All journals in the Organization Collection are indexed by:

Common Ground journals are highly accessible on the web. They are not hidden behind subscription walls. Every article has its own page; and every author has their own self-maintainable website, which includes any articles and books they have published with Common Ground, a blog, and places to paste their bionote, photo and CV.

We want to make a general comment, however, about the ways in which academic knowledge is valued. The current system, based mainly on rejection rates and citation counts is seriously fraught. Rejection rates, for instance, are an arbitrary supply-and-demand relation of submissions to publication slots which tell little of intellectual quality. Our measure of quality is the process itself and the rigorous application of explicit criteria of intellectual excellence.

The other conventional measure of scholarly value, the citation count, is just as fraught. Just how fraught is a long story, the intricacies of which we explain in the publications below. In a number of ways, we at Common Ground have been working to create a peer evaluation system which is more reliable and which produces better quality publications. What we do is, we would argue, uniquely rigorous. In our quest to publish only the best, Common Ground takes a work through multiple steps in a collaborative knowledge creation process. Our goal is to implement innovative peer review practices, using a process of what we call ‘synergistic feedback’. Our aim is to provide scaffolds for a vibrant knowledge ecology. Our new media tools also provide high levels of Internet exposure and potentials for web interactivity around your work.

References:

• Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. 2009. "Signs of Epistemic Disruption: Transformations in the Knowledge System of the Academic Journal." First Monday, 14.
• Cope, Bill and Angus Phillips (eds). 2009. The Future of the Academic Journal. Oxford UK: Chandos.
• Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. 2010. "Evaluating Webs of Knowledge: A Critical Examination of the ‘Impact Factor’." Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community, 21:117-132
• Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee. 2011. Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research. Cambridge UK: Woodhead Publishing

All journals in The Organization family encourage the widest range of submissions and aim at all times to foster the highest standards intellectual excellence in our journal publishing program. These are our objectives:


Open Review


Common Ground’s approach to peer review is open and inclusive, at the same time as it is based on the most rigorous and merit-based ‘blind’ peer review processes. Our referee processes are criterion-referenced and referees selected on the basis of subject matter and disciplinary expertise. Ranking is based on clearly articulated criteria. The result is a refereeing process that is scrupulously fair in its assessments at the same time as offering a carefully structured and constructive contribution to the shape of the published paper.


Intellectual Excellence


The result is a publishing process which is without prejudice to institutional affiliation, stage in career, national origins or disciplinary perspective. If the paper is excellent, and has been systematically and independently assessed as such, it will be published. This is why Common Ground journals have so much exciting new material, much of it originating from well known research institutions but also a considerable amount of brilliantly insightful and innovative material from academics in lesser known institutions in the developing world, emerging researchers, people working in hard-to-classify interdisciplinary spaces and researchers in liberal arts colleges and teaching universities. In recognition of the highest levels of excellence, every year an international prize is awarded for the top-ranked paper in each journal.


Practicality


Common Ground is developing a low-cost commercial approach to academic publishing. We believe there are limitations in both the high cost commercial publishing and apparently no-cost open access publishing models. This is why are seeking to find a practical middle way between the idealism of open access and the inefficiencies and greed of which the big journal publishers are increasingly accused. The idealism of open access often creates new problems, leaving academics in the often less-than-happy role of amateur publisher. And ironically, open access journals and discipline repositories sometimes give insider networks even greater control over what gets published than was traditionally the case with the big commercial publishers.


Common Ground journals are highly accessible on the web. They are not hidden behind subscription walls. Every article has its own page; and every author has their own self-maintainable website, which includes any articles and books they have published with Common Ground, a blog, and places to paste their bionote, photo and CV. We have modest subscription charges for libraries and a small per-article charge for electronic access by non-subscribers. Conference participants are granted free electronic access to the corresponding journal for a year. Our journals are also available in print editions.

The journals in The Organization family are great resources for researchers, students, and academics.  If you would like to recommend The Organization family of journals to your institution’s library, you can download a recommendation form.