Editorial: Two Decades of Open Access, Practice-Led Learning and Teaching Research

Abstract

The rate of survival of community-led open access journals are not well known or documented, but the resourcing challenges of journals that rely on institutional goodwill to fund platforms and volunteer editors and reviewers is real. The constraints of these systems – diamond open access – often lead to sporadic publication cycles, inconsistencies in publishing quality, and can struggle to achieve high impact factors. The Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice has been no exception to the perils of balancing volunteer and paid commitments and finding money when institutions change their financial commitments to those enterprises. In the JUTLP context, we are equally challenged by a second force; the pursuit of practice-led research. Practice papers, in my experience, tend to have higher rates of reading and applicability to direct change in the way universities and educators engage in learning and teaching, but lead to less research onflows. Despite these forces, the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice continues to provide scholarly leadership to researchers and practitioners and this has been well recognised through metrics as well as evidence of genuine impact. This Two Decade review is an entry into allowing members of our academic community to be evaluative of our publishing practices and help ask the question of what should continue, and what ought to change, over the next decade of JUTLP. Most importantly, this issue is a celebratory note of the endurance and persistence of the journal’s academic community and not least to the close to 100 editors who have supported the last 20 years of open publishing.