OK, so picture the scenario. You are sitting
at your desk, maybe it is a Saturday afternoon,
and you are just trying to grind through a literature
review. Oh, yeah, we have all been there. Right.
Or you are pulling together research for a departmental
strategy meeting. You are looking specifically
at how digital learning landscapes are shifting.
You are evaluating new methodology. Exactly.
Maybe for a university rollout. So you run the
Boolean searches, you comb through the databases,
and finally, there it is, the exact perfect citation.
And holy grail. The title aligns perfectly with
your thesis. The abstract is practically screaming
that it holds the precise data you need to make
your case. Right. So you click the DOI link,
fully expecting to download the PDF, and... You
hit the wall. That paywall. The ubiquitous, incredibly
frustrating academic paywall. You get that polite
little pop -up from a publisher asking for $35
or $50 just to rent the article for 24 hours.
Just to rent it, yeah. If you operate anywhere
in the academic or professional research space,
you know exactly the friction I'm talking about.
It completely derails your momentum. It absolutely
does. But what happens when we look at the exact
opposite end of that spectrum? What if the highest
echelons of peer -reviewed research were entirely
frictionless? Not just free for you to read,
but completely free for the authors to publish
in the first place. Which is a structural question
that gets right to the heart of how modern academia
functions, or honestly how it malfunctions. Right,
okay, let's unpack this. Because today we are
going on a deep dive into the foundational mechanics
of how knowledge is actually disseminated when
those barriers are completely removed. Yeah.
And our source material today is it is a bit
unconventional. It is. We are looking at a Wikipedia
article. Specifically the entry outlining the
publication details of the International Journal
of Educational Technology in Higher Education.
Which on the surface reading the metadata of
an academic publishing journal might seem incredibly
dry. Very dry. But if we connect this to the
bigger picture, a journal's metadata, so its
funding structure, its indexing, its editorial
board, its publication frequency, it is essentially
its DNA. It tells a profound story about the
political economy of academic knowledge. This
specific EdTech journal serves as a fascinating
case study of a massive structural shift happening
in higher education right now. Exactly. And that
is the mission for this deep dive. We were taking
this Wikipedia entry detailing the journal's
history, its open access status, its indexing
metrics, and we are going to reverse engineer
it. We want to understand the machinery behind
this specific publication. To grasp how top -tier
educational technology research gets vetted and
distributed globally. because whether you are
prepping for a policy meeting, or you are an
educator adapting to new tech, or if you just
follow the debates about the privatization of
research, understanding the architecture of a
journal like this is a massive shortcut. It is
a shortcut to being well informed. So let's start
with the origins, because this publication has
a distinct timeline. The source text notes it
was established back in 2004. By the Open University
of Catalonia. Right. But it didn't launch with
the highly specific EdTech title it holds today.
It was originally called the Universities and
Knowledge Society Journal. Which is such an interesting
title. It operated under that banner until 2016.
That is when it underwent a substantial rebranding
to its current name, the International Journal
of Educational Technology and Higher Education,
and simultaneously moved to Springer Science
plus Business Media. I want to pause on that
2004 origin for a second, because that initial
title, The University's and Knowledge Society
Journal, it is an artifact of a very specific
era in academic thought. If you think back to
the early 2000s, the discourse around the internet
and education was heavily influenced by sociologists.
Like Manuel Castells. Exactly, who incidentally
is deeply tied to the Open University of Catalonia.
The knowledge society or the network society
was this broad sweeping sociological framework.
Right. It was about how the fundamental nature
of human interaction, economy and community was
being reshaped by digital networks. So when a
university launches a journal with that title
in 2004, they are inviting submissions that are
highly theoretical, very philosophical, looking
at the macro level impact of digitization on
the concept of the university itself. It feels
very Web 2 .0, right? Yeah. It has that early
Internet optimism. It is a massive umbrella.
Like if I submit a paper to an all society journal
in 2005. I could be writing about the cultural
implications of open source software or the digital
divide in rural communities Or just the philosophy
of information scarcity. It is expansive. Yeah,
but then you hit 2016 and they pivot to the International
Journal of Educational Technology and Higher
Education. That is a stark transition. To use
an analogy, it is like a restaurant changing
its name from Food and Society to... To the Molecular
Gastronomy Institute. Yes. The first name suggests
you are going to sit around discussing the history
of agriculture and the cultural significance
of bread. But the second name tells you exactly
what is happening in the kitchen. You are getting
liquid nitrogen, centrifuges, and highly technical
applications. The 2016 rebrand signals a laser
focus on the tools and the machinery of digital
learning. That analogy captures the operational
shift perfectly. By 2016, higher education had
moved past the theoretical debate of whether
a knowledge society existed. They were in the
trenches of actually implementing it. Right.
