Open Access Week Feature: Two OA Journals Founded at UMassD

International Open Access Week (October 23-29, 2023) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an Open Access journal that was founded by UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley, in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island. A few other UMD faculty are currently listed as co-editors.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles. The journal published a feminist criticism of paywall publishing.

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka  currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS) which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing. OJS is open source and enables the publication of articles and issues online and indexed in global services like Google Scholar, Crossref, and many others.

Are you interested in locating more OA Journals? Take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Celebrate International Open Access Week

This year’s theme for International Open Access Week (Oct. 23 – Oct. 29) is Community over Commercialization. Open Access (OA) places the value of accessible information to the public above monetary interest in knowledge dissemination. OA removes restriction from research outputs such as journal articles, books, datasets, and more. Have you ever hit a paywall in your research? Perhaps you have located the abstract for an article that sounds ideal for your project, but then you click to find a request for your credit card. Interlibrary loan is a solution for the UMass Dartmouth community in those circumstances, but what about researchers who do not have library resources available?

The free and immediate availability of academic publications online means that the research will be read and built upon by a wider and more diverse audience. With this greater exposure comes more opportunity in the academic and scientific community. This publishing model is not available for all academic research at this time, but acknowledging Open Access Week is a great way to expand awareness of OA, and to learn more.

Here are some ways to deepen your understanding of OA this week:

  • Check out a print book about OA publishing from the display in library.
  • Access books online from MIT Press Direct to Open.
  • Subscribe to our Scholarly Communications blog for OA features this week and beyond.
  • Stop by the library/MASSPIRG OA Week table from 11am – 3pm on Tuesday Oct. 24th in the library lobby.
  • Attend one of these OA Week webinars:

Celebrate Open Access Week with a Screening of “Paywall: The Business of Open Scholarship”

In celebration of Open Access Week, the Scholarly Communications Committee is screening “Paywall: The Business of Open Scholarship” at the library. The documentary “questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier, and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google.”

When: Friday, October 26 2018, 11:30AM-1:00PM
Where: Library 314

Anyone interested in open access publishing is welcome! Bring lunch and questions or ideas about the future of academic publishing.

For more information about the film, visit https://paywallthemovie.com/paywall, where, in true open access form, it is available to watch in full if you cannot make it to the screening.

For more information about Open Access Week and events happening all around the world, visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/events

We hope to see you there!