Where to publish technology research without paying a fee
Most open access now means the author pays. It does not have to, and the arithmetic of who gets published changes when it does.
Open access was supposed to remove a barrier. For readers it did. For authors it mostly moved one: the article processing charge, now routinely between $2,000 and $5,000, and in the better-known venues considerably more.
The effect is easy to state and hard to look at. Work gets published according to whose department has a publishing budget. A well-designed study from a university without one competes against a weaker study from a university with one, and loses, not on the evidence.
What diamond open access actually means
Diamond, sometimes platinum, open access means no charge at either end. Readers pay nothing, authors pay nothing, and the running costs sit with the publisher. There are several hundred such journals, and they are hard to find, partly because they have no marketing budget either.
The Journal of Sociotechnical Inquiry is one of them. No submission fee, no article processing charge, no page charge, no colour figure charge. Authors keep copyright under a Creative Commons licence and may deposit any version in any repository immediately, with no embargo.
Waivers are not the same thing
Many fee-charging journals offer waivers, and they are worth applying for. But a waiver requires an application, a justification, usually a declaration about your funding, and a wait, before you know whether the journal will even review your paper. Some researchers simply do not submit rather than ask. Charging nobody removes the question.
What to check before you submit anywhere
A journal that charges nothing is not automatically a good journal, and some predatory venues advertise low or no fees to attract volume. Before submitting anywhere unfamiliar, check:
- Is the ISSN real? Look it up on the ISSN Portal. It should be registered and the title should match.
- Is there a named editorial board with institutional affiliations? Look two or three of them up. Do they exist, and do they know they are on it?
- Does it promise speed? "Publication within two weeks" is the clearest warning sign there is. Real review takes longer than that.
- Does it claim metrics it cannot have? A CiteScore comes from Scopus. A journal not in Scopus displaying one has invented it.
- Is it in DOAJ? Not every legitimate new journal is yet, the directory requires a publishing history first, but a journal claiming to be listed when it is not is lying about something checkable.
We would rather you applied those tests to us than took our word for it.
What we publish
Research on technology and social life from any discipline, with one requirement applied strictly: the technology has to be in the analysis, not only in the title. Our subject areas describe what we are looking for from each field.