FAQs - frequently answered questions

Common reasons for rejection

I am interested in contributing to your journal 'Australasian Journal of Educational Technology'. The draft abstract and a few key words of the manuscript are provided below. Would you please be able to give me an indication if its theme is acceptable...?

• One of the common problems with AJET submissions is that authors present ideas without a substantial and convincing body of evidence from research investigations that test and assess the utility, the relevance, the applicability of the ideas.

• Another common problem with AJET submissions is failing to meet the expectation that AJET articles will centre upon "teaching and learning as faciliated by technologies".

• Another common problem is that some submissions are review articles providing a thesis style comprehensive review of some topic in educational technology. Often these topics are frequently represented in AJET and many other educational research journals, and therefore particular attention has to be given to the acceptance criterion that the work must be a significant, novel and comprehensive contribution to the literature. AJET's readers are seeking novel results and insights rather than demonstrations of mastery in topic areas already very familiar to most readers of the journal.

I was wondering if you publish material from Universities on the subject of the development of the learning organisation.

From the brief indication you have given, I suggest that journals concerned with vocational education and training may be more appropriate, for example: ... Another suggestion is journals concerned with organisational management, though I don't have anything specific to suggest, because this area is outside my usual range of reading.

Another factor I could mention is that journals are often not interested in literature reviews unless they contain particularly novel, original and significant theoretical insights. The reason is that in general readers of specialist journals are already familiar with the research literature pertaining to their interests, and are not interested in a demonstration of mastery of knowledge in a particular topic (though that is critically important if the reader is a thesis examiner!!). However, the picture is different if your work contains original results from surveys, interviews or other investigative techniques.

Postgraduate student projects

Sometimes the amount of research in a small project is not sufficient for a journal article. For example, this problem may occur with postgraduate student projects such as those conducted as the research component in a coursework Masters in Education degree. To counter this problem, supervisors of postgraduate students' research projects could encourage the formation of small groups, who share the work of literature review, research design and analysis of results, whilst data collection phases are executed individually. To take an example from the schools sector, postgraduate students who are practising teachers could execute data collection in their own schools, enabling a larger project with data aggregated over a number of schools.

As to the problem of reluctance to share ideas and engage in group work at postgraduate research level, there could be a potentially powerful incentive. Small scale projects (one postgraduate researcher, one supervisor, one small class, one term or semester, one school) may fail to secure acceptance by a journal, whereas a larger scale project with considerably more data may have a much better chance, albeit with an increased number of authors sharing the credit for the publication.

Legal deposit

What legal deposit copies are provided by AJET?

• National Library of Australia
• University of Sydney Library
• State Library of NSW
• State Library of Queensland
• Library and Information Services WA

Preprints and postprints

Can I web mount preprints and postprints of my article?

1. Preprints. Yes. Articles that have been self published on an institutional or personal website may be considered by AJET in the normal way. However, if your article is accepted, then post-publication you should replace your self-published copy with a redirection to the AJET URL for the article. That makes matters easier for your readers, and a journal URL would be regarded by most people as better for one's CV than a self-published URL.

2. Postprints. Yes. As authors of AJET articles retain copyright, you are free to remount your article. Usually, there's no advantage in remounting, because AJET's policy is open access [Copyright in AJET articles]. However, AJET encourages authors to support their institutional eprint repositories. You should be able to do this by supplying appropriate bibliographic detail and the AJET URL to the repository, without remounting. However, if you do remount, we recommend that you obtain up to date, definitive files from AJET's website (a significant amount of technical editorial work is done on each article prior to publication). In the case of the HTML version, ensure that the 'Please cite as' section in the file footer is included in any copies or remounts. If you wish to remount a definitive PDF version, optimised for printing, request the emailing of a copy from AJET's Production Editor, or in the case of post-2007 articles, download from the website.

Rejection rate

The administration here at my University judges journal articles by the rejection rate (last 2-3 years average) of the journal. I would be obliged if you could please give me some indication of what it is for AJET.

We expend quite significant amounts of reviewer and editorial time in formative feedback that in many cases enables a submission to earn a change from 'rejected' to 'accepted'.

We often use the analogy that quality of teaching in a unit of study is not regarded as being related in any simple or predictable way to the unit's failure rate ('rejection rate').

Please let me know the rejection rate of your journal. I need to know this information for my tenure review material.

However, if you have a tenure review committee that believes in the usefulness of "rejection rate", and really does want a number, tell them: "65-70%".

One could ask the tenure review committee whether the University of [Somewhere] (http://www.somewheredomain/) believes that a higher (or lower) failure rate in [a course at University of Somewhere] (for example) proves that it is better (or worse) than [another course at University of Somewhere] (for example)?

With AJET we strive hard to run a formative pre-submission and post-submission review process, in which articles that could have been rejected summarily are worked upon by the authors, with support from reviewers and editors, in order to achieve a higher and very acceptable research standard, in comparison with other journals publishing in the same area as AJET.

If we say without further explanation that acceptance is "about x%", we omit reference to the great importance of formative review processes, for both the articles that are accepted and the articles that are rejected, or directed to more appropriate journals or other forms of publication. "Value added" is more important than the percent rejected.

