Open Access Arts and Humanities Journals

INQUIRIES Journal is an open-access academic journal that highlights the work of students at the undergraduate level and above. The journal publishes work across a range of academic disciplines with a particular focus on the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Our goal is to provide a credible and accessible venue for the dissemination of the best student scholarship into the public, professional, and academic discourse. Although students regularly conduct in-depth research and undoubtedly possess unique insights, few venues exist to facilitate engagement with these ideas outside the classroom. We believe that an intellectually engaged society depends on an efficient marketplace of ideas. Thus, Inquiries Journal offers students a unique opportunity to share work of an academic and intellectual character with a broad audience both within and outside academia.

Networking Knowledge is an e-journal published by the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. The Network brings together around 400 postgraduate and early-career researchers in the fields of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies. The aim of Networking Knowledge is to provide a space where the best work of this thriving postgraduate community can be showcased.

Supported by the MeCCSA PGN Executive Committee, Networking Knowledge aims to publish at least one issue per year based on work arising from the annual MeCCSA PGN Conference. Further regular and guest edited issues are published throughout the year in order to cater for more specific research interests.

Although only featuring the work of postgraduate and early-career researchers, Networking Knowledge aims to encourage open debate across all levels of scholarship.

THE CEC’S ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ELECTROACOUSTIC PRACTICES

Published by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community since 1998, eContact! is an online journal dedicated to the exploration and promotion of the richly diverse discipline of electroacoustic practices.

As a CEC project, eContact! is meant to benefit the whole of the community of electroacoustic practitioners and audience at a local, regional, national and international level. The journal’s editorial team is committed to inclusiveness and strives to explore with depth, authenticity and lucidity the complex issues and interests of the broader electroacoustic milieu: from “pure” acousmatic and computer music to videomusic and mixed media to soundscape and sonic art to hardware hacking and beyond.

The journal is and has always been freely available to the public; access to over 1000 articles in over 70 issues of the journal (as of the 18th volume) is unimpeded by subscription fees or library memberships.

RUUKKU is a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed journal on artistic research launched in 2013. It is based on the Research Catalogue (RC), an international artistic research platform and database that enables multimedia publication. The primary languages of publication are Finnish, Swedish and English.

RUUKKU aims to be a top-class research publication and to participate in the development of artistic research that the international Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) has engaged in since 2010. RUUKKU has opted for a publication policy that includes thematic issues, supplements with new initiatives for discussions, a section containing news and topical issues, as well as presentations of unpublished research in progress. By providing the opportunity to use the Finnish language, RUUKKU promotes discussion within Finnish artistic research. Furthermore, its English-language abstracts and publication platform offer Finnish artistic researchers a way to participate in international discussions in the field.

Similar to JAR, RUUKKU will function as a portal for expositions, i.e., research articles, authored in the Research Catalogue. RUUKKU is characterised by its multimedia publication format, multidisciplinarity, use of the Finnish language in the context of international artistic research, and published peer reviews as well as the Research Catalogue's search functions and long-term archiving.

The RC platform is maintained by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), which was established in 2010 as a vehicle for publishing JAR (the Journal for Artistic Research) and maintaining the Research Catalogue platform. The Society has both individual and institutional members all over the world. A list of the institutions supporting the Society is available at http://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/members.

PARSE is a research publishing platform committed to the movement back and forth between analysis and creation, between meaning-making and the analytics of meaning, between construction and re-construction.

PARSE bridges gaps, and strengthens the field of artistic research by meeting its needs for new forms of peer review, publication, and conferencing.

PARSE addresses a broad range of academics, artists, and art audiences who are curious about the contribution of research to the arts, and the contribution of the arts to knowledge-making.

PARSE is committed to interdisciplinarity and internationalization – our purpose and aim is to facilitate and publish research across disciplines, in an international context.

The Journal of Games Criticism grew out of lively conversations among graduate students and faculty from the Department of Communication and Media (C&M) and the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Starting in 2012, several C&M students identified the need for critical tools for reflection about and useful for the design of video games. From these conversations, it is apparent that, while there are a handful of established journals within the field of games studies, additional space was needed to join together the communities at work within gaming culture. This space would call on all corners of the community, from developers and writers to bloggers and academics, to be a dynamic, current, and multifaceted journal. It continues the hallmark of peer-review from academic journals while opting for total inclusion.

We take video games as our impetus and our enterprise. With multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as our tools, we look to the past of video gaming in order to orchestrate and build its future. Looking to rhetoric, media studies, and cultural studies, many apparatuses of analysis are present, but they all must be brought into these media and reborn.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research. The field of virtual worlds research is a continually evolving area of study that spans across many disciplines and the JVWR editorial team looks forward to engaging a wide range of creative and scholarly work.

What are virtual worlds and what is virtual worlds research, within the context of this journal? These are evolving questions that we hope the formation of a community of scholarship will explore and expand. However, to provide a base to build upon, we consider virtual worlds to be computer-based simulated environment where users interact with other users through graphic or textual representations of themselves utilizing textual chat, voice, video or other forms of communication. The term virtual worlds includes, is similar to, or is synonymous (with extensive qualifications) to the terms of virtual reality, virtual space, datascape, metaverse, virtual environment, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs or MMOGs), massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), multi-user dungeon, domain or dimension (MUDs), MUD object oriented (MOOs), multi-user shared hack, habitat, holodeck, or hallucination (MUSHs), massively-multiuser online graphical environments, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) or multi-user virtual environments (MUVES), and immersive virtual environments (IVEs).

