Research
The college's international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal. Double-anonymous review, no fees in either direction, a DOI for every article, and content that stays freely available.
Overview
The journal publishes scholarly work across the liberal arts, sciences, business and management. It is open to ACLAS students, faculty and alumni, and to researchers anywhere.
An international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by ACLAS. Articles appear online immediately on acceptance, so there are no fixed issue deadlines to wait for.
Volume 1, Number 1 is the inaugural issue, published 20 September 2026.
How it is run
Predatory publishing is defined by what it hides: fees, the review model, the licence, and what happens to the archive. Every one of these is published.
Every research article, review article and case study goes to at least two independent reviewers matched to the subject area. Neither reviewers nor authors are identified to each other.
There are no submission fees and no article processing charges. Readers can read, download, copy and redistribute any article without charge or registration.
Articles are deposited in Zenodo, the open repository operated by CERN, where each receives a persistent DOI for long-term preservation and citation.
Articles publish under CC BY-SA 4.0 and authors retain copyright. Journal metadata is exposed through an OAI-PMH interface for discovery services and libraries.
Why these four, specifically.A journal that charges authors but does not say so, reviews nothing, takes copyright, and lets the archive vanish is the profile of a predatory title. The ACLAS Journal publishes the opposite position on all four points, which is what makes it possible to check rather than take on trust.
Scope
Work across the liberal arts, sciences, business and management, in five article types.
Process
How to assess it
Anyone evaluating the ACLAS Journal — or any journal — should be able to verify these six things without trusting the publisher. For this journal, each one has a published answer.
| Check | Why it matters | ACLAS Journal |
|---|---|---|
| Author fees | Hidden charges are the primary predatory signal | Published: none |
| Review model | “Peer reviewed” alone means nothing | Published: double-anonymous, two reviewers minimum |
| Copyright and licence | Shows whether the author or the publisher holds rights | Published: author retains copyright, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Preservation | Whether the archive survives the publisher | Published: Zenodo deposit with a persistent DOI |
| Named editorial board | An anonymous board is a warning sign: nobody is accountable for the review decisions. | Not yet named. The masthead page is published but does not list members. This is the journal’s most significant outstanding gap. |
| Indexing | Which discovery services actually carry it | Claims Google Scholar and major discovery services. Not claimed: Scopus, Web of Science, DOAJ |
This table states what the journal publishes about itself. Where a claim is about a third party — indexing, for instance — it is attributed rather than asserted, because the journal does not control those services.
What the journal does not have yet.The journal launched in 2026 and is still building the things that make a publication assessable from the outside. As of this page: the editorial masthead is published but names no members; there is no ISSN; the journal is not listed in DOAJ; and the inaugural issue contains one editorial and no research articles so far. These are stated here rather than left for a reader to discover, because a journal’s credibility rests on being checkable, and that includes being checkable about its own stage of development.
What would strengthen it
Listed for anyone advising the journal, and for authors deciding whether to submit. None of them is a formality.
Members, affiliations and terms. An anonymous board is the first thing an experienced author checks and the first thing that reads as a warning.
An ISSN is issued free through the national centre. Without one the journal is not a journal to librarians, indexers or citation databases.
The Directory of Open Access Journals is the recognised separator between legitimate open-access titles and predatory ones. The journal already meets most of its stated criteria.
One editorial and no research articles is a launched journal, not yet a publishing one. Three to five peer-reviewed articles changes how the journal reads to everyone who evaluates it.
Context
Running a peer-reviewed journal is one of the ways an institution contributes to its field and can be assessed on something other than marketing. It is not an accreditation, and it does not change how a jurisdiction or an employer recognises an ACLAS award.
ACLAS states its accreditation position separately, including what it does not hold. Nothing about the journal alters that, and this page does not suggest otherwise.
On honorary awards.ACLAS publishes honorary awards separately from its taught degrees and from this journal. Queries about honorary awards should go to the college at info@aclas.college. This page and this site cover degree programmes, certificates and the journal.
Where the journal lives.The journal runs on its own infrastructure at journal.aclas.college, which is where submission, review and the article archive are handled. This page exists so that the journal is discoverable from the college’s main web presence.
Questions
Cost, review, copyright, preservation and indexing.
ACLAS students, faculty and alumni, and the wider global academic community. Submissions are open year-round rather than through fixed calls for papers.
No. The journal states that it charges no submission fees and no article processing charges, and that readers can access every article without charge or registration.
Reviewers normally return their structured reports within four weeks. The journal aims to reach a first decision within eight to twelve weeks of submission.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication. Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
Articles are deposited in Zenodo with a persistent DOI, and the journal states that archived content would remain freely accessible even if publication ceased.
The journal states that its metadata is indexed by Google Scholar and major discovery services, and that it exposes metadata through an OAI-PMH interface. It does not currently claim indexing in Scopus, Web of Science or DOAJ.
No. A peer-reviewed journal is a research activity, not an accreditation. ACLAS's accreditation position is published separately and does not change because the college runs a journal.
It launched in 2026. Volume 1, Number 1 is the inaugural issue, published on 20 September 2026, and articles appear on a rolling basis as they are accepted.
Submissions are open year-round to ACLAS students, faculty, alumni and researchers anywhere. There are no submission fees and no article processing charges.
