Radical Open Access in the Social Sciences

Paralleling my threads on Twitter and BlueSky, I am going to start sharing more details of some quality, Open Access (OA) journals in the social sciences, who won’t sell your stuff to AI companies, and also don’t charge you fees. The reason I am doing this is because none of the directories (like DOAJ or CrossRef) seem particularly useful at providing me with what I want, and they certainly don’t take account of the ethics of the publishers (for example, DOAJ includes Elsevier open access journals, and RELX, which owns Elsevier is a massively unethical data broker).*

Please DM me or reply with genuine examples. This will be on ongoing post. Generally speaking my interest is in more interdisciplinary examples, and certainly my starting point is a bias towards journals that do stuff on technology, politics and society. But I hope this will grow to include more specialist examples from wider across the social sciences. I’ve also started to list some presses and open access book publishing initiatives below this list…

Radical Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences

1. ACME journal. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme – This journal was a trailblazer. A radical human geography journal that has always been genuinely open access, supportive of others doing the same, and which publishes good stuff in multiple languages.
2. Ephemera journal. https://ephemerajournal.org/what-ephemera – another early example, founded in 2001, Ephemera is a radical organization / organisation studies journal, with an eclectic range. But I am slightly worried that they don’t seem to have yet had an issue in 2024…
3. Surveillance & Society. Yes, I have to include my own transdisciplinary journal, and I add it here because we had the advice of both the ACME and Ephemera editors when we started in 2002. S&S continues to publish 4 quality issues a year. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/
4. Foucault Studies. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/index Stuart Elden reminds me of a journal that is also dear to the hearts of surveillance studies scholars. He writes: “36 issues across 20 years. Initially entirely independent, then edited by Sverre Raffnsøe and the Copenhagen Business School, now moving to University of Pennsylvania Press. But always open access and no author charges.”
5. Kommunikation@Gesellschaft. https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup2/kommges/index. Nils Zurawski writes: “publishing OA since 2000, only German language though, but that may change…”
6. Technology and Regulation, http://techreg.org. Bryce Newell says “…a good OA journal. More law and regulation than social science, but I think they are open to social science work as well.”
7. International Journal of Communication, https://ijoc.org, published by the USC Annenberg School, has been running for 18 volumes and charges no fees for authors or readers.
8. Triple C (Communication, Capitalism, Critique). https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC. One of the originals! A very much marxist and marxist-adjacent journal covering critical perspectives on communication.
9. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/. An Eastern European-based OA journal that’s been going for 20 volumes, although there has been nothing so far in 2024.
10. Media Theory, https://mediatheoryjournal.org. A heavyweight journal in, err.. media theory, which publishes a couple of very high quality issues a year.
11. Limn, https://limn.it, a technology and society journal project, both OA and Print-on-Demand, which straddles academia and wider public accessibility. It was on hiatus, and is apparently now back!
12. Disability Studies Quarterly. https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/index. A longstanding journal, the first in its interdisciplinary field, which is now library-backed and fully free and OA. (h/t Ria Cheyne)
13. Professions & Professionalism. https://journals.oslomet.no/index.php/pp/about. An international and interdisciplinary OA journal producing 3 issues a year, focused on knowledge-based occupations. (h/t T.D. Valland)
14. Language Development Research, https://ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu. This is one is very specialized, but the editors are also commendably vocal about the journal’s commitment to both OA and quality: “we don’t believe in locking articles behind paywalls, in charging taxpayers and universities to publish research they’ve already funded, or in privileging papers that are “exciting” over those committed to scientific rigour.”
15. Journal of Political Ecology, https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/. Operating since 1994, JPE may be one of the oldest online OA journals. It “publishes research into the linkages between political economy and human environmental impacts, across different locations and academic disciplines.”
16. Journal of Social Justice. Based at Brock University in Canada. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/index
17. Computational Culture, computationalculture.net, which covers “inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational objects, practices, processes and structures” and examines “the ways in which software undergirds and formulates contemporary life.” It has published an annual issue since 2011 (with a gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022).
18. Journal of Extreme Anthropology, https://journals.uio.no/JEA/index, “an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, open-access and indexed journal (DOAJ) that publishes articles written in the fields of anthropology, social sciences, humanities, philosophy and critical theory focusing in particular on extreme subjects, practices and theory.” Now in its 8th Volume, with usually two issues a year.

Open Access Presses and Other Radical Publishing Initiatives

1. Public Knowledge Project (PKP), https://pkp.sfu.ca. The grandparent of OA publishing, an open source project which has produced software platforms for online journals (OJS), book publishing (OMP) and now preprints (OPS), also formerly also conferences (OCS), although the last seems to have been discontinued.
2. Radical Open Access Collective, https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org. Supposedly the centre of radical OA activity, although we’ve had no luck getting them to reply to us so far!
3. Open Humanities Press (OHP), https://openhumanitiespress.org. A thriving OA publisher, which unfortunately only touches on / overlaps with social science concerns, but which we need to support!
4. Meatspace Press, https://meatspacepress.com/, a boutique technology and society-focused OA and Print-on-Demand publisher, which pays attention to readability and aesthetics, not just access.
5. Shift+OPEN, https://mitpress.mit.edu/shiftopen/.:”an MIT Press program to flip journals to open access.”
6. Érudit, https://www.erudit.org/ Originally a Quebec-based francophone online and open access platform, which has now expanded into other languages, in collaboration with PKP via Coalition Publica (see below).
7. Coalition Publica, https://www.coalition-publi.ca. A new Canadian initiative between PKP and Érudit, to expand open access publishing.
8. Simon Batterbury’s list of OA journals in Geography, Political Ecology, Anthropology, Area Studies etc., https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-decent-open-access-journals/. Occasionally still updated, this is a useful list with different criteria than mine (it does include some journals with APCs, for example; and obviously the subject range is a bit different, although overlapping).

*A note on the big publishers. Of course not all publisher are exactly the same. I have to say that I have more mixed feelings about Sage. Amongst the big academic publishers, they are by far the best in terms of trying to keep their APCs relatively low and also tiered according to income / employment status of authors. Compared to publishers like Springer-Nature (the worst example of APC price-gouging), they are virtually saintly, but they still charge and they still aren’t genuinely or universally open access. But if you are going to go with any of the big general academic journal publishers, Sage would seem to be the best.