American Sociological Association: ASA to to Launch Open Access Scholarly Journal for All Sociology Subfields

"The American Sociological Association (ASA) is pleased to announce that it will launch a new sociology open access journal in summer 2014 with the support of SAGE Publications. The journal, which will be free to all readers, will welcome scholarly articles in any area of sociology. The name for the ASA’s open access journal is currently being discussed by the Association’s Committee on Publications and Council. It will be the Association’s first open access journal covering all subfields of sociology, adding a new resource to ASA’s history of publishing the highest quality peer-reviewed scholarship. The ASA’s open access journal will provide a new outlet for innovative peer-reviewed scholarship that will be accessed freely and rapidly by users throughout the world. It will allow authors to receive a publishing decision quickly, have article lengths unconstrained by printed page limits, as well as have accepted articles published online immediately after editorial review and acceptance. Authors will retain their copyright under a Creative Commons license The new open access journal shares with all ASA journals the centrality of rigorous peer review. There will be, however, some exciting differences in the process from the perspective of the author. As with all ASA journals, peer reviewers will focus on the theoretical and empirical contributions of the manuscript as well as the quality of its research methodology (i.e., whether it was conducted properly, the discussion accurately summarizes the research, and the conclusions follow logically from the research). However, the ASA open access journal editor(s) and reviewers will have none of the constraints faced by editors of print journals on the length of an article or other limitations imposed by the printed page. Methodologically sound submissions that add to the existing knowledge base of the discipline, are well written, and are appropriately concise are eligible for publication ..."