AERA Open
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Click here to read submission guidelines FAQ.
Submit your manuscript today at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aeraopen.
AERA Open is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA). With an emphasis on rapid review and dissemination, AERA Open aims to advance knowledge through theoretical and empirical study across arenas of inquiry related to education and learning. AERA Open emphasizes publishing scientific and scholarly work that adds to knowledge incrementally and cumulatively. AERA Open also serves as a venue for innovation, novel inquiry and ideas, interdisciplinary bridge building, and research that fosters the connection of research to practice and practice to research.
AERA Open’s content will transcend the boundaries between education research and other adjacent fields of inquiry, formal and informal education, research and development, education and other social institutions in society, early and later stages of human development, and scientific and humanistic study. By design, AERA Open seeks to avert the silos and stereotypes that can lead to favoring one rigorous method over another or one conceptual framework or model as more robust than another. AERA Open will not only make knowledge available, it will also use its available space to promote access to data; research instruments, protocols and guides; and other supplemental sources of information that will enhance the value of articles as well as stimulate others to pursue research or its application. As an online journal, AERA Open will provide a publishing venue for works in new and innovative formats, such as video, interactive data tables, and audio recordings that a print format precludes.
Read the Inaugural Editors' Editorial. Check out the most recent articles here.
| Audrey Amrein-Beardsley | Arizona State University, USA |
| Gustavo Fischman | Arizona State University, USA |
| Jennifer Keys Adair | University of Texas, Austin, USA |
| Jason Beech | University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Elizabeth Sumida Huaman | University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA |
| Punya Mishra | Arizona State University, USA |
| Sharon Nichols | University of Texas at San Antonio, USA |
| Pia Lindquist Wong | California State University, Sacramento, USA |
| Tao Xin | Beijing Normal University, China |
| Zhang Yu | Tsinghua University, China |
| Marcelo Caruso | Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany |
| Bee Leng Chua | Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore |
| Inés Dussel | CINVESTAV, Mexico |
| Rocío García-Carrión | University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain |
| Peter Halpin | University of North Carolina, USA |
| Hyeon-Ah Kang | University of Texas at Austin, USA |
| Jeongeun Kim | University of Maryland, College Park, USA |
| Keon McGuire | North Carolina State University, USA |
| Rebecca Tarlau | Stanford University, USA |
| Tina Trujillo | University of California, Berkeley, USA |
| Shiyu Wang | University of Georgia, USA |
| Terri S. Wilson | University of Colorado-Boulder, USA |
| Naheed Abdulrahim | University of Nebraska, Kearney |
| Rosemarie Allen | MSU Denver, USA |
| Kaitlin Anderson | American Institutes for Research |
| Laura Ascenzi-Moreno | Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA |
| Zarrina Azizova | University of North Dakota, USA |
| Felipe Barrera-Osorio | Vanderbilt University, USA |
| Stephen Billett | Griffith University, Australia |
| Maneka Deanna Brooks | Portland State University, USA |
| Cassie J Brownell | University of Toronto, Canada |
| Paul Bruno | University of Illinois, USA |
| Patricia E. Burch | University of Southern California, USA |
| Jill Castek | University of Arizona, USA |
| Yu Chen | Louisiana State University, USA |
| Julia Cohen | University of Virginia, USA |
| North Cooc | University of Texas at Austin, USA |
| Negin Dahya | University of Washington, USA |
| David DeMatthews | University of Texas at Austin, USA |
| D. Brent Edwards | University of Hawaii, USA |
| Idit Fast | Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel |
| Carlton Fong | Texas State University, USA |
| Katherine K. Frankel | Boston University, USA |
| Gina A. Garcia | UC Berkeley, USA |
| Dan Goodley | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Maithreyi Gopalan | University of Oregon, USA |
| Rene Guillaume | New Mexico State University, USA |
| Laura Hamilton | Center for Assessment, USA |
| Emily Hodge | Montclair University, USA |
| David Houston | George Mason University, USA |
| Xiangen Hu | Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China |
| Simone Ispa-Landa | Northwestern University, USA |
| Jeremy Wright-Kim | University of Michigan |
| Kylie L Anglin | University of Connecticut, USA |
| Oren Pizmony- Levy | Columbia University |
| Michael H Little | North Carolina State University |
| Chee-Kit Looi | The Education University of Hong Kong |
| Ruth María López | University of Arizona, USA |
| Cuellar Marcella | University of California, Davis, USA |
| Anna J. Markowitz | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Heather McCambly | University of Pittsburgh , USA |
| Patrick McEwan | Wellesley College, USA |
| Benjamin Nagengast | University of Tübingen, Germany |
| Tuan D Nguyen | University of Missouri, USA |
| Gabrielle Oliveira | Harvard University, USA |
| Scott Peters | Northwestern Evaluation Association, USA |
| Morgan Polikoff | University of Southern California, USA |
| Stephanie Reid | University of Cincinnati, USA |
| Luis Rodriguez | New York University, USA |
| Sophia Rodriguez | New York University |
| Maria V Santelices | Catholic University of Chile, Chile |
| Lucrecia Santibañez | University of California, Los Angeles , USA |
| Mohammed Saqr | University of Eastern Finland, Finland |
| Corey Savage | University of Glasgow, UK |
| Jeremy Singer | University of Michigan-Flint, USA |
| Everett Smith | University of Cincinnati |
| Kamden Strunk | Virginia Commonwealth University, United States |
| Ivory A. Toldson | Howard University, USA |
| Blanca Elizabeth Vega | Montclair State University, USA |
| Emiliana Vegas | Harvard University, USA |
| Antoni Verger | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Samantha Viano | George Mason University, USA |
| Christina Weiland | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA |
| Miri Yemini | Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel |
| Gema Zamarro | University of Arkansas, USA |
| Michalinos Zembylas | Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus |
Click here to read submission guidelines FAQ.
