Introducing Q Open
Developed in collaboration between Oxford University Press, the European Agricultural and Applied Economics Publications Foundation, and the European Association for Agricultural Economics, Q Open is an innovative new open-access journal, publishing applied research across agricultural, climate, environmental, food, resource, and rural development economics. The title is inspired by the Q category of the Journal of Economic Literature’s subject classification system.
Q Open’s editors are Iain Fraser, Erwin Bulte, Vincenzina Caputo, Phoebe Koundouri, and David Lewis, and they are dedicated to rigorous and fast peer-review, aiming to provide a first decision within 4-6 weeks. To help achieve this, authors have the option to share reports from a previous submission.
Q Open operates ‘sound-science’ peer review, where the focus is on scientific rigour and reflects the state-of-the-art in the field. The decision on acceptance/rejection will rely less on the often subjective evaluations of likely impact, novelty, or breadth of interest. The practice of existing journals in the field shows that the editorial process has limited success in evaluating along these dimensions of manuscript quality and it may