Open Access Policy

This is an Open Access journal. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of articles in this journal, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers. As an experiment, enter a research topic into a search engine like Google and see how many links you obtain to papers published in traditional journals. You will find that most references are to working papers, not to published papers, because working papers are freely available. The advent of the web has made free dissemination of research feasible and financially viable. Because existing specialty journals obtain revenues from selling subscriptions, primarily to libraries, access to the research they publish is limited. The attractive revenue stream that such subscriptions provide makes it unlikely that these journals will convert to Open Access. Thus a need exists for new refereed Open Access journals to replace existing journals. We believe that the establishment of a major Open Access journal in communication study will lead others to establish Open Access journals for many sub-fields and specialties in communication, reclaiming full control for the profession of its research output. We hope that this will lead the profession to a new norm in which all research is freely available and which there are no article processing (APC) or submission charges.  The International Journal of Communication has no article processing charges and no article submission charges.