This year’s Open Access Week theme, Who Owns Our Knowledge? is fitting considering the present moment, when commercial interests and backlash to diversity and inclusion initiatives threaten to widen already deep inequities in scholarly publications and society at large. The question here is how can researchers and co-creators inside and outside academic communities assert control over the knowledge they produce?
The suite of education journals at the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation (MLFC) — "Education Policy Analysis Archives," "Education Review" and "Current Issues in Education" — is dedicated to community-owned, community-led and non-commercial approaches to research production and sharing called for by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and Toluca-Cape Town Declaration. We agree that research can only be a public good when it is accessible to all (inclusive), is candid about by whom, where and how it was created (transparent) and acknowledges and values all the voices involved in the research (democratic).
The MLFC journals strive for a bidirectional approach to scholarly publishing, where research flows collaboratively and reciprocally between authors, publishers and wider communities in the Global North and the Global South. Toward this end, we promote several open access practices:
No financial restrictions
MLFC journals do not charge authors or readers. Our authors submit manuscripts to the journals without incurring an article-processing fee (APC). Our readers may freely access all published content without encountering fees (paywalls) to download or view the content.
Author-owned copyright
Our authors retain copyright without restrictions under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. In other words, authors who publish in MLFC journals own the right to their published works and may share them wherever they choose, such as institutional repositories, academic networking sites or their own personal websites
Multilingual publishing
To amplify diverse voices and promote intercultural understanding and connections, two of our journals publish in English, Spanish and Portuguese languages. Whenever possible, we publish translations of original works, provided by the author or another source.
Global focus
All MLFC journals serve international audiences and encourage global perspectives and conversations. We strive to maintain scholarly rigor at the state and national level through distinct teams of regional editors and peer reviewers with expertise in topics reflecting and respecting local cultures, traditions, and needs.
Our journals have editorial boards and teams that span the globe, including members from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The MLFC journals are proud to be a part of the growing open access publishing community of practice at Arizona State University. A pioneer of online, open access publishing since the early 1990s, the MLFC journals partner with the ASU Library, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, Hispanic Research Center's Bilingual Press, and Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts with Professor Claudia Mesch to mobilize and support university-wide open access initiatives like regular working groups, collaborative grant-seeking, and the development of a toolkit for editors starting up open access journals.
--Stephanie McBride-Schreiner, scholarly communications managing editor, MLFC
Dive into open access
Read all of our International Open Access Week articles celebrating open access publishing at ASU.