Monday, December 15, 2008

An Open Access Journal to Consolidate a New Research Field, and Learn How to Care for our Young

Nordisk Barnehageforskning is a brand new mulitlingual (often english) open access journal. In the introductory Editorial, Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Jan-Erik Johansson talk about how the field of Early Childhood and Care sector has expanded in recent years, so that now almost all young children are in some kind of care before school age. In contrast, research in this sector is just beginning, with most research in the form of thesis or works published by staff in this area. This new OA journal aims to consolidate research in this field. The editors talk about why it is important to have a local journal for Nordic countries, which share much in common with each other. Articles are published as soon as they are ready. The journal aims to be evaluated as a Level 1 academic journal in Norway. Other countries (such as Canada) have local means of evaluating academic journals, a potentially interesting alternative to evaluation by impact factor. Learning and writing about such journal evaluation alternatives would be an interesting research question.

Thanks to Jan Szczepanski for including this journal in his latest collection.