• Journals Cooperation

In the last century, journals that published articles on adult and continuing education were rare. Today, the number of specialized journals or journals open to adult and continuing education topics has increased. Journals promoted by public organizations, research centers, non-governmental organizations and even global publishing groups still prevail. But some of them are starting to have an autonomous life also from a financial point of view.

Scientific journals are numerous. All are committed to ensuring and raising quality standards and measuring performance indicators (such as Impact factor or Citescore).

Scientific journals of adult and continuing education have an interest in attracting the most read and most cited authors and articles. However, all journals also have the common interest of increasing the number of their readers, the number of submissions, the number of citations.

These results can also be achieved through the development of forms of coordination, healthy co-petition and complementarity between all journals.

The Florence meeting would like to be an opportunity to reflect on what concrete measures could help journals achieve these results. We propose five possibilities below:

a. A common web page where the calls for all journals are announced and with links to their websites and where all journals are presented. Inclusion requires some shared minimum quality standards (to be defined: "Legitimate Journal"; versus "Predator Journal"). The University of Florence can make this service available on the website dedicated to the HOFE;

b. Sharing of reviewers (voluntary and according to GDPR) and the possible creation of a reviewer award established by the HoF;

c. Annual or biennial coordinated programming of thematic calls (shared information);

d. Mutual promotion of articles related to the topics of the calls (exchange of long lists of articles related to the scheduled calls and which can be cited by the authors);

e. Joint promotion of campaigning activities on the political and moral priorities of adult and continuing education.