The main reason for establishing this journal is that we feel too many journals inhibit submission due to their overly strict rules for submissions; where form prevents content from being shared. Our ethos is to ensure that your voice is heard. We want to capture the rich contexts, experiences, and voices from colleagues across the sector. We encourage all types of writing from more traditional educational inquiries, to working-out-loud papers and provocations.
oSoTL aims to publish work in the area of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. While there is no disciplinary focus of the journal, we work with section editors who are teaching in all areas of higher education, and discipline-specific or themed special editions are welcome.
oSoTL submissions could include - but are not limited to:
- Reflective practice
- Course evaluation, including learner experience research
- Learning, teaching or assessment case study of practice
- Debates around SoTL
The journal is published by the founding editors: Dr Nathalie Tasler, Dr Matthew Barr, and Dr Vicki Dale.
oSoTL uses an open peer review process. In the interests of transparency and collegiality, reviewers' identities are known to authors and vice versa. Each submission is looked at by a member of the Editorial Team before being assigned to a minimum of two peer reviewers. The Editor responsible for the submission will make the final decision, based on peer review comments and in discussion with the rest of the Editorial Team, if required.
oSoTL provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This journal understands 'open access' in terms of the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
oSoTL does not charge authors any submission or article processing charges.
Authors retain all rights to their work. Any version of a paper published in oSoTL may be deposited in an institutional or other repository of the author’s choice without embargo.
oSoTL is a part of the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN).
Authors can share their original manuscripts on a preprint server intended for non-commercial use such as EdArXiv, a preprint server for the education research community. Posting on a preprint server is not considered to be duplicate publication and this will not jeopardize consideration for publication in oSoTL. If your manuscript is accepted for publication in oSoTL, authors should add a note to the front page of the preprint to indicate the paper has been published following peer-review and link the oSoTL DOI to the preprint.
Reviewers are asked to answer the following questions when considering a submission:
- Do you think the article is interesting to Higher Education educators?
- Is the article innovative?
- What makes the article special, interesting, or valuable for you?
- What would improve the article?
Reviewers are then asked to make one of the following recommendations:
- Accept
- Accept with minor changes
- Accept with major changes and peer support
- Reject
Please remember that oSoTL has adopted an open peer review approach. To help encourage collegiality, your identity as a reviewer will be known to the author.
Reviewers are also asked to refer to our Ethics Statement.