Simo Vehmas, President of NNDR, http://blogs.helsinki.fi/spvehmas/
Fom the beginning of 2018, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research (SJDR) will be published with an Open access license by Stockholm University Press. This means that all the material in the journal can be downloaded for free and shared with colleagues without restrictions. The whole previous archive of SJDR with its 18 volumes will be made available free of charge as well. The entire journal content will thus become available to anyone with an access to internet. As the NNDR board and the Editors are already working hard with the transition to a new publisher, we’d like to announce the change now to open up for comments.
The journal will be a truly open publication because we have chosen the strategy to not charge the authors of publishing their material in SJDR. All the costs will be covered by NNDR. And now you’re thinking: there’s a catch, isn’t there? Yes, there is. It’s called Nordic social democracy.
We believe that academic publishing should increase knowledge and understanding. Importantly, it should also promote social justice. That is why it is increasingly important that the knowledge produced in academia is available to all; disabled people, policy makers, general public.
Facts and sound arguments are powerful weapons against ignorance and bigotry, which continue to be serious concerns to disabled people across the globe. That is why the journal will maintain and even tighten its criteria for high standard. We are however not in the business of getting as much readers as possible with minimum quality control. The peer-review of submitted manuscripts will continue to be rigorous, led by Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist and her team.
The way we see it, since NNDR owns and pays for the journal, it actually makes sense to us to introduce a limit for the output at 30 articles per year. This will, in the initial phase, be funded by the surplus from our society conferences. In the future, we aim to apply for public (Nordic social democratic) funding to cover the costs which will hopefully enable us to publish more high-quality material. It would also enable us to reduce the attendance fees to our biennial conferences to make them accessible to those with less or no institutional funding.
So from now on, instead of delivering for free all the material to a major academic publisher, and paying them for publishing it, we are now free to publish whatever we see to be of good quality scholarship, whatever we see to be useful in order to understand things better and make things better for disabled people, and whatever will annoy the hell out of the Donald Trumps of this world.