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Friday 25 August 2023

Free career journals

It always staggers me how much a journal can charge for one article: for example, an Elsevier publication article that I had ordered from my institution's library was going to cost USD$75, for one article, just for my access alone, for a year's 'rental'. I didn't own it, and I was supposed to destroy it after the rental period. The librarians got back to me and asked if there was anywhere else I could possibly get the article from as that - at the time - equated to NZD$151: the price of purchasing a textbook which the library would then permanently own. Needless to say, I instead emailed the lead author, who very kindly sent me a copy from their own allocation, thus avoiding the publisher altogether.

But wait, there's more. Other than ten - or so - freebies, the researcher/writer of such articles rarely sees any of the fee charged by the publisher. I have written about the rort that is academic writing before (here), where academics are paid by their institutions for research (usually a woeful one day each week; short by some 200-300% I would reckon). Academics also sit on the journal boards, edit the journals, review the articles submitted by other academics, arrange for their libraries to purchase the articles, and set the article reading lists for their students. As part of their salary and conditions, they are stuck in a loop where they must produce content, on which their employment and bonuses - again, if any - depend.

While it is difficult, what can help to counter the rort that is academic publishing is Open Access journals. For Open Access to work, we need to do more of (a) writing for the free access journals, and (b) reading the articles published in them.

So, in that spirit, following are a list of open access career-specific journals:

Then we have the Science Direct journals, which contain some career content: 

If you are a member of either of the following organisations (APCDA or CDANZ), you get access to the following journals as a part of your membership:

Further, if you are a CDANZ member, we can apply to get a logon and password to access to the Ministry of Education library, where we can search for any journals which MoE are subscribed to. Access to this library resource has assisted my research a lot.

Lastly, there are some more goodies listed here (CERIC, 2020); and though I suspect those not listed here may be behind a paywall, it is worth checking.

Please let me know if there are any open access career journals I have missed, and I will keep adding to this list :-)


Sam

References:

CERIC. (2020). Career Development Journals that should be on your radar. https://careerwise.ceric.ca/2020/10/15/7-career-development-journals-that-should-be-on-your-radar/

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