The market for learning management systems like
Canvas and Blackboard had just exploded. Universities
were dealing with the practical realities of
synchronous versus asynchronous online learning.
They were looking at data analytics, early adaptive
learning algorithms. The journal's name change
reflects a maturation of the field. They were
signaling to researchers, we do not need broad
philosophical essays anymore. Right. We need
empirical data on how this specific software
integration affects retention rates in undergraduate
engineering programs. It is a total shift from
sociology to applied technological science. But
I want to push back a little here, or at least
play devil's advocate. A name change is one thing.
Journals rebrand all the time to taste trends
or optimize for search algorithms. Sure. But
the Wikipedia article links this 2016 name change
directly to a transition to Springer. Springer
Science plus business media, yes. That is not
just a rebrand. That is an acquisition or at
least a major strategic partnership. The Open
University of Catalonia is respected, but Springer
is an absolute behemoth in the academic publishing
world. Moving under their umbrella completely
changes the dynamic, does it not? It changes
the dynamic entirely, and it is a fascinating
strategic maneuver. When a journal is incubated
at a single university, even an innovative one,
it inherently has a ceiling on its administrative
and distributive reach. Because the university
press has to handle everything. Right. They handle
the typesetting, the server hosting, the DOI
minting, marketing, indexing applications. Moving
to a global publisher like Springer provides
an immediate, profound injection of infrastructural
capital. And reach. Massive reach. Springer brings
rigorous standardization, a globally recognized
submission portal, and integration into their
vast ecosystem of institutional subscriptions.
It acts as an immense multiplier for the journal's
prestige. OK, but here's where the friction usually
comes in. Anyone who operates in academia knows
that partnering with a giant like Springer usually
comes with a massive catch. The paywall. The
historical trade -off for that global infrastructure
is that the publisher takes your peer -reviewed
research, locks it behind their proprietary system,
and charges university libraries exorbitant subscription
fees to access it. The prestige is practically
tied to exclusivity. That is the traditional
model, yes. But the source text reveals that
this journal managed to secure Springer's infrastructure
while doing the exact opposite regarding access.
And that leads us to the most critical structural
component mentioned in the article. The journal
operates on a diamond open access model. This
is the crux of why this journal is so noteworthy.
The funding model of a journal dictates its politics,
its reach, and its equity. The Wikipedia entry
explicitly defines the status, stating that,
as a diamond open access journal, authors do
not need to pay an article processing charge,
or APC. Which is huge. To understand why this
is such a radical departure from the norm, we
really had to contextualize it within the broader
open access movement. For a long time, the traditional
model was reader pays. Right. The researcher
does the work, reviewers review it for free,
the publisher claims the copyright, and the reader
pays to view it. which naturally sparked massive
backlash from researchers who realized public
grant money was funding research that the public
could not even read. Open Access was supposed
to fix that. Exactly. The Open Access movement
aimed to tear down the paywalls. But the publishing
infrastructure still costs money. Servers, copy
editors, permanent digital archiving, editorial
management systems, none of that is free. So
who pays? Well, the industry predominantly shifted
to what is known as gold open access. In the
gold model, the paywall is removed for the reader,
which is great for the dissemination of knowledge.
But the cost is shifted to the author. Before
the article is published, the author or their
institution must pay an article processing charge,
the APC. And these are not nominal fees. For
top tier journals, APCs can range from $3 ,000
to sometimes over $10 ,000 per article. Which
creates an entirely new, arguably much worse,
layer of inequity. I mean, think about the field
of educational technology specifically. If you
have a gold open access model with a $4 ,000
APC, You are essentially gatekeeping the conversation.
You are. A well -funded researcher at Stanford
or MIT, backed by massive institutional grants,
can easily afford to publish their findings on
the latest VR integration. but a brilliant researcher
at a community college in the Midwest. Or a professor
at an underfunded university in the global south.
Exactly. Someone who has developed an incredible
low -bandwidth mobile learning strategy. They
get completely shut out, they have the data,
they have the peer -reviewed rigor, but they
literally cannot afford the entrance fee to share
it. That is the insidious nature of the APC model.