We see the current predominance of the virtual worlds of Second Life and its competitors as the most recent iteration of a long lineage of developments in virtual reality and gaming both in terms of technologies and conceptualization. Finally, we do not pretend to be a gaming journal, and hope that through this forum we are contributing to the development of specific space within the scholarly and creative communities for discourse on the wide variety of topic areas that are involved in virtual worlds research, including history of virtual worlds, cultural and social theory, quantitative research, qualitative research, virtual ethnographies, pedagogy, education and virtual worlds, development, experimentation, ideas and the intersection of virtual worlds and society.

Back in 2009, Critical Distance was founded to answer the question: “Where is all the good writing about games?”

Our goal for the last 10 years has always been to facilitate dialogue. Through roundups, roundtables, podcasts, and critical compilations, we provide one place where all the most important discourse is collected together. We aim to build a foundation for ongoing conversations between developers, critics, educators and enthusiasts about critical issues in games culture.

We are a compendium of the most incisive, thought-provoking, and remarkable discussion in and around games, keeping it archived for years to come. Our work has helped new writers to find their voice, educators to find resources to help their students develop critical thinking, and developers to become more reflective in their design practice.

PARSE is a research publishing platform committed to the movement back and forth between analysis and creation, between meaning-making and the analytics of meaning, between construction and re-construction.

PARSE bridges gaps, and strengthens the field of artistic research by meeting its needs for new forms of peer review, publication, and conferencing.

PARSE addresses a broad range of academics, artists, and art audiences who are curious about the contribution of research to the arts, and the contribution of the arts to knowledge-making.

PARSE is committed to interdisciplinarity and internationalization – our purpose and aim is to facilitate and publish research across disciplines, in an international context.

NECSUS is an international, double blind peer-reviewed journal of media studies connected to NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and published by Amsterdam University Press. The journal is multidisciplinary and strives to bring together the best work in the field of media studies across the humanities and social sciences. We aim to publish research that matters and that improves the understanding of media and culture inside and outside the academic community.

Each volume features diverse contributions, a special thematic section, and review sections that cover books, festivals, and exhibits. NECSUS is targeted to a broad readership of researchers, lecturers, and students and is offered as a biannual open access journal.

In a critical review, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet stated that the journal:”oscillates between essayism, artistic practice and meta-reflection in a most exciting way. They write about silent knowledge, poetics, reflection on reflection, composition of the composed, in the difference between objective and subjective knowledge, epistemology and doxology…”

The journal ArtMonitor aims to present interesting artistic projects that give different perspectives to artistic research. You will find artists, musicians, philosophers, filmmakers, designers, photographers - all art forms - presented and with their views on artistic research.

Visible Language is the oldest peer-reviewed design journal, first published in 1967. For its first four years, it was published under the title The Journal of Typographic Research. Our founding editor, Dr Merald Wrolstad, understood that research and scholarly information were essential to the development of communication design and in particular to the development of typography in its support of reading and writing. Understanding these broader implications, he changed the title to Visible Language.

In 1987, the journal passed to its second editor Sharon Poggenpohl, who strengthened the investigation of design research, interdisciplinary thinking, and the evolution of digital communication along with its cultural impact. In 2013, Mike Zender at the University of Cincinnati School of Design assumed the role of editor, and the journal has further refined its focus on communication design research.

Over its lifetime, the journal has published nearly 900 articles. From our initial focus on typography, we have evolved with the changing landscape of communication design to embrace interdisciplinary relationships with anthropology, art, design, education, English and linguistics. General issues by their very nature are interdisciplinary.

Foucault Studies is the only international journal in the English language devoted to the work and influence of the thinker Michel Foucault, often listed as the most cited contemporary author within the human and social sciences, also in the Nordic countries.

Contributions to Foucault Studies are not limited to the examination of his work, but advance the analytical, empirical and practical use of Foucault's thought across all disciplines.

Culture is too important to be left to specialists. It has moved to centre-stage in societal debates, and become a significant problem for economics, organisations and heritage. Although it is lauded for originality and innovation in aesthetics, it is often given as an excuse for resistance to change in institutions. Politics is riven by polarisation between ‘tribal’ cultures.

Cultural Science Journal is the home of a community of scholars drawn from natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. We want to understand how cultural systems function, how culture creates the groups that create knowledge, and how that operates at global scale. If you are concerned about the emergence, economics and governance of groups, the negotiation and transmission of identity through meaningful systems, from language and media to trade and technology, the history and dynamics of communities, the development of networked knowledge, or the role of social media in shaping our futures, then you have a place in the rich interdisciplinary ferment of our growing community.

We call it cultural science; you may call it something else. But if you are interested in the intersection of culture, groups, knowledge and how they are sustained, then we hope you will join our conversation. What’s new is our commitment to developing systematic models and methods to trace causation through cultural processes and groups. We also look beyond the academy, to advocacy, activism and policy. We’re a journal of ‘public thought’, open to those working on applications of knowledge as well as on basic research.

Cultural Science Journal investigates culture from a systems perspective, as an adaptive source of groups, knowledge, creativity and innovation. It seeks to integrate the insights gained in the humanities, especially communication, media and cultural studies, with other spheres, especially the evolutionary sciences (including economics and bioscience, as well as anthropology) and complexity sciences (computational systems and networks).

The International Journal of Qualitative Methods is the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary open access journal of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) at the University of Alberta, Canada.

The journal was established in 2002 as an eclectic and international forum for papers reporting original methodological insights, study design innovations, and funded-project proposals using qualitative or mixed methods research that are useful to the global research community.

Big Data & Society (BD&S) is an Open Access peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences about the implications of Big Data for societies.

The Journal's key purpose is to provide a space for connecting debates about the emerging field of Big Data practices and how they are reconfiguring academic, social, industry, business and governmental relations, expertise, methods, concepts and knowledge.