Copyright,
Open Access, Reprint
and
Quality-Control Issues
Sociation Today is an open-access sociology
journal. It is refereed and quality
controlled. All articles submitted are
reviewed (refereed). The members of the
Editorial Board are listed on the home page
and at the bottom of each article, along
with our institutional affiliations.
These are the men and women who do most of
the refereeing for us.
Sociation Today is
published by the North Carolina Sociological
Association (NCSA), a non-profit
group. The web address for NCSA is
www.ncsociology.org/new. Sociation
Today has a shortcut at
www.sociationtoday.org. No officer of
NCSA is paid nor receives any allowance for
travel to meetings or for any other
reason. We are all volunteers.
All the editorial board
members and the editor of Sociation
Today are also volunteers. Sociation
Today does not charge to review
manuscripts nor do we charge to publish
them. We do copyright our materials
for quality control purposes. However,
we do not charge anyone to read the
materials (thus open access). Nor is
there a charge to reprint an article BUT we
do ask for you to inform us of any interest
in reprinting AND to give the author and the
journal credit. You may not modify or
rewrite an article. Authors are free
to use their own article in any way they
wish, but would need to mention that it was
published first in Socation Today.
We do not accept articles that have been
previously published. As a regional
society, most of our authors are in the
region and thus the problem of plagiarism
has not been an issue with us.
One of the goals of Sociation
Today has been to make available to
the public refereed, scholarly sociological
articles without charging high fees like
JSTOR. Open access means knowledge
should be free. For us, it is.
Sociation Today
is web-based. Our ISSN number is ISSN
1542-6300. We are a member of the
EBSCO publishing group. The EBSCO data
base provides us with a way of making sure
our articles have a permanent home
maintained by another organization.
Most university libraries in the United
States are a member of EBSCO. Sociological
Abstracts lets other sociologists know of
articles.
In the past Sociation Today
has been a member of DOAJ, a group which
listed our journal as an open access source
and maintained our index of past issues, a
valuable service. We were invited
to join this group after our first
issue. However, recently our index
seems to have disappeared and they are
demanding the all journals reapply for
"membership." Thus any future relation
with this group is unclear at the present
time. In the meantime, please use
Google Scholar. I will post here any
future developments with DOAJ.
It seems that the
reapplication made in January 2015 was
rejected because it was not submitted
through the internal sign-in, but via. email
with an attached form. Thus the
reapplication was rejected, which I did not
know until a reminder came. Thus I
have sent in a second reapplication.
There seem to be numerous European
organizations on copyright that they want
you to agree to, but which do not change our
policies. When I do get permissions to
reproduce an article, I always have said
"yes." As an open access
journal, there is never a fee.
George H. Conklin, Editor
Updated September 28, 2015.