It silences researchers based on funding rather
than merit. And this is why the diamond model,
which this journal utilizes, is so crucial. So
diamond means neither pays. Diamond Open Access
completely removes the financial transaction
from the individual researcher and the individual
reader. The financial burden of the publishing
infrastructure is instead absorbed by institutional
subsidies, university consortiums, or philanthropic
grants. In this case, it is maintained through
the backing of its founding institution. like
the Open University of Catalonia and its partners,
even while utilizing Springer's platform. I have
to press you on the economics of that, though.
Springer is a massive, publicly traded, for -profit
entity. They do not operate charities. Sure,
they do not. If they are providing the servers,
the formatting, the global distribution networks,
and the indexing management, and they are not
charging the reader a subscription fee, and they
are not charging the author an EPC, How is this
actually sustainable? Is Springer just using
journals like this as loss leaders for prestige,
or are the partner universities writing massive
checks behind the scenes? It is almost certainly
the latter, structured through complex institutional
agreements. Universities and research consortiums
are increasingly realizing that paying a publisher
a negotiated lump -sum subsidy to host a diamond
open access journal is actually more cost effective.
Cost effective for the academic community globally.
Yes. It is better than having thousands of individual
researchers constantly bleeding grant money to
pay individual ATCs. It is a pooling of resources.
That makes total sense. The institutions fund
the journal's operational costs collectively,
allowing Springer to cover its overhead and profit
margins, while the end user, both the author
and the reader, experiences a completely frictionless
environment. It requires a deep, long -term financial
commitment from the editorial institutions. It
is institutional heavy lifting to ensure individual
freedom. And that freedom extends beyond just
reading the text. The Wikipedia article notes
another critical layer of metadata. The journal
operates under a Creative Commons Attribution
License 4 .0. Generally known as CCBY 4 .0. Right.
Now for anyone in academia, you see CCBY licenses
all the time. But the specific implications of
the 4 .0 Attribution License are incredibly powerful
when applied to the EdTech sector. It is the
most accommodating and permissive license available
within the academic sphere that still retains
the requirement for scholarly attribution. Under
traditional copyright, if an educator reads a
published paper and wants to use a highly effective
diagram or a specific pedagogical framework in
a textbook they're writing, they often have to
navigate a labyrinth of permissions. Sometimes
paying royalties to the publisher. Exactly. Or
think about the commercial side. If an EdTech
startup reads a study proving that a certain
UI layout increases student retention by 20%,
they might hesitate to integrate those exam findings
into their commercial software. They would be
terrified of intellectual property litigation.
But CCBY 4 .0 explicitly removes that anxiety.
It means anyone can take the material, share
it, copy it, distribute it, and most importantly
adapt or remix it. You can build upon the research
for any purpose. Including commercial purposes.
Yeah. The only stipulation, the BY and the license,
is that you must provide appropriate credit link
to the license, and indicate if changes were
made. Which is a profound philosophical statement
by the journal's leadership. By choosing CC -BY
4 .0, they're explicitly stating that educational
technology research should not be siloed in theoretical
vacuums. The ultimate goal of EdTech is practical
implementation. They want software developers,
instructional designers, university administrators,
and commercial vendors to take this research
and build real -world tools with it immediately.
It maximizes the utility of the knowledge. And
that concept of utility and immediacy provides
a perfect bridge to the next major section of
the source material. Because being free and legally
permissive does not matter if the research is
stale by the time it reaches the public. The
Wikipedia entry details two key logistical elements.
First, it states the journal's publication frequency
is continuous. Second, it provides a very specific
list of databases where the journal is abstracted
and indexed. Let's start with the publishing
cadence. What does continuous actually mean in
contrast to legacy academic publishing? To appreciate
the continuous model, you really have to look
at the legacy architecture it replaces. Historically,
the print -based academic world operated on an
issue -based model. You had the spring volume
and the fall volume. Precisely. If a team of
researchers concluded a study in February and
the manuscripts successfully passed the gauntlet
of peer review and revisions by April, they might
still be forced to wait until October. Just to
get bundled. Just for the publisher to bundle
their article with ten others, print the physical
journals and ship them to universities. libraries.
