International Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2022) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this beneficial model in scholarship and research. The term Open Access refers to scholarly information that is available digitally, free of charge, and without other access barriers. Some teaching and learning materials, referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER), are published online under flexible licenses called Creative Commons Licenses that allow for sharing and remixing. This includes textbooks – Yes, we said FREE textbooks. Each day this week we will feature a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who uses OER in their classroom or publishes scholarly work under a Creative Commons license. Today we highlight an Open Access Journal that was founded by 3 UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley,  in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice yearly on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes a unique interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields, such as the Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz who was awarded a 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama; and the Afro-French filmmaker Amandine Gay whose documentary, Ouvrir la Voix (Speak Up; 2016), on Black women in France, is the first of its kind. JFS has also published special issues on relevant contemporary topics such as “Education, Intersectionality, and Social Change,” “Feminist Disability Studies,” and the “Queer Archive.” Since 2011, JFS has emerged as a highly regarded platform with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is an excellent resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines. The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles.

“From its inception, JFS has been committed to a mission to disseminate peer reviewed feminist interdisciplinary scholarship across the social sciences and humanities at no cost to authors or readers. The journal has always maintained a commitment to open-access publication, academic rigor, and political relevance, as well as privileging transnational, intersectional, and interdisciplinary orientations.” – Prof. Anupama Arora