News from Open Gender Journal – October 2020: querelles-net joins Open Gender Journal
After 20 years of independent publication, the review magazine querelles-net is now integrated as a section in the Open Gender Journal – a good time to review developments to date and reflect on the consequences for future publication.
The section in the Open Gender Journal will continue to be called querelles-net, and this signals that the established and proven scholarly, technical-legal and organizational standards will be maintained and – if possible and necessary – further developed. These include, above all, the quality assurance through standardised peer review of submitted texts, which is usually unusual for reviews, strict adherence to the principles of Open Access, the organisation of publications in the Open Journal Systems (OJS) editorial system, and orientation towards the best standards for scientific publishing in various disciplines.
querelles-net was founded in 2000 as the first German-language electronic review journal; published by the Zentraleinrichtung zur Förderung von Frauen- und Gender Studies, founded by Dr. Ulla Bock and Dr. Anita Runge and launched by Dr. Constanze Jaiser as editor. In 2009 the transformation into an Open Access journal and the migration to the OJS editorial system took place, for which Marco Tullney was mainly responsible. A whole range of people have worked on querelles-net to date, either as editors or as proofreaders and translators. In the meantime, 67 issues have been published with a total of approx. 1,150 texts. The editorial team has always endeavored to orientate its work on querelles-net in terms of content, organization, law and technology to the latest standards of open access publishing and to help shape these standards. Most of this work, however, was done with a very small team and on a part-time basis; there has therefore long been a desire to integrate the journal more strongly into the community and to transfer editorial responsibility to a larger group.
With the integration as a section in the Open Gender Journal and thus in the context of a journal with a large editorial team, which is supported by the Fachgesellschaft Geschlechterstudien and several gender research centers, there are opportunities to attract new authors and to implement the ambitious concept of the review journal together with a larger group of people.
Unique characteristics, which querelles-net has acquired as a place for scientific reviews, are thereby further leading for the journal: Also in the section querelles-net in the Open Gender Journal we will strictly pay attention to the scientific independence and quality of the reviews. We will continue to check every submitted text for bias and plagiarism, carry out a standardized quality assurance procedure, and provide professional editing, proofreading and layout.
In the future, the querelles-net section will participate in all further developments of Open Access publishing that are tested and implemented within the Open Gender Journal. This includes the use of a newer version of the Open Journal System editorial system, which enables the documentation of all decision-making steps and discussions, keywording based on a controlled vocabulary (the Schlagwortindex GenderOpen) and, above all, participation in the development of semi-automated publication workflows of media-independent publishing, which should allow texts to be easily output in different formats and for different devices.
Interested authors who would like to write a review should contact the responsible editor of the Open Gender Journal (redaktion@querelles-net.de). After a transition phase, the previous function in querelles-net, to apply for reviews via a suggestion list, will be available again in the new version of the editorial system. For the submission of reviews with querelles-net interested authors must register themselves here at Open Gender Journal.
In the medium term, the articles published in querelles-net will be available under the old address. In any case, all contributions are archived at the German National Library.
We thank all authors who participated in the past 20 years in making querelles net a unique review journal, and hope that as many as possible of them accompany and support us on the new publication way.
The first reviews of the new section querelles-net can now be found in the current issue of the Open Gender Journal.
