Navigating the Digital Divide: JCIHE's Commitment to Equity in Open Access Publishing

• In Event: Open Access Journals & Publishing: Inclusion Within Neoliberalism Contexts

Proposal

This presentation critically unpacks tissues of Open Access (OA) as applied to the Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education (JCIHE), the official journal of CIES Higher Education SIG. A JCIHE case study supports the CIES Annual Conference Theme as digitalization reshapes journal submissions and reviews. It also supports Higher Education SIG as the presentation focuses on author access and addressing the challenges of fairness, transparency, proprietary costs, and diversity.

Conceptual Frameworks
Two conceptual frameworks guide critical analysis of JCIHE. The Digital Divide defines who has access, who does not, and the resulting inequities about expectations of learning in a digital society and what future issues will undermine equity and inclusion. Neoliberalism framework is central since digitalization is not free. Digital publishing platforms are costly and the conflict between income and access remains.

Literature Review
Studies on Open Access Journals share five themes. 1) the field is complex with variable pricing. Despite some discounts, 50% of APCs come from authors (Borrego, 2023). 2) Association journals, like JCIHE, are challenged with finding funding for digital services and indirect costs. 3) Commercial publishers set higher APCs for journals with higher CiteScores (Asai, 2020b; Okagbue et al., 2020; Schönfelder, 2020) and Web of Science/Scopus list fewer low-impact OA journals (Kim & Park, 2021). The Web of Science and Scopus search engines define what is valid knowledge and what is not, i.e. journals not listed in those databases. 4) Systemic inequities limit access to under-funded authors, under-funded institutions (Gorrego, 2023), Global South institutions (Frank, Foster & Pagliari, 2023), academic librarians (Neville & Crampsie, 2019), doctoral students (Purwanto et al., 2020), and early career researchers (O'Hanlon et al., 2020). 5) Inequities of access raises questions about how we define knowledge, what is our expectation of learning in a digital society, what will the repercussions will occur from AI and data-mining for finding OA journals and their articles.

Methodology
This presentation uses a literature review to find key issues and apply it to a qualitative case study of JCIHE (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). A case study involves an in-depth examination of a program for a specific period and is suitable for learning about a phenomenon which is little known (Yin, 2017).

Research Questions
1: What are Gold OA Journals and variations?
2: What are the benefits for JCIHE in ensuring author equity, diversity, and inclusion?
3: What are the drawbacks and concerns for JCIHE?

Conclusion
Findings show that there are a range of Gold OA Journals, many of which charge APCs and thus do not fit into the JCIHE mission. Findings also show that digitalization of publishing is not free. Who pays for the costs remains a critical question for Open Access. The more that is shared about Open Access Journals, the more important decisions can be made about the future of these journals. Keeping costs low, maintaining no author costs, eliminating known systemic inequities are part of the challenges of the future.

Author

• Rosalind Latiner Raby, Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education JCIHE