The knowledge essentially sat in a holding pattern
for half a year just to satisfy a logistical
printing schedule. Which, in the context of educational
technology, is an absolute eternity. If we were
talking about a journal of classical antiquity,
a six -month delay is irrelevant. A new analysis
of Roman aqueducts will be just as valid in October
as it was in April. True. But EdTech moves at
the speed of the software industry. If a researcher
completes a rigorous study on how a specific
generative AI tool hallucinates during organic
chemistry exams, that is mission -critical data
for professors setting their syllabi for the
next semester. It needs to be out there. If that
paper sits in a publisher's queue for six months,
the AI model has already been updated three times.
The research might be functionally obsolete before
it even sees the light of day. The continuous
publication frequency is an acknowledgement that
the traditional print model is a massive detriment
to fast -moving scientific fields. In a continuous
model, the concept of the issue is largely relegated
to an organizational afterthought. So how does
it work? The moment an article clears peer review,
completes its copy editing, and is assigned a
DOI, it is immediately published online as a
standalone entity. It enters the academic bloodstream
instantly. This requires a much more agile editorial
workflow, but it honors the velocity of the technological
change they are studying. Now, I can hear the
skeptics arguing that continuous publication
might incentivize a drop in quality. that it
creates a content mill where peer review is rushed
just to keep the feed populated. That is a common
critique of agile publishing. But the second
logistical element in the source text completely
dismantles that argument. The journal's indexing
profile is fiercely guarded. The Wikipedia article
lists several major databases where this journal
is abstracted and indexed, including eBusco databases,
Scopus, Current Content, slash Social and Behavioral
Sciences, the Social Sciences Citation Index,
and MIR. that is a very robust list. So layperson,
that is just alphabet soup. But in the academic
ecosystem, being indexed in these specific databases
is the ultimate proof of rigorous quality control,
right? Indexing is essentially the circulatory
system of global academic discovery. When researchers
or students at a university use their library
portal to search for literature, they are not
using an open web search engine. They are querying
these curated databases. Scopus, managed by Elsevier,
and the Web of Science indices, managed by Clarivate,
which includes the Social Sciences, Citation
Index, and Current Contents. Those are the gold
standards. These databases do not automatically
crawl and index every journal on the internet.
They're gated. They have incredibly stringent
inclusion criteria. They audit a journal's peer
review transparency, the geographic diversity
of its authors, its citation metrics, and its
adherence to publication ethics before they even
agree to index it. So just to be clear, Springer
cannot just call up Scopus and say, hey, we bought
this new journal. Put it in your database. The
journal itself has to continually prove its academic
rigor to maintain its placement in those search
engines. Exactly. Inclusion. in the Social Sciences
Citation Index means the journal is recognized
as producing highly consequential, heavily cited
research within its discipline. If the continuous
publication model resulted in sloppy, rushed
peer review, the journal's citation rates would
plummet and they would risk being de -indexed
by Clarivate or Scopus. It is an active filter.
The indexing serves as a relentless, subjective
quality assurance mechanism. But looking at that
list of databases, there's one name that absolutely
jumps out if you know the landscape. And it highlights
just how broad the field of digital learning
has become. The source explicitly lists HindOnline
as one of the databases where the journal is
abstracted and indexed. MindOnline, yeah. EBS
Go and Scopus make total sense for an EdTech
journal. But HeinOnline is fundamentally known
as a premier legal and governmental database.
It is the platform lawyers, legal scholars and
policymakers use to pull case law, international
treaties and jurisprudence journals. It is the
legal gold standard. Why is a journal focused
on educational technology being heavily indexed
in a database designed for the legal profession?
That is perhaps the most revealing piece of metadata
in the entire article. It requires us to extrapolate
on the real -world implications of digital learning.
The presence of this journal in HeinOnline strongly
suggests that the research it publishes frequently
intersects with profound legal, regulatory, and
policy issues. It is not just about iPads in
the classroom anymore. Educational technology
is no longer just about whether a tablet app
helps third graders learn fractions. It is about
massive systemic infrastructure. Think about
what happens when a university mandates a new
cloud -based learning management system or requires
students to use AI -driven proctoring software
to take exams from their bedrooms. Oh, the legal
ramifications are staggering. You're immediately
crashing into data privacy laws. If a university
uses a proctoring software that records a student's
eye movements and scans their bedroom for unauthorized
materials, you are dealing with potential Fourth
Amendment issues in the U .S. or severe GDPR
compliance issues in Europe. Who owns the biometric
data being collected? If a professor uploads
their entire curriculum to a third party corporate
server who holds the intellectual property rights
to those lectures, if a university adopts a digital
courseware platform that isn't fully accessible
to visually impaired students, they are instantly
exposed to massive civil rights litigation. Precisely.
