Case of establishing journal C: A renewed enterprise committed to open-access

• In Event: Presidential Invited S.: Decolonizing and facilitating knowledge production and transfer via new journals in non-Western-dominated discourse: China-based English-language journals in education (CELJE)

Proposal

Journal C has flourished since its 2011 inception and first papers in 2012, engaging hundreds of eminent authors in authoring, reviewing and editing influential papers. A total of nine volumes and 18 issues were published via a paper-based and subscription-only model. For a decade, journal C was constructed as a prestigious collegial periodical which nurtured ideas and talents related to diverse facets of education.

This same period has seen enormous changes in academic publishing, communities, and in education itself. In 2021 it was timely to relaunch journal C for the new era and set it on a path for future growth. It was shifted to a new publishing platform as an established, fully refereed, online, continuous and diamond open-access journal. The entire backfile with more than 120 papers was made freely and globally available to anyone with an internet connection. Each year, around 30 excellent new papers will be published as each is finalised. Journal C will triple in size in terms of the number of articles, support a much larger readership, and yield substantially greater value and impact.

After less than two years diamond open access, this has already happened. Up to 70 articles are on track to be published by end of 2022, from around 15 per year since 2012. Between 2012 and 2020, journal C articles were downloaded 696 times in total. In the first 18 months of open access articles were downloaded around 60,000 times. It is proof that phenomenal value has been unlocked from readers accessing a trove of excellent articles. Though citation statistics lag by around 2 years, total journal citations have also doubled in the last year, starting from a low base and now showing parabolic growth.

Journal C’s innovation and growth poses questions for the nature of academic publishing and in particular ‘open access’ publication. It has long worried people who study the ‘idea industry’ that governments fund public universities to create and publish knowledge for society, then those same institutions are compelled to buy-back access to their own publications. In recent years, such worries have percolated into louder rumbles among universities, systems, funders and governments. Resulting discussions have helped to clarify problems, and importantly also pathways ahead. Yet open access publishing is not without its own challenges and complexities, which we consider in this paper. ‘Open’ means many things. Open access publication is available to scholars with capacity to fund and conduct relevant work. Open access is available to those with access to internet and appropriate language capability. Open access places additional heavy demands on reviewing and editing, and on promoting the journal and its contributions. Open publishing moves attention beyond attracting readership to fostering more sustained and connected forms of engagement. Such evolution goes to opening up new forms of community and innovation networks.

Authors

• jinghuan shi, Tsinghua University

• Hamish Coates, Institute of Education, Tsinghua University