We wish you good fortune with your tenure review committee.

>I notice that AJET rejection rate is 65-70%. While agreeing with all that
>you say about what this actually means, it is hard evidence of quality for
>many. It seems a high rate for our area, is that true?

If anyone ever suggests to you that a journal's rejection rate is 'high', 'low', 'about right', or whatever, please tell them that you know an editor who is very keen to access the data upon which their opinion is based. Give them my email address.

References
AJET Editorial 23(2) - AJET's review process: 2007 update
BJET. British Journal of Educational Technology. Blackwell Publishing. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0007-1013
JETS. Journal of Educational Technology & Society. International Forum of Educational Technology & Society. http://www.ifets.info/others/

Republication

... I very recently found out that the paper is available online from [a society] web site. I realise this is my error. I assume that this now makes it ineligible for publication in your journal. If this is the case, please accept my apologies for this mistake...

"Normally submissions to AJET should be unpublished and not under consideration by another journal or for a conference proceedings, except that self published articles from an institutional or personal website may be considered, and ASCILITE and other Conferences may arrange republication in AJET as a special recognition for an outstanding work."

1. an expanded, updated, corrected or otherwise improved version
2. bringing the article to a readership that has relatively little overlap with the readership for the first publishing of the article
3. an outstanding article that warrants additional recognition
4. the first publication was not subject to a DEST-compliant peer review and the author deserves a chance to get the 'brownie points' (applicable only for authors employed at Australian universities)
5. the first publication is not available online free to the Internet and self archiving is hindered by the lack of an appropriate repository at the author's institution (only applicable in cases where the author has not signed away the copyright in the work).
6. the first publication was in a language other than English and there is a good case for seeking republication in English.

Review process times

I consider publishing a paper with your journal and would like to know the
duration of your review process.

We regret that occasionally in the past our review process has slowed down, sometimes to a considerable extent, owing to fluctuations in the rate of arrival of submissions, or commitments to related publishing activities for conference proceedings. At present (May 2006) we are just returning to the three month norm after a backlog period during 2004 to early-2006. Recent advice on this matter, and references to earlier advice, appears in Editorial 22(1).

In the cases of articles that are declined by editorial screening [AJET's review process], usually a period of 1-2 weeks may elapse after receipt before we prepare and despatch advice to the authors, depending upon fluctuations in work loads.

Almost all articles that are offered acceptance will undergo revisions in accordance with reviewer and editor recommendations, and this adds to the total time for the publication process.

Citation rates

>[Author 2] and I had this paper published in AJET (2006) vol 22 n x.
>I am writing on the off chance that you would be able to tell me if it has
>been cited in any of the 4 subsequent numbers of your journal.
>
>[An Aust uni] staff have been asked to provide evidence by 6 June [2007] of the
>impact of their research publications. We have looked through Google
>Scholar for citations but no luck. The paper was published a year ago so
>perhaps there has been insufficient time for citations to show up.
>It would be wonderful if [Author 2] and I could say that we had been cited in AJET!

By the way, don't search Google Scholar for author (Author 1 initial surname], with no other search terms, the [Author 1 surname]s are all too common :-)

We do the best we can to encourage increased citations of AJET articles:

1. by being an open access journal
2. by publishing high quality articles
3. by increasing the number of articles AJET publishes per year.
4. by general promotion of AJET (especially getting AJET listed by as many indexing and abstracting journals as we can - see AJET Editorial 23(2) for the latest good news)
5. by means of Production Editor advice to authors concerning potential cites for using in their revised version
6. by advice to prospective authors that reviewers may be drawn from AJET authors (see http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/about/ref/author-advice.html#review). This implies that it would be a good idea to check AJET for relevant cites, because (among other reasons) your paper may go to a reviewer who could be a bit miffed if reviewer's own work has not been cited and should have been.

It is a bit too soon to expect citations of your 2006 paper. Remember that with many journals over a year may elapse between submission and publication. However, be optimistic, your article's hit count is looking good, see http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet22/ajet22counts.html

Databases

>I had been meaning to contact you. I am wondering whether the ASCILITE
>Journal is included in any of the databases (ie.Wiley etc.) and is DEST
>recognised?
>
>The latest Journal [23(2)] is really interesting!

By about 2001, our promotional effort shifted towards abstracting services and their databases. Outcomes have been reported from time to time in AJET Editorials, particularly Editorials 23(2) and 21(4). As indicated in those Editorials, great patience is required, because the processes may be agonisingly slow. Sometimes we can report progress (T&F's ERA, Thomson, EBSCO) and sometimes we just 'wait along, wait along' [1] (Elsevier, ERIC, ...). As for Wiley... another addition to the "to do" list.

By about 2006, the imperatives for getting AJET into a larger number of commercial databases and citation services had become more urgent, owing to certain features that were developing in Australia's Research Quality Framework. In Editorial 23(1) we expressed:

'...the concerns that we as editors have about the possibility or risk that RQF processes may eventually give increased competitive advantages to the largest, oldest, most prestigious journals, relative to other journals.'