As editor of the Journal of East Asian Studies, I am very pleased to announce an exciting change to JEAS’s publication model. In collaboration with Cambridge University Press and with the full support of the East Asia Institute, starting in 2025 JEAS will transition to a fully Open Access publication model. This means that starting next year, every new article published by JEAS will be freely available to any reader, anywhere in the world, at no cost. Even more importantly, none of the costs of this transition to full Open Access will be borne directly by our authors.
This is a major milestone for JEAS, and for scholarly publishing on East and Southeast Asian politics. But it is the culmination of a process that has been in motion for at least a decade, as academic institutions and funding organizations have realized that the traditional model of scholarly publication placed substantial barriers on scholarly information and exchange. For JEAS’s audience—readers and prospective authors alike—that publication model was particularly harmful, because it made it difficult for readers who aren’t employed in wealthy institutions to access our journal. For authors who wanted to publish their articles under an Open Access model, the costs of doing so—through “Article Processing Charges”—were often prohibitive.
Even with these constraints, JEAS has already made great strides towards Open Access publication. In 2022, 61% of our research articles were published on an Open Access basis. This next step will remove all remaining barriers to access, making all research in JEAS available to everyone, regardless of position, institutional affiliation, or ability to pay.
The new model that CUP and EAI have introduced works because CUP has secured agreements with thousands of institutions around the world to support Open Access publication for their own researchers. These agreements allow CUP to subsidize Open Access publication for any author who is not covered by such an agreement, which is especially important for scholars from East and Southeast Asia. This means that beginning in 2025 (Volume 25), any author whose manuscript is accepted for publication for JEAS will either be covered by CUP’s existing agreements, or will be automatically granted a waiver for all Article Processing Charges by CUP.
This is an exciting time for JEAS. Thanks to the hard work of my predecessors Byung-Kook Kim and Stephan Haggard, and to the dedication of our excellent Editorial Board and our committed peer reviewers, I am fortunate to step into my position as editor knowing JEAS has an outstanding reputation for publishing cutting-edge research on politics, political economy, and international relations in East and Southeast Asia. I am committed to continuing to build JEAS’s international reputation as a premier venue for scholars of Asian politics, one that is open to submissions from any methodological tradition or theoretical perspective but with high standards for evidence, analysis, and argument.
But my other commitment is for JEAS to amplify the voices of underrepresented scholars—not just from Asia but from around the world—doing research on East and Southeast Asian politics and society. Our transition to full Open Access is an important step towards this goal. Stay tuned for more, and check out the excellent research that is published and forthcoming at JEAS.
Tom Pepinsky 