The market for scholarly journals has been rapidly changing towards electronic formats. Among global research institutions in economics, IZA was one of the first to pursue a strictly open-access strategy for our own peer-reviewed journals. We now have three well-established electronic journals: IZA Journal of Labor Economics, IZA Journal of Labor Policy, and IZA Journal of Development and Migration.
While the readership of printed or traditional electronic journals is limited by costly subscriptions, open-access publishing provides immediate worldwide access to all articles, thereby stimulating the exchange of knowledge while maintaining highest quality standards.
Reaching a wider audience and gaining more citations
A recent IZA discussion paper by Seth Gershenson, Morgan S. Polikoff and Rui Wang found that article downloads increased by 60 to 80 percent when the paywall to several prestigious educational research journals was unexpectedly taken down for two months. The researchers conclude that open access makes scholarly articles available to a substantially larger number of academics and practitioners while at the same time increasing the probability of the work being cited.
By transferring the IZA Journal Series to Sciendo as our new publisher, we have now taken the next step towards establishing the open-access principles in the field of labor economics. Owned by the renowned publishing house De Gruyter, Sciendo has specialized in publishing services suited to the needs of journal owners in academia. Its lean production facilitates smoother submission and article processing, faster publication and circulation of articles, as well as substantially reduced publication costs.
The main benefits of our move to Sciendo are:
- Simplified submission process via Editorial Manager
Sciendo has set up clearly structured and simple processing via Editorial Manager allowing for hassle-free submissions within a few minutes.
- Reduced publication fee: €975 instead of €1250
A growing number of institutions in the field of economics explicitly offer funding for open access publication. While IZA does not expect authors to pay publication fees from their personal funds, we aim at exploiting available funds at research institutions and third party resources. If no other funds exist, IZA will cover the publication costs. The IZA Journals do not charge any submission fees.
- Well-organized article processing
Authors, editors and reviewers will benefit from a streamlined workflow that will also further speed up publication.
- Automated plagiarism detection
Sciendo implemented an efficient routine to check every submitted paper for plagiarism to meet IZA’s high standards of research integrity. The results will be kept strictly confidential and only shared with the authors if necessary.
We are confident that this will further increase the attractiveness of the IZA Journals as a scientific resource with high visibility and impact.