The CDI Journal

Continuing with the series on open access journals (read more here), this time we consider a for-profit publication house periodical. Originally called the International Journal of Career Management and established in 1996, the Career Development International (CDI) is a partially open access Emerald Insight journal (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2025). CDI explores careers and development, often in an organisational setting, sitting under training and development, in the career development and promotion sector. In 2021, CDI was 25 years old, and published a "retrospective of the major trends, research constituents, thematic structure and key factors explaining the citation impact of CDI articles between 1996 and 2020" (Varma et al., 2021, p. 113).

At a little over 40 articles published each year, over 80% of published articles have multiple authors, most often hailing from The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, the USA, UK, Israel, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong and New Zealand (Varma et al., 2021).

Publishing between six and seven issues annually, this is a hybrid journal, which means that article submitters pay to be published. Further, unlike the other two open access journals I have mentioned - NICEC and CJCD, here - not all the articles in IJCD can be downloaded and read without cost. It is a bit of a pick and mix as to whether there is free access or not. And, also unlike NICEC and CJCD, the entire issue cannot be downloaded.

However, at least some articles are free to download, and that is a bonus for career practitioners everywhere.

Sam

References:

Emerald Publishing Limited. (2025). The International Journal of Career Development.  https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1362-0436

Varma, A., Kumar, S., Sureka, R., & Lim, W. M. (2022). What do we know about career and development? Insights from Career Development International at age 25. Career Development International, 27(1), 113-134. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-08-2021-0210