The researchers publishing in the International
Journal of Educational Technology and Higher
Education are clearly analyzing these exact friction
points. They are studying algorithmic bias in
automated grading systems, the surveillance ethics
of campus Wi -Fi tracking, and the data sovereignty
issues of international online learning. That
makes so much sense. This research is so empirically
robust and policy relevant that legal scholars
researching education law and policymakers drafting
new regulations for data privacy act... require
access to it. HeinOnline indexes the journal
because EdTech is fundamentally a legal and policy
frontier as much as it is a pedagogical one.
That drastically changes how you view the journal.
It is not cordoned off in some niche pedagogical
silo. It is actively informing the broader legal
and social sciences discourse. It is dopely interdisciplinary.
Now to pull off that level of multidisciplinary
relevance, while maintaining continuous publication,
navigating the rigorous standards of Scopus and
the Web of Science, and defending a diamond open
access funding model, That requires serious operational
leadership. You do not achieve that kind of infrastructural
harmony on autopilot. No, you do not. And that
brings us to the final major section of our analysis,
the global leadership and the empirical impact
of the journal. The structure of a journal's
editorial board is often highly indicative of
its strategic vision, and frankly, its epistemological
blind spots. The Wikipedia source provides the
names and institutional affiliations of the current
editors -in -chief, and the geographic distribution
is intentional and highly significant. Let's
hear it. The leadership includes Joseph M. Dort,
from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain,
where the journal originated. It includes Alvaro
Galviz from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
We see Miread Nikjola -McHill from Dublin City
University in Ireland and Irina Valenjevicina
from Vaitat Asmagnus University in Lithuania.
Anyone who reads academic literature regularly
knows how rare that kind of spread actually is.
In so many top -tier journals, especially those
published by massive Western European or American
conglomerates, the editorial board is essentially
an echo chamber. It is entirely homogenized.
You will see a board entirely composed of researchers
from the Ivy League, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge.
And the problem with that is if your entire leadership
team operates within the exact same socioeconomic
and infrastructural reality, they're going to
unconsciously prioritize research that speaks
to that specific reality. That is the ultimate
danger of provincialism in academia. If an editorial
board only consists of professors from elite,
extraordinarily wealthy institutions where Every
student has a brand new laptop and gigabit internet
access. Their baseline assumptions about what
constitutes useful ed tech research will be heavily
skewed. They won't see the value in anything
else. They might consistently reject perfectly
rigorous research on mobile first distance learning
in low bandwidth environments because it doesn't
align with their technological paradigm. They
might view it as niche when in reality it reflects
the learning conditions of a massive percentage
of the global student population. Exactly. So
by actively structuring their leadership to span
Spain, Colombia, Ireland, and Lithuania, they're
building a firewall against that specific type
of bias. The way digital technology is implemented
in Bogota is influenced by different governmental
policies, funding models, and cultural attitudes
than the way it is implemented in Kaunas or Dublin.
It is contextual. A researcher submitting a paper
from a developing educational market knows that
there is someone at the very top of the editorial
chain who understands the context of their research.
It ensures the journal actually lives up to the
word international in its title rather than just
being a mouthpiece for Western elite institutions.
It guarantees a plurality of perspectives during
the peer review assignment process. And we have
concrete empirical evidence within the source
text that this strategy of combining geographic
diversity, diamond open access, and rigorous
indexing is yielding extraordinary results. The
Impact Factor. The Wikipedia article concludes
its primary data points with a highly consequential
metric. According to the Journal Citation Reports,
the journal has a 2021 impact factor of 7 .611.
Let's really dig into that number. Because we
know you understand the basic premise of an impact
factor. It is the average number of citations
per article in a given year. But we need to contextualize
just how much of an anomaly a 7 .611 is in this
specific scenario. It is an outlier in the best
way. In the academic world, the impact factor
is like your box office gross or your Spotify
monthly listeners. If you are working in molecular
biology or clinical oncology, an impact factor
of seven might be considered mid -tier. because
papers in those fields are citing dozens of lab
results every week. The turnover is incredibly
fast. But in the social sciences, education and
educational technology, citation velocity is
much slower and more deliberate. Achieving an
impact factor of 7 .611 places a journal in the
absolute upper echelon, usually the top tenth
percentile, of its discipline. It is elite status.
It means that on average, every single paper
they publish is being used as the foundational
building block for over seven new pieces of peer
-reviewed research shortly after publication.
