Statement of Purpose
The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology aims to provide scholars in the southern hemisphere with an avenue through which they can express their scholarship. The IPJP also serves as a networking opportunity for scholars in the region as they undertake their research, just as similar avenues exist in the Northern Hemisphere (Europe and North America).

The IPJP is intended primarily as a forum for Southern African, Indian, Australian, Asian, New Zealand and Pacific Island scholars to discuss a broad range of issues within the phenomenological tradition.

Contributions from the Northern Hemisphere will also be considered.

The underlying assumption of the IPJP is that phenomenology provides researchers with a unique research philosophy which allows them to explore issues central to the question of being human. It enables the richness of human experience to be fully explicated.

We particularly seek to support scholars who feel the need for a further dimension in their research that would enable them to explore topics whose import lies beyond the reach of measurement and calibration, and in areas such as human meaning, experience, values, and truthfulness. Moreover, we envisage the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology as providing established scholars and students with an avenue for publishing written material and undertaking new exploratory research in areas such as emotional sentiment, mental states, bodily experience and existence as well as social and interpersonal relationships, and the contexts in which these take place.

Area of interest:
The journal's primary area of interest is focused on broadly based phenomenological and qualitative research approaches (theoretical and empirical) to deepening and refining our understanding of what it means to be human in every aspect that might pertain to human living, feeling and behaving in all realms whether these be spiritual or secular.

Profile:
The Editorial Board of the journal is aware of the broad range of ways in which phenomenology is applied by a variety of scholars, such as classical, hermeneutical, existential and religious, AND that phenomenology is an approach and a research method which is not static but evolving. As such, it is the Board's wish that each of these sub-disciplines be developed and extended within the context of this forum.

Of particular interest to the journal is the application of these various sub-disciplines and their theoretical sources, to applied practical topics in the research field determined by submitting authors.

Open Access: A Brief Introduction (by Peter Suber)
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA is possible because of the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labour, so do most journal editors and referees participating in the peer review process.

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles:  OA journals and OA archives (repositories).

OA Journals:
OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space.

OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency).

OA journals that charge processing fees often waive them in cases of economic hardship, and those with institutional subsidies are sometimes able to significantly reduce the processing fee or not charge at all.

OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. In this regard, there is much room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal.

OA Archives (repositories):
OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both.

Archives may belong to institutions such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines such as physics and economics.

Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it.

Benefits of Open Access:
For Authors: Increased visibility.
For Readers: Able to keep abreast of professional developments - no charge!
For Institutions: Minimize investment on knowledge access.
For Academia: No financial barriers to the sharing of knowledge.

Readers might wish to browse the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) site which aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook' on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies.

The Open Access Policy of the IPJP is aligned with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to knowledge. 

Click here to view the world map of Open Access sites.

Fee-based open-Access Journal
The IPJP is a fee-based open-access journal which requires payment on behalf of the author. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. In cases of economic hardship, the journal will consider waiving all or part of the 'article processing charge' (APC).

Gold Route
Considered to be the most sustainable OA method in the long term, and recommended by the Finch report, the Gold Route involves publishing in a fully open-access journal or website. The Gold Route is a 'pay to publish' rather than a 'pay to read' route and is considered to be "egalitarian" as it is designed to ensure maximum researcher and public access to information.

Predatory Publishers
The Gold Open-Access model has, unfortunately, given rise to many rogue online publishers. These publishers are "corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts" (Beall, 2012). Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver (in Denver, Colorado), has been an academic librarian for over 22 years and has published extensively in the areas of metadata, full-text searching, and information retrieval. Through his blog, 'Scholarly Open Access: Critical Analysis of Scholarly Open-Access Publishing', he took on the mantle of monitoring so-called "predatory OA publishers" and updated lists of such commercial journal enterprises were posted on a regular basis. Unfortunately, Beall was forced - through legal challenges - to close down this blog as from January 2017.

Prospective authors might wish to familiarize themselves with this debate by going to the following blogs:

Identifying and Avoiding Predatory Publishers: A Primer for Researchers

How to Identify a Predatory Publisher

GUIDE: How to spot predatory academic journals in the wild

Predatory Publishers are Corrupting Open Access

Cabell's New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review

Library Publishing Coalition Blog

Additionally, the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa has released a statement cautioning prospective authors and scholars against using such journals. 

Publication Ethics and Best Practice Guidelines
The IPJP aims to adhere to the Code of Conduct and Best Practice guidelines as set out by the Council of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in 2011 (see 'Submission Information').

Listings
The IPJP has listings with several prestigious online databases, directories, repositories and research partnerships:

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
The IPJP is a member of the Editor's Forum, established under the auspices of ASSAf. The Forum aims to provide support, guidance, networking and quality control for South African-based journals through their voluntary association.

Academic Publishing Platforms (APP) is a knowledge transmission project being developed by the Prague Development Center (PRADEC). The aim of APPlatforms is to provide research journals with an effective one-place knowledge platform that can be accessed and promoted globally. The IPJP's listing by Academic Publishing Platforms and its Knowledge Promotion Network is aligned with the IPJP's policy of Open Access and its archiving of freely available fully downloadable PDF peer-reviewed research publications.