AERA Open is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Types of Manuscripts
AERA Open publishes research on educational processes and outcomes, broadly defined. Papers can be conducted in a wide range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to psychology, economics, neuroscience, anthropology, and sociology, and can also be interdisciplinary. Submissions can focus on education and learning in any context (e.g., early childhood, after-school, post-secondary) or country provided they are suitably contextualized for AERA’s readership.
The majority of articles published in AERA Open will be empirical studies, which draw on quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods traditions. Occasional exceptions are made for innovative conceptual articles that make very special contributions in illuminating learning processes and outcomes or methodological articles that offer new approaches in the collection or analysis of data. In most cases, we expect conceptual and methodological papers to be largely based on prior empirical research. We also welcome meta-analysis, replication studies, and studies with precisely-defined null results. We do not publish opinion essays, literature reviews, pilot studies or practical guides.
A manuscript can be submitted as a regular article or as a special topic article. AERA Open publishes special topic collections on a range of important interdisciplinary themes related to education. See our special topic collections page to view current calls for papers. Note that many special topics require prior approval of an abstract.
Manuscript Submission
Please read the guidelines below then visit the Journal’s submission site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aeraopen to upload your manuscript.
Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of AERA Open will be reviewed. As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.
Open Access
As an open access journal, AERA Open is freely available online immediately upon publication. All articles are rigorously peer-reviewed and brought to publication as rapidly as possible. Production costs are covered by Article Processing Charges (APC) paid by the authors/institutions/funders upon acceptance of their manuscripts (more information below). There is no charge for submitting a paper to AERA Open.
For general information on open access at SAGE please visit the Open Access page or view our Open Access FAQs.
Continuous Publication
One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no issues to fill and no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as the production process is complete. At this time it will be completely free for readers to view and download. Check the “Latest Articles” tab on the journal website for the most recent published content.
AERA Open accepts only original research articles. Researchers submitting manuscripts should consult the Standards for Reporting on Research in AERA Publications and the AERA Code of Ethics. Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of AERA Open will be reviewed. As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.
Upon acceptance of your manuscript, you will be charged a one-time Author Processing Charge (APC). This fee covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available. Once the charge has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and will appear online within an average of 20 working days.
Author processing charges are listed below. The introductory rates are discounted from the full rate and are available for a limited time.
|
Author Category |
Introductory Article Processing Charge |
Article Processing Charge |
|
Standard Rate |
$200 |
$700 |
|
AERA Member Rate* |
$100 |
$400 |
|
AERA Graduate Student Member Rate** |
$50 |
$100 |
|
Non-Member Graduate Student Rate** |
$150 |
$200 |
* All authors must be an AERA member in order to qualify for the AERA member rate
** All authors must be “Graduate Student” members of Association in order to qualify for the discounted rate.
Note that the article processing charge will be waived for authors who are residents of a country included in the World Bank list of low-income countries, provided that all authors of the manuscript are residents of the low income country. Authors of manuscripts who are residents of a country included in the World Bank list of lower middle income countries, provided that all authors of the manuscript are residents of the lower middle income country, will be eligible for the standard or student member rate, as applicable.
All manuscripts for AERA Open should be submitted electronically at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aeraopen. Authors should read the inaugural editorial. For specific questions or inquiries, email the AERA Open editor. Manuscript submissions by email are not accepted.
Only electronic files conforming to the journal’s guidelines will be accepted. Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word DOC, RTF, and XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted. Please refer to the additional guidelines on submitting artwork and supplemental files, below.
Authorship
All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
AERA Open manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the style guidelines of Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), 6th edition.
Manuscripts should not exceed 8,000 words in length, excluding tables, appendices, figures, notes, and references. (The editors encourage authors of empirical articles to submit main manuscripts that are under 5,000 words and focus on summaries of relevant research literature, procedures, and results, and then include supplementary online material to provide further details of data, measures, and robustness-checking.) Note that, if the submitted work is based on modes of scholarship that do not rely on the written word (e.g., photographs, recordings), researchers should aim to use equivalent criteria that convey the logic of scholarly reasoning in as concise a manner as feasible.
Pages should be numbered consecutively, beginning with the page after the title page. Manuscripts should be typed for 8½” x 11” paper, in upper and lower case, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins on all sides. The type size should be at least 12 point. Figures and tables are to be placed at the end of the text. Subheads should be placed at reasonable intervals to break the monotony of lengthy text. Sentence structure, not italics, should be used to create emphasis. Abbreviations and acronyms should be spelled out at first mention. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters should be formatted to indicate italics, boldface, superscript, and subscript.
