CFP: Scholarly Journal as a Form of Communication (special issue of Russian Journal of Communication)

[DeBlasio, Alyssa]

Call for Papers
Russian Journal of Communication (Routledge)
Special Issue: The Scholarly Journal as a Form of Communication (Spring 2014)

In Russia, the role and future of the academic journal as a vehicle of scholarly communication is at the center of debates in higher education.  The past two decades have seen the collapse of a centralized system of academic periodicals; a boom of short-lived journals in the 1990s; expanding numbers of online and print journals in the 2000s; and wide-spread adoption of subscription databases in the 2010s, which have brought Russian regional publications to Moscow and an extensive selection of international journals to leading universities across Russia.  At the same time, scholarly journals are more influential than ever, serving as a primary vehicle of communication between disciplines and within disciplines.  Yet, journals are also highly politicized: they have become the favorite tool of administrators and are ranked as part of the controversial VAK system so that they may be used as tools for assessing scholarly influence and academic potential.

The spring 2014 thematic issue of the Russian Journal of Communication (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrjc20) <http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrjc20%29> will look specifically at Russian-language academic journals in the humanities and social sciences: philosophy journals, sociology journals, history journals, and others.  In particular, the volume will investigate the changing role and significance of the academic journal in the context of scholarly communication, both over Russo-Soviet history and in the contemporary era.  Some questions we plan to explore: What is the relationship between a scholarly journal and the past, present, and future of its respective discipline?   What is the role of transnational flows and influences in shaping the content, style, and communicative mode of Russian academic journals?  How have advances in online distribution and subscription in the 2000s affected readership?  What role do scholarly journals play in the public sphere?  In what ways have the VAK ratings informed the quality, authorship, and reputation of the publishing industry?  How are editing and review processes organized and what tensions exist between different journalistic operating models (i.e. between article selection based on personal communication and contacts vs. anonymous peer review)?  Finally, how have scholarly journals weathered the collapse of the Soviet educational model and continued to (or failed to) communicate the standards and aspirations of their respective disciplines?


In investigating these and other questions, we invite submissions on topics included but not limited to:

- the history and development of academic journals in Russia and the Soviet Union
- case studies of single journals or fields
- sociological studies of readership and authorship
- analyses of language use and rhetoric in a particular time or journal
- the academic journal as institutional and/or professional tool
- the failures and successes of the journal as communicative vehicle
- the academic journal in the electronic age
- the role of journals in contemporary educational politics


Please send a 500-word abstract to the editors at the addresses below by 1 December 2012:
Alyssa DeBlasio, deblasia at dickinson.edu <mailto:deblasia at dickinson.edu> and Maxim Djomin, mdemin at hse.spb.ru <mailto:mdemin at hse.spb.ru>

Upon acceptance of abstracts in early January 2013, completed papers are due electronically by 1 May 2013.

Papers should be approximately 30 double-spaced pages including references in APA style. Please see the journal’s author guidelines <http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_projects/rjoc/guidelines.shtml> for more information: http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_projects/rjoc/guidelines.shtml <http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_projects/rjoc/guidelines.shtml>

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