Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice runs on a Diamond Open Access model so it is completely free for everyone who reads it and free for the contributors who publish in it too. 

Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice is part of a world-wide political movement to democratise professional and other academic journals. This disrupts the business model for journal publishing associated with profit led dissemination of information. It is also follows a trend of people looking online for papers and expecting to find material to be freely available. Open access journals are free for anyone to read and for contributors to publish in. The ethos of open access is that knowledge arising out of publicly funded practice and research should be available to all for the public good.

The European Research Council has directed that publicly funded research needs to be open access by 2020. This has resulted in major publishing companies requiring journal authors to pay for their papers to be open access. These Article Processing Charges (ACP) for what is known as Gold Open Access are usually about one or two thousand dollars per article. Senior academics in the Netherlands and elsewhere boycotted the journal publisher Elsevier over the steep fees they charge for institutional subscriptions and ACP fees. An initiative, started by Alexandra Elbakyan in Kazakhstan, is Sci-Hub which is said to illegally host 62,000,000 papers to make them freely available to all.

 

Source: Farquharson, Jamie (2018): Diamond open access venn. figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6900566.v1 

 

We are using Open Journals Systems (OJS) which is a free, open-source software developed by the Public Knowledge Project specially designed for the publication of peer-reviewed open access journals. Open Journal Systems is now the leading open access platform for thousands of journals across the globe. Journals can be produced with the same high quality but with lower overheads and reach many more people.

This is the direction for professional journals. As readers, we need to be able to read professional journals in other countries. We need to not have our reading censored by the limits of professional subscriptions and or cuts to library subscriptions. As writers, we need to be confident that interested parties will find our professional and research writing and that we will not be hindered from publishing by unaffordable fees.

For an important analysis of open access journal publishing, see the study by Saurabh Khanna, Jon Ball, Juan Pablo Alperin, John Willinsky; Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies 2022; 3 (4): 912–930. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228

Authors hold unrestricted copyright to their own work published in this journal and also to publishing rights of their work published in this journal.

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