Directory of Open Access Journals
The IPJP is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals which is a service that provides access to quality controlled open access journals. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open-access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system to guarantee the content, and it is not limited to particular languages or subject areas. The aim of the Directory is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open-access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals is hosted by Lund University Libraries Head Office (Sweden), and the project is funded by the Open Society Institute in Budapest and supported by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The directory only contains full-text, open-access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system to guarantee the content.

EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO is an aggregator of premium full-text content. Its core business is providing online databases to libraries worldwide, schools, academic institutions, medical institutions, and corporations. EBSCO provides over 300 full-text and secondary databases, including databases in respect of the health and business sectors. The IPJP has contracted with EBSCO to provide freely downloadable full text PDF articles through its portal to assist the journal in its mission to disseminate its academic content as widely as possible in terms of its Open Access Policy.

Index Coperenicus
Index Copernicus is a web-based scientific infrastructure and communication platform that aims to offer a set of essential tools for scientists and professionals through the effective communication and worldwide exchange of information thus facilitating the integration of different sources of information on literature, grants and patents. Moreoever, IC offers personalized information delivery based on keywords and profiles. IC is also a journal indexing, ranking and abstracting site. The 2014 assessment awarded the IPJP an Index Copernicus Value (ICV) of 6.93. The maximum ranking is 9.0.

Journals Impact Factor site
The Journals Impact Factor site (JIF) uses several different factors such as 'peer review', 'originality of content', 'technical editing quality', 'editorial calibre and the degree of 'internationalization' to evaluate, rank and categorize journals published by learned societies, universities, institutions and publishing houses.

Philosophy Documentation Center
The Philosophy Documentation Center has been serving the philosophical community on a non-profit basis since 1966, earning a reputation for excellence with the publication of essential reference materials, journals, conference proceedings, and research databases. Its International Directory of Philosophy is an online database containing information on university philosophy departments and their programmes, philosophical societies, associations, research centers and institutes, journals, and philosophy publishers around the world. The aim of this database is to be the most comprehensive resource on philosophical activity currently available. The database presently contains the following listings:

Names and contact information for 28,000 philosophers
3,000 University Departments / programmes
1,000 philosophy journals
420 societies / associations
350 research centers / institutes
700 philosophy publishers

 SAePublications
The IPJP is catalogued by SAePublications which is the most comprehensive, searchable collection of full-text electronic South African journals in the world, and focuses on making journals published in South Africa available online, including those published under an Open-Access license. The service currently includes 227 publications, with new publications being added on an ongoing basis. The SA ePublications service enables users to easily locate, display and print full- text documents from their desktops; search on full text, on abstract, or on both, by article title, author, subject, ISSN, etc., and electronically access full-text versions of articles that are exact copies of the printed versions.

SciELO
The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA is South Africa's premier open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable full-text journal database in service of the South African research community. The database covers a selected collection of peer-reviewed South African scholarly journals and forms an integral part of the SciELO Brazil project. SciELO SA is managed by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology and endorsed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). Journals are considered for inclusion in SciELO SA when they have received a favourable evaluation from ASSAf's journal quality peer-review panel.

SHERPA Project
The SHERPA partnership is a large, diverse and representative body of institutions, ranging from smaller specialised bodies such as SOAS (a constituent of the University of London, specializing in the arts, humanities, languages, and social sciences inter alia), through to large, diverse Universities like Cambridge and Oxford. The partnership includes the British Library and the Arts and Humanities Development Service with their skills and experience in intellectual property rights, data preservation and collection management. The partners are all research-led institutions that are well placed to take full advantage of the facilities that eprint repositories and extended-data repositories can offer.

The IPJP is registered with SHERPA as a Blue category publisher in terms of its publication policy and has adopted the Gold OA route.

The Department of Education, South Africa
The IPJP is approved by the Department of Higher Education and Training (South Africa) for educational and research subsidy purposes. In order to be accredited by the DoHET (under the auspices of the Council on Higher Education), journals have to be peer-reviewed and must show evidence of producing internationally acceptable scholarly material that supports high level learning, teaching and research. Additionally, approved journals must be devoted to disseminating original research and new developments within specific disciplines, sub-disciplines or fields of study.

The Qualitative Report
A weekly online journal dedicated to qualitative research since 1990. Its aim is to disseminate published research using qualitative, transformative, and mixed-method approaches. In addition, each week it posts news items about the latest developments in the world of qualitative research including when new journal issues and calls are announced.

Publisher

During the journal’s neophyte years, it was generously supported by Edith Cowan University, Western Australia and Rhodes University in South Africa, and then later, for a five year period, by the University of Johannesburg.

While the journal continued to be sponsored by these universities, NISC became its publisher in 2008.

In 2015, further collaboration was forged with Taylor and Francis (Routledge Group).

The IPJP is currently published by NISC (Pty) Ltd in association with Taylor & Francis in an online Open Access format.

Print copies are available from NISC by subscription.

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