Volume 1, Number 1

There are a great many journals. The honest question for anyone starting a new one is what this journal will do that the existing ones do not.

The answer is not novelty of subject. Law, nursing, literature, history, education, policy and environmental science are all well served by excellent journals, and this journal does not pretend to compete with them at the top of their fields. The answer is a matter of access, and of how a manuscript is treated when it arrives.

Consider the ordinary situation of a college teacher in a district town who has spent two years studying something worth knowing: how bail is actually granted in the local sessions court, how nursing handovers work in a district hospital, what a forgotten Hindi periodical of the 1930s reveals about its readership, what happened to a water scheme after the inauguration. That research is often good. What happens to it is often one of three things. It goes to a journal that publishes anything for a fee, where nobody reads it and nobody cites it. It goes to a journal that never replies. Or it is not written up at all, because the author reasonably concludes that neither outcome is worth two years of work.

This journal exists for that manuscript. Three commitments follow from it, and they are commitments rather than aspirations because a reader can check each one.

The first is that we reply. Every submission receives a written editorial response within seven working days, and every manuscript that goes to review receives the reviewers’ reports, whether the decision is acceptance or rejection. A rejection that explains itself leaves an author better equipped than before. A silence leaves an author with nothing, and silence has become the ordinary experience of submitting to a journal. It will not be the experience here.

The second is that we charge nothing. No submission fee, no processing charge, no publication charge, no fee for a certificate, no paid fast track. A publication charge decides who can publish before anyone has read a word, and it decides against exactly the researchers this journal was founded to reach. The journal is run by a board that serves without payment, on a platform that costs very little to operate, and the costs that do arise will be met without ever being passed to an author.

The third is that the standard does not move. Review is double anonymous, against seven criteria published on this website before the first call for papers went out. Those criteria apply equally to a manuscript from a national institute and a manuscript from a college nobody has heard of, which is the entire point of anonymising the manuscript in the first place. A journal that is generous about where work comes from and strict about whether it is any good is a useful journal. A journal that is generous about both is a waste of everyone’s time, and there are enough of those already.

Three sentences about what we are not. We are not indexed yet, and we say so plainly on the indexing and preservation page rather than implying accreditation we do not hold. We do not have an impact factor, and we will not display a purchased one. We are new, which is a real disadvantage to an author choosing where to send good work, and the only honest response to it is to do the work well from the first issue and let the record accumulate.

The founding issue is open across all seven research sections. Manuscripts are invited until 31 October 2026 for publication on 31 December 2026. The submission guidelines set out precisely what to send and what happens after you send it.

One last thing, addressed to the author who is unsure whether their work is good enough for a journal. Send it. If it is not ready, you will be told why, specifically, in writing, by someone who read it. That is a better outcome than the manuscript sitting in a folder, and it costs you nothing but the postage, which is also nothing.