Native American and Indigenous scholarship now available to all: AICRJ flips to an open access publishing model with eScholarship!

By admin / April 10, 2023

The eScholarship Publishing program of the University of California is pleased to announce the open access launch of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ). AICRJ was founded in 1970 and is published by the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is a premier journal in Native American and Indigenous studies and includes a multidisciplinary collection of original scholarly work on a wide range of issues in the fields of history, anthropology, geography, sociology, political science, health, literature, law, education, and the arts.

“The American Indian Culture and Research Journal is one of the longest-standing and most respected Native Studies journals in our field. It consistently publishes research and sometimes creative works that are timely, innovative, and responsive to a wide variety of issues that affect the lives of Native peoples. It is a great academic and community resource,” says Dr. Kimberly Tallbear, Professor in the faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society.

AICRJ’s shift to open access digital publishing from a subscription model ensures no fees for authors or readers moving forward. Additionally, the entire back catalog of AICRJ issues, spanning nearly 50 years, will now also be openly available. “Of all the communities represented in scholarship, Indigenous communities often lack the financial and institutional resources to even see what has been published about their lives,” notes the Editor in Chief, Dr. David Delgado Shorter. “Reaching a point where we could be fully accessible was long in the making in American Indian Studies at UCLA, our host institution.”

Recognizing the resource challenges of a transition from subscription-based to open access publishing, the journal editors and the UC libraries have worked to ensure a sustainable funding model for the journal moving forward. The University of California has contributed substantially to support the journal’s transition, and AICRJ is also included in LYRASIS’ Open Access Community Investment Program, which matches libraries, consortia, foundations, departments and other prospective scholarly publishing funders with non-profit publishers and journal editorial boards that are seeking financial investments to sustain or transition journals or books to Open Access (OA) publishing.

AICRJ is published on UC’s eScholarship platform, managed by the California Digital Library (CDL), and uses Janeway for its submission and peer review workflows. The journal will join more than 90 UC-affiliated, open access journals published by eScholarship across a broad range of disciplines and serving a global audience.

“We are delighted to support Indigenous communities in making this valuable scholarship openly available to everyone,” says Catherine Mitchell, director of Publishing, Archives and Digitization at CDL. “The mission and vision of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal aligns with the values of openness and equity that drive CDL’s library publishing program, and we are committed to supporting this important journal for years to come.”

Read the latest issue of the American Indian and Culture Research Journal now (and the complete back catalog soon) at: https://escholarship.org/uc/aicrj

eScholarship Publishing provides comprehensive publishing services for UC-affiliated departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars who seek to publish original, open access journals, books, conference proceedings, and other scholarship. Our journals program, in particular, supports publications that traverse standard disciplinary boundaries, explore new publishing models, and/or seek to reach professionals in applied fields beyond academia.

LYRASIS is a non-profit membership organization that supports enduring access to shared academic, scientific and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums and knowledge communities worldwide.

Janeway is a free, open source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. The community standards are designed to make it easy for others to delve into the codebase; to ensure the security of the platform, as journals become more of a target for hackers; and also to publicly commit to the open access nature of the platform.