Launch of Reviews of Economic Literature

We are offering more than just another journal. Reviews of Economic Literature (REL) represents a unique collaboration with Stanford University Press (SUP) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University. REL is the first journal published by SUP+PKP, an open access journal publishing initiative employing the subscribe-to-open model of library support and PKP’s open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS). It is the first journal that Stanford University Press has published in its 133-year history, as the university seeks to support, through this open access model, making the finest research more widely and publicly available on an equitable basis for authors and readers.

At REL, our mission is to appraise and disseminate research on developments in the economic literature, for anyone to access and use, now and in the future. Founded on the goodwill of the academic community and the independence of peer reviewers and editors, we are here to open access to rigorous scientific knowledge, while respecting authors’ rights to retain the copyright in their work.

We envision REL as part of a movement to return scholarly publishing to the priorities, values, and integrity of the academic community. This sense of return has been most dramatically announced by a number of entire editorial teams resigning from corporate sector journals. In this case, REL was launched following our mass resignation from the Journal of Economic Surveys. We could no longer accommodate the increasingly misaligned incentives that arise from commercial publishers for whom profit is their primary motivation.

In our view, corporate publishers’ policies and practices can end up undermining editors’ independence, peer review, and the integrity of academic publishing, often leading to perverse incentives. Business models that emphasize quantity over quality, we believe, increase risks of proliferation of poor-quality science. Moreover, editor agreements with publishers that expose editors to unlimited liability for work that is ultimately pro bono are, in our opinion, unacceptable.

We are thrilled about the new direction being pursued in academic journal publishing by this and related initiatives from MIT Press and the Open Library of the Humanities. We believe it is a momentous change that will benefit the state of knowledge and humankind. We hope that you share our excitement and trust in this approach to journal publishing, and, as a result, that you will both submit your work and peer review for REL!

Reviews of Economic Literature Editorial Team