Dylan Small writes:

I am starting an observational studies journal that aims to publish papers on all aspects of observational studies, including study protocols for observational studies, methodologies for observational studies, descriptions of data sets for observational studies, software for observational studies and analyses of observational studies. One of the goals of the journal is to promote the planning of observational studies and to publish study plans for observational studies, like study plans are published for major clinical trials.

Regular readers will know my suggestion that scientific journals move away from the idea of being unique publishers of new material and move toward a “newsletter” approach, recommending papers from Arxiv, SSRN, etc. So, instead of going through exhausting review and revision processes, the journal editors would read and review recent preprints on observational studies and then, each month or quarter or whatever, produce a list of papers they recommend.

That said, given that Dylan and his co-editors are going the conventional route, I like how they’re doing it. In particular, “The journal is open access and has no publication charges.” And here is their statement of aims.

Observational studies are important. Indeed, our most recent post discussed an (informal) observational study about basketball.