About the Journal

FOCUS & SCOPE

The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that welcomes papers on all aspects of educational technology, including online learning, technology-mediated learning, social media, open education, digital and open scholarship, emerging technologies for learning or research, and other topics or interdisciplinary ways in which technology and society intersect. Audiences for the journal include researchers, students, learning designers, teaching and learning directors, university leadership and instructors, K12 leadership and teachers, librarians, educational technologists, government managers and staff, and anyone wishing to understand how technology impacts us as individuals and in systems.

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Articles submitted to the OTESSA Journal are assigned to three reviewers and are reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers. The reviews are double-blind by default. Open reviews are used if the editors approve the author's request for one or if the content of the submission makes it impossible to anonymize, such as media or profiles of practice which can identify the authors. Please allow approximately six weeks for reviews to be completed. If there are any exceptional reasons to request an expedited review, a request can be made to the editors at journal@otessa.org. Once an article is reviewed, and possible revisions have been completed, it must go through a copyediting process and translation of at least the title, abstract, and keywords. To improve turnaround time required for copyediting and to increase chances of acceptance, we strongly recommend that authors submit polished and properly proofread works with attention to detail in citations and reference lists that use APA style.

PUBLICATION FREQUENCY

The OTESSA Journal publishes articles arising from: 1) our ongoing general call for submissions, 2) full papers that arise from the OTESSA conference, and 3) special issue call for submissions. We anticipate approximately four issues per year, though this may fluctuate.

LANGUAGE OPTION

The official language of the OTESSA Journal is English; however, submissions can be accepted in either English or French, which are the official languages of Canada. Papers will be published in the language in which they were received; however, abstracts will be published in both languages. English submissions may use either British or American English, but the usage must be consistent throughout. Please check spelling and grammar before making a submission. Authors are encouraged to sign up as reviewers. Under "areas of interest," enter "English reviewer" or "French reviewer" in addition to keywords for expertise to assist us with the review assignment process.

STANDARDS AND ETHICS

We expect authors to follow the International Standards for Authors published by COPE. The OTESSA Journal takes issues of copyright infringement and plagiarism in publication very seriously. Will will seek to protect the rights of our authors and investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles in order to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. We reserve the right to check submitted articles with duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarised other work or included copyright material without permission or acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing a correction, retracting the article, contacting leadership within the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies, or taking appropriate legal action. The manuscript must be original material that has not been published and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. If your article is derived from a thesis or dissertation, please provide the name of the institution to which it was submitted, the date of submission, the author(s), and the supervisor. 

The researcher(s) confirm that they have followed ethical standards for research involving human participants such as the statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans for Canadian researchers. All papers reporting human studies must state in the methods section that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided (or waived) approval. Please ensure that you have provided the full name and institution of the review committee contact, in addition to the approval number. For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.

FUNDING & CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The OTESSA Journal requires all authors to acknowledge their funding source(s) under a separate heading or state that the research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors. 

The journal requires all authors to declare any conflict of interest that may arise from the publication. If any conflict exists, authors must insert a statement at the end of your manuscript, after any acknowledgements and prior to the references. If no conflict exists, please state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest.’

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

“The means of communication should be held by the public, the very basis of how we connect should be a public utility. That principle we are trying to bring to research and scholarship” (Willinsky, 2012). 

This journal provides immediate open access to its content to support the public good. We pursue open access for expanding equity, impact, reach, and knowledge advancement. We welcome sponsors to support the important work we do at OTESSA. Please visit Becoming a Sponsor on our OTESSA website.

UVic TIE Lab. (2012, October 19). The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Changing Political Economy of Technology in Canada [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GgbE-8rXVg&feature=emb_logo

ARTICLE PROCESSING FEES

To ensure equitable access to publishing opportunities, the OTESSA journal does NOT require any article processing charge (APC) or submission charges from authors. 

VOLUNTARY AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

As an open access journal, the lack of APC does not negate the fact that we require funding to operate.  While there are no required APCs for authors to publish in our journal, we do encourage those authors with the privilege to access research or other funding to consider paying a voluntary author contribution (VAC) at an amount your budget allows or to consider including an author contribution amount in your funding proposals. The global average per journal amount for an APC is $1,626 USD, although it ranges from under $100 to over $5,000 as per Wikipedia. As these funds may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder, the amount may vary and we welcome any VAC amount to be self-determined. Note, funding may be available from institutions or grants earmarked for open access publication (via a research grant or through an institution's department or library). If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators, grant officer, and institution library, as publication funds may be available to you. 

The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Authors with submissions under review are not eligible to submit a voluntary author contribution amount until the final decision has been made on their manuscript. An author's ability to contribute makes absolutely no difference to the editorial decision-making on the submission. In fact, the editors will remain unaware of any VAC or donation payment to the journal. The VAC, if the author is able to make one, would cover publication costs (editorial processes, copyediting, translation, marketing, etc.), which in turn helps our journal to fund even more articles for publication. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and helps our journal to be run in a sustainable way.

The receipt for any VAC will be labelled "author contribution."  The link to contribute a VAC will be provided in the final decision email and, again, remains entirely voluntary. 

DONATE TO THE JOURNAL

Readers or other stakeholders are welcome to donate to the journal to help offset our editorial costs (e.g., editorial work, copyediting, translation, etc.). This may be done as a one-time payment or as a recurring monthly or yearly payment via PayPal. Alternate methods of payment can be arranged by contacting our secretariat at admin@otessa.org. NOTE: OTESSA is not a charity, therefore, no tax receipts will be provided. No donation is too small and we welcome your support of the OTESSA Journal.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) License. This licence allows anyone to share the work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it at no cost and without further permission, provided that appropriate attribution of initial publication in the journal is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

An example of attribution to used is as follows:

The article, {insert article title}, by {insert author name(s)} has been reproduced from the OTESSA Journal under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 CC-BY. 

Please link the article title directly to the article location on our website.

If you are redistributing or remixing one of our articles, please let us know by contacting us at journal@otessa.org, as we are interested in learning more about the frequency and context in which our papers are being used.

PUBLISHER

The owner/publisher of the OTESSA Journal is the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association, which is a non-profit corporation registered in Canada. The journal is hosted and supported by the University of Victoria Libraries.

ARCHIVING

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in the OTESSA Journal.