphasized the importance of diversity in developing a truly rigorous, ecologically valid, psychological science. Our efforts in this regard have been driven by the recommendations of the Global Engagement Taskforce Report commissioned by SIPS in 2020. Our Nairobi conference reflected this diversity emphasis in terms of location, attendance, session themes and leads, and our partnership with Busara.
Some Reflections on SIPS from our Founders, Presidents, and Followers
We recently asked our current and former leaders, as well as our followers on social media, to provide short reflections on what SIPS has achieved and what it has meant to them professionally or personally. We include those reflections below.
What is immediately apparent from the word cloud derived from the reflections is an overwhelming emphasis on the importance of community. For all of us, SIPS is a community of scholars who are passionate about improving the quality of psychological science! What was formerly a scattered group of individuals has now grown into a much larger, interconnected, and increasingly global village.
Simine Vazire (Co-Founder and President 2016-17)
It’s been a pleasure watching SIPS grow and evolve since we founded it in 2016. I haven’t been involved in a leadership role in a few years, which makes it especially gratifying to see it continue to thrive. I think SIPS has done a great job adapting to how the field is changing, while sticking to its mission and values. Going to the conferences each year, it’s clear that SIPS serves as an important community and catalyst for those eager to help create change in the field. And it’s great to see so many new faces every year – the future of the field is looking bright.
Brian Nosek (Co-Founder)
Improving culture is a collective action problem. No one can change a culture on their own. This results in feeling disempowered and alienated when a culture is misaligned with our ideals. SIPS is a solution to the collective action problem. SIPS has provided a venue for people who want to improve the research culture to gather, debate what improvements are needed, experiment with new approaches, evaluate whether they could work, and disseminate them to the research community. Of course, the ultimate objective is to benefit the research community, but I am most grateful for the benefits that SIPS has provided to me personally — a sense of belonging, community spirit, and empowerment.
Katie Corker (President 2018, current Financial Officer)
I’ve felt very fortunate to support SIPS’ work and growth over these past 10 years. It’s quite humbling to step back and look at all that we have done and built as a community. SIPS’ action orientation is still the thing that best distinguishes it from other initiatives. Many people have stepped up to put in the work that is needed to realize the changes we’re advocating for. I don’t take that work for granted.
Sanjay Srivastava (President 2019)
For many of us, the early days of the open science movement were like a big social referencing experiment. For a long time, you would see a result that is too clean or too surprising, but you’d look around and nobody is reacting. So you would talk yourself into thinking it is normal and believable. All of a sudden that shifted – you could turn to someone and say, “Did I just see what I think I just saw?” And there was someone saying “Yeah, I saw it too.”
Social media was a big reason for that. There were a handful of blogs where you could find those other people in the comment section. Then researchers started finding Twitter and connecting on it. So maybe you were the only person in your department wondering what was going on – but now you could find your people.
But like everything else, social media is a mix of good and bad. There are limits to building a community on an open social media network – you cannot keep out the deniers, trolls, and assholes. And social media is great for talking, but to turn that talk into action, you need more.
SIPS was founded to solve both of those problems. By design, it was an inclusive community focused on action. The initial vision came from Simine and Brian. But they did something very wise – they built it from the ground up to be driven by the community. The innovative conference format, the power-sharing governance structure, all were designed with that in mind.
Those first SIPS conferences were pivotal experiences for me and, I suspect, for many others. There was lots of “hey I know you from Twitter.” But on a deeper level, people who had experienced isolation and hostility from colleagues suddenly had a community that would support them, that would get excited about their ideas, and that would pitch in and get to work side-by-side with them.
One of my interests in those early days was on using SIPS to make science open to, and inclusive of, more people. I organized diversity hackathons at several early conferences, and when I got into governance, I helped write the first Code of Conduct (SIPS was the first scholarly society in psychology I knew about that had one) – and then, after a term as President where I had to enforce it, wrote a major revision drawing on lessons learned. I was never alone in this work – there was lots of energy among society members. It was sometimes difficult work. But it was also rewarding to see tangible outcomes and real progress.
I have been less directly involved in SIPS the past few years, first because of a personal decision to reduce travel, and then a career change to industry. But the work I did on open science, including SIPS, is some of the most important to me in my career so far. I am excited to see SIPS continue to thrive and spread its reach around the world.
Alexa Tullett (President 2020)
I’m extremely proud to have been associated with SIPS in these early years of what I hope will be a long existence. For me, SIPS has been an example of what can happen when you build a scientific community from the ground up, constantly challenging our ideas about what that is supposed to look like. If an unconference is a conference that up-ends the basic assumptions of the form, then SIPS must be an unsociety. As SIPS enters its second decade, I look forward to all the news ways that SIPS members will break my brain and expand my imagination.
Heather Urry (President 2021)
SIPS has been foundational to my continuing development as a mid-to-late career scientist; I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn through SIPS events and members how to increase the transparency and credibility of my research. From my vantage point as a former member of the Executive Committee, SIPS has done a great job building a community of people willing to share their expertise, making SIPS spaces safe and inclusive, and making funding available to support its mission. A challenge for SIPS moving forward is how to navigate its own mid-career stage of development now that open science practices are more common. We must continue to evolve and innovate ways to foster inclusion, transparency, and credibility for scientists with a wide range of scientific approaches and sensibilities without leaving anyone behind. Let’s do this!
Morton Gernsbacher (President 2022)
I was delighted to serve as President of SIPS in 2022. In addition to serving our core values and hosting an exciting conference, we awarded nine SIPS Travel Awards of $2000 each, four SIPS Grants in Aid that combined for a total payout of $5000, and awarded the inaugural SIPS-Collabra Registered Report Funding, which, along with the SIPS Grants In Aid, were instigated by my amazing predecessor, Heather Urry, who served as SIPS President in 2021 and who creatively moved SIPS forward in marvelous ways. One aspect of serving SIPS as President, as well as other committee roles, that inspired me was demonstrating that not all the old guard (e.g., folks like me who earned their PhD over forty years ago) are resistant to improving psychological science!
Crystal Steltenpohl (President 2023)
SIPS has provided me so many opportunities to meet scholars who approach knowledge discovery differently than how I was taught. I am constantly in awe of the dedication, intelligence, and kindness of this community as we work together to improve psychological science. Going forward, I hope we can remain dedicated to the idea of continuous improvement and to resist the urge to become dogmatic, to resist the urge to get too locked in any singular path forward. We benefit so much from the diversity of perspectives and approaches that are present in our community, and I hope we keep fostering an environment where we learn from each other.
Clare Conry-Murray (President 2024)
Here are a few sentences on what we achieved during my presidency (23-24) and my thoughts on SIPS. We held our first conference on the continent of Africa in Nairobi, Kenya and it was a great success. I’m happy to see that we continue to connect with the people who attended, since we have a new EC board member from Nairobi: Catherine Karanja. We made an effort to make SIPS procedures more well-documented and transparent. SIPS continues to influence how I do my job, and how I interact in the world. SIPS does not accept the status quo. SIPS teaches us to think about our most important values and consider how to best enact those values–even if it means challenging conventional practices. I hope to do the same in all my endeavors.
Priya Silverstein (President 2025)
From attending my first SIPS in 2019 in Rotterdam to becoming President in 2024, it has been great to see SIPS evolve over this time. Of particular note, we have seen diversity and inclusion in psychology be an increasingly large portion of the programming, which I am very happy about. I look forward to continuing to serve the SIPS community this year! I met my boyfriend (soon to be husband) at [online!] SIPS 2022! I have also made loads of friends and colleagues through SIPS, and have joined and led several successful collaborations through hackathons. Very grateful for what SIPS has given me and excited to give back through my presidency!
Lisa Spitzer
Attending my first SIPS in Rotterdam was actually one of my main motivators to start a PhD! I really really wanted to contribute to the open science movement, and I am super happy that I was able to focus on a metascience PhD project at @zpid.bsky.social ❤️
Jade Pickering
Been attending SIPS since 2019! I’ve met so many amazing people and been involved in loads of projects I wouldn’t have otherwise. It really helped me during my PhD and postdocs, and SIPS still supports my passion of improving psychological science from an academic-adjacent role ❤
Jay Patel
Well, SIPS 2018 convinced me to take up metascience projects in my spare time and switch my focus to it full-time. It was life-changing, especially 2 years after attending a Nosek talk at my university.
Pam Davis-Kean
I have had multiple papers come out of SIPS meetings as well as good conversations on how to increase the rigor of psych science. Dev Psych and researchers that used observational studies were a small group. So I have dropped my attendance because I have felt less connected. However, I often reference SIPS as the type of conference I like-because you generate new ideas and products for the community.
Daniel Moriarity
Loved having a model of a society driven by an inspirationally broad meta-mission + getting the chance to connect and increase my awareness of scholars from across disciplines and the world who share the goal of improving psychological science.
The Future of SIPS
Much has been achieved over the last decade but much remains to be done. The word cloud and reflections above reflect that fact with many references to moving forward. At the end of 2024 we brought together a group of prominent early reformers to discuss lessons from our first decade with an eye to the future. If you weren’t able to attend that online event we encourage you to watch the recording here.
Finally, we encourage everyone to come to SIPS 2025: either in-person in Budapest, Hungary, June 25-27, or online May 21-22. We hope to see many of you at either or both events and wish you well for a happy, safe, productive year!
