On December 24th 2019, I received a legal threat by the American Psychological Association to remove one of my papers from my personal website. Similar requests have been received by other colleagues recently.

I appealed the request, and have now heard back from APA’s Chief Publishing Officer that I can ignore the request because “it is not intended to limit researchers in highlighting their works on their personal sites”. At least to me, this appears to constitute a radical change of policy with pretty sweeping implications for psychological researchers, and I therefore describe this issue in some detail below.
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2017: APA starts the removal request initiative
To the best of my knowledge, the APA started this initiative in 2017, in emails had the same content and were sent by the same authority (see here for a 2017 example email received by a colleague at Princeton). As I discussed in a blog post about the broken publishing system before, APA additionally asked webhosters such as WordPress to force-edit researchers’ websites, leaving this image on the webpage…
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