The Dutch publishing landscape includes a wide variety of student journals. These journals play an important role in students’ development and form an initial training ground in academic writing, editorial work, and peer review—skills that are often only limitedly addressed in the regular university curriculum.
At the same time, student journals regularly face structural challenges: limited funding, rapidly changing editorial boards that put continuity under pressure, and the ongoing challenge of attracting sufficient submissions.
Within Openjournals, we are therefore exploring how we can better support student journals. In the coming period, we will sit down with several journals about their needs, the challenges they face, and the possibility of joining our platform.
This opens up opportunities not only to increase visibility, but also to support professionalisation and more sustainable embedding within the open access ecosystem. We are also examining the potential role universities and libraries can play in this development. In addition, it offers the chance to connect with DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), thereby improving visibility within the international open access landscape.