It is a staggering metric for the field, and
it completely disrupts a very stubborn, cynical
narrative that has plagued the open access movement
for over a decade. For years, legacy publishers
and traditionalists argued that APCs and paywalls
were necessary proxies for quality. They equated
expense with rigor. Exactly. The assumption was
that if a journal was free to publish in, it
must be a predatory journal, a content mill with
low standards that would publish anything just
to generate volume. The prevailing myth was that
high academic rigor inherently required high
financial barriers. But the data says otherwise.
The 7 .611 impact factor of this journal empirically
dismantles that myth. It does not just dismantle
it. It arguably proves the exact inverse. You
can make a very strong case that the Dyme Open
Access model is precisely why the impact factor
is so incredibly high. Think about the mechanics
of citation. Right. Who can actually read the
paper? If I publish a brilliant paradigm -shifting
paper on AI grading bias, but I publish it in
a traditional closed journal, the only people
who can read it and therefore cite it are researchers
whose universities pay $50 ,000 a year for that
specific database bundle. Your audience is severely
restricted. My potential audience is artificially
capped by institutional wealth. But if I publish
that exact same paper in the International Journal
of Educational Technology and Higher Education,
every single researcher on the planet with an
internet connection can download it instantly.
The friction is removed, maximizing the surface
area for discovery. Furthermore, because it utilizes
the CC BY 4 .0 license, researchers don't just
read it. They feel legally empowered to actively
incorporate its frameworks into their own derivative
studies. It encourages reuse. The high impact
factor is not an accident. It is the logical
mathematical outcome of combining a rigorous
globally diverse editorial board with a zero
barrier distribution model. It is a flywheel
effect. Yes. The journal attracts top tier submissions
because researchers crave that level of unimpeded
global reach. The stringent peer review ensures
only the most robust methodology gets published,
and the open access ensures maximum visibility,
which drives up citations, which in turn drives
up the impact factor, attracting even better
submissions. It is a perfectly engineered, self
-sustaining lube of academic influence. And it
forces us to re -evaluate the entire landscape
of how we share knowledge. We started this deep
dive looking at a Wikipedia page about a journal's
metadata, but what we've actually unpacked is
a blueprint for the future of academic publishing.
We traced its origins from the broad sociological
concepts of the University's A Knowledge Society
journal in 2004 through its strategic evolution
in 2016 into a highly specific continuous publishing
powerhouse partnered with Springer. We examined
the profound legal and policy implications of
EdTech that demand its inclusion in databases
like HeinOnline, alongside standard academic
indices like Scopus and EBSGO. We saw how a geographically
diverse editorial team spanning Columbia to Lithuania
prevents ideological echo chambers. And most
crucially, we analyzed how it achieved a stratospheric
7 .611 impact factor while remaining fiercely
committed to a diamond open access model. Proving
that the highest levels of academic rigor do
not require charging the researcher to speak
or charging the reader to listen. It is a profound
demonstration that the artificial scarcity imposed
by traditional publishing models is a choice,
not a necessity. We have empirical proof documented
in the indexing and the citation reports that
a journal can scale globally. partner with the
largest corporate infrastructure in the publishing
world, maintain rigorous quality control, and
disseminate hyper -relevant multidisciplinary
research without ever erecting a financial paywall.
It completely changes the baseline of what researchers
should expect from the platforms that host their
work. It really does. Which leaves us with a
critical, undeniable question to ponder as we
wrap up this deep dive. You have seen the mechanics.
You understand the funding structure, the licensing,
and the massive citation success of this model.
You know it works. So the next time you hit one
of those $50 academic paywalls while trying to
do your job, or the next time your department
is asked to pay a $5 ,000 APC just to share your
findings with the world, ask yourself. This is
the big question. If the International Journal
of Educational Technology and Higher Education
can successfully run, scale, and thrive at the
very top of its field using a frictionless diamond
open access model, what is actually keeping the
rest of the academic publishing industry from
doing the exact same thing? It is a question
of institutional will and perhaps deeply entrenched
financial interests. It absolutely is. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
today. Whether you use this knowledge to navigate
your next research project, advocate for open
access at your own institution, or simply to
better understand the invisible economic structures
that dictate the information you consume, we
hope it gives you a crucial shortcut to being
well informed. Keep learning, stay curious, and
always question the architecture of the knowledge
around you. We will catch you on the next deep
dive.