Notes are for explanations or amplifications of textual material, not for reference information. They are distracting to readers and expensive to set and should be avoided whenever possible. They should be typed as normal text at the end of the text section of the manuscript rather than as part of the footnote or endnote feature of a computer program and should be numbered consecutively through the article.
Manuscripts must include a list of references, which should include only sources that are cited in the text. The accuracy and completeness of references and citations are the responsibility of the author(s). Reference each dataset with its title, author, date, and a persistent web identifier, such as a digital object identifier (DOI), a handle, or a uniform resource name (URN). If necessary, this last element may be replaced by a web address and an access date, although researchers are urged to use the DOI as the preferred citation. Personal communications (letters, memos, telephone conversations) are cited in the text after the name with as exact a date as possible.
All manuscripts should include an abstract of 100–150 words, followed by a list of keywords (the terms that researchers will use to find the article in indexes and databases). Abstracts should be structured to inform readers of the purpose, methods, and findings of the research or the equivalent for theoretical or non-empirical manuscripts.
Provide full contact details for the corresponding author, including email, affiliation, mailing address, and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations are required for all co-authors. These details should be presented in their own file, separate from the main text of the article, to facilitate anonymous peer review.
Figures and tables should present data to the reader in a clear and unambiguous manner. They should be keyed to the text. If illustration and text are redundant, eliminate the illustration or reduce the amount of detail provided in the text. Figure captions should be typed on a separate page and should not appear in full on the original figures. One high-quality electronic version of each figure must be submitted with the manuscript that is to be typeset. Tables will be typeset. Figures supplied in color will appear in color online.
For additional guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures, and graphs in electronic format, please visit SAGE’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.
Photographic illustrations should be rendered with at least 300 dpi; please use CMYK color conversion if possible. Graphs made with Office software such as Microsoft Excel can be provided in their original format to facilitate conversion into printable format with preserved quality. Any other line graphs/illustrations should preferably be provided in EPS format with a resolution of at least 600 dpi to prevent ragged lines when printed. A figure image should be at least 160 mm in width at the appropriate resolution. For further guidance on how to prepare your digital image see http://art.cadmus.com/da/index.jsp.
Researchers need to address conflicts of interest, human subjects protection, and data sharing in accordance with AERA’s standards for reporting on research in AERA publications.
AERA Open encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.
To comply with the guidance for research funders, authors and publishers issued by the Research Information Network (RIN), AERA Open additionally requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit Funding Acknowledgment on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state in your acknowledgments that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
This journal is able to host approved supplemental materials online, alongside the full text of articles. Supplemental files will be subjected to peer-review together with the article. For more information please refer to SAGE’s Guidelines for Authors on Supplemental Files.
Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using the services offered by SAGE Language Services. Visit SAGE Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.
AERA Open uses double-blind review. Authors will not know the identities of reviewers and reviewers will not know the identities of authors.
The complete title of the article and the name(s) of the author(s) should be provided only in a separate cover-page file to ensure anonymity in the review process. The text should have no author names but may carry a short article title at the top. Names of authors in citations and references should not be blinded; however, information in text that would identify those references as belonging to the author should be deleted from the manuscript (e.g., text citations of “my previous work,” especially when accompanied by a self-citation; a preponderance of the author’s own work in the reference list). These elements may be reinserted in the final draft. Information that could help identify any author (e.g., mention of any affiliation) should also be removed. Citations and references to undistributed work, as long as it is unsearchable on the web, should be blinded using “Author” and realphabetized in the reference list. The author’s name should be removed from the document’s Properties.
Proofs
We will email a PDF of the proofs to the corresponding author. Any accompanying queries should be answered as soon as possible so that publication is not delayed. The PDF of your article will be available for download on the journal website after publication. Your SAGE Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process.
We value your feedback to ensure that we continue to improve our author service. Upon publication all corresponding authors will receive a brief survey questionnaire on your experience of publishing in AERA Open with SAGE.
Contributor’s Publishing Agreement
Before publication, SAGE requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. AERA Open publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard AERA Open license is Creative Commons by Attribution NonCommerical (CC BY-NC), which allows others to reuse the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced and the use is noncommercial. Authors may also use the Creative Commons by Attribution (CC-BY) if required by their institution or funders. For more information, you are advised to visit SAGE’s OA licenses page.
Alternative license arrangements are available, for example, to meet particular funder mandates, made at the author’s request.
AERA Open and SAGE take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism, or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of articles published in the journal. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked using duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyrighted material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgment, or where authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action, including but not limited to publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article (removing it from the journal); taking up the matter with the head of the department or dean of the author’s institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; banning the author from publication in the journal or in all SAGE journals; or taking appropriate legal action.
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. If authors are using their own work, they will still be required to obtain permission if they did not retain copyright of the previously published work.Papers will not be accepted for publication without the correct permissions. For further information, including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.