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OpenPsych

publisher of pseudoscientific open-access academic journals

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ85790836
Source-derived summary

OpenPsych is an online collection of three pseudoscientific open access journals covering behavioral genetics, psychology, and quantitative research in sociology. Many articles on OpenPsych promote scientific racism, and the site has been described as a "pseudoscience factory-farm". The journals were started in 2014 by a pair of nonprofessional researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer, who had difficulty publishing their studies in mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journals. The website describes its contents as open peer reviewed journals, but the qualifications and neutrality of its reviewers and quality of reviews have been disputed.

Founders

OpenPsych was founded by Danish far-right white supremacist Emil Kirkegaard in 2014. Kirkegaard is also the founder of the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation which publishes Mankind Quarterly, another pseudoscientific journal. The Mankind Quarterly was published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was presided over by Richard Lynn until his death in 2023. Kirkegaard was the registrant of the Mankind Quarterly website between 2017 and February 2023, after which the WHOIS was anonymised. In February 2024, Kirkegaard filed his Mankind Publishing House LLC with the state of Wyoming under the name William Engman (his legal name since 2021).

Co-founder Davide Piffer has written on remote viewing which is widely dismissed by scientists as parapsychology.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “OpenPsych” is publisher of pseudoscientific open-access academic journals. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through OpenPsych, publisher and pseudoscientific, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2014, 2023, 2017, 2024—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, OpenPsych, publisher and pseudoscientific is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “publisher of pseudoscientific open-access academic journals” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85790836. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2023, 2017 and 2024.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “OpenPsych”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow OpenPsych primary sources, OpenPsych archive and OpenPsych research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “OpenPsych”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from OpenPsych” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.