Psych (journal)

Psych is a open-access pseudoscience journal founded in 2019 that has attracted racists from the OpenPsych pseudojournals. The latter has been widely discredited and virtually stopped publishing in 2018 after its editorial board including Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst and Peter Frost were exposed as eugenicists and white nationalists. All three now publish at Psych and the first issue of the journal is based on race and intelligence and racialism. Psych is published by which has been criticized for publishing other pseudojournals and for journals with poor peer review processes that were lacking in rigour.

As of 2020, the Psych journal no longer publishes controversial papers on race. Those on the current Editorial Board have nothing to do with racialist pseudoscience.

Psych as OpenPsych Version 2
Almost all authors of papers submitted and/or published in the first issue of Pysch (Vol. 1, 2019) are associated with OpenPsych:


 * Davide Piffer (co-founder of OpenPsych; parapsychologist crank who claims to have psychic powers)
 * John Fuerst (white nationalist; on editorial board of OpenPsych where he published a book on race)
 * Richard Lynn (white supremacist and pioneer of hereditarianism pseudoscience; has published in OpenPsych)
 * Emil Kirkegaard (co-founder of OpenPsych; white nationalist eugenicist who claims governments should pay white people to breed more)
 * Jan te Nijenhuis (race and intelligence pseudoscientist whose PhD dissertation sparked a racism row)
 * Edward Dutton (racist eccentric with many bizarre views, editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly; has published in OpenPsych)
 * Kenya Kura (eugenicist; on editorial board of OpenPsych)
 * Robert L. Williams (on editorial board of OpenPsych)
 * Meng Hu (formerly on editorial board of OpenPsych, quit after describing Kirkegaard as dishonest and criticising OpenPsych's lack of peer-review)
 * Michael A. Woodley of Menie (an aristocrat and eugenicist; on editorial board of OpenPsych)
 * Gerhard Meisenberg (ex-editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly; on editorial board of OpenPsych)
 * Peter Frost (white genocide conspiracy theorist; on editorial board of OpenPsych)
 * Aurelio J. Figueredo (race and intelligence pseudoscientist who accepted $458,000 from the far-right Pioneer Fund)

In 2019, the Psych journal published 16 papers as part of the "Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability".

The first issue editor, Bryan Pesta, is a proponent of hereditarianism and was on the editorial board of OpenPsych. Pesta is no longer on the editorial board of Psych.

Controversy
One can speculate why Psych no longer publishes racialist pseudoscience. In April, 2019 the journal published Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence by white supremacist Richard Lynn. The paper was controversial and the Editorial Office of Psych issued a public "Expression of Concern", and changed the paper to an "opinion" piece. The Editorial Office reported several concerns:

Unsurprisingly, Lynn claimed he does not agree with the expression of concern. In regard to this incident, noted the shoddy peer review process of Psych:

2019

 * Biogeographic Ancestry, Cognitive Ability and Socioeconomic Outcomes.
 * Reservations about Rushton.
 * Spearman’s Hypothesis Tested Comparing 47 Regions of Japan Using a Sample of 18 Million Children.
 * The Effect of Biracial Status and Color on Crystallized Intelligence in the U.S.-Born African–European American Population.
 * Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data.
 * The Intelligence of Biracial Children of U.S. Servicemen in Northeast Asia: Results from Japan.
 * A Conversation with Gerhard Meisenberg.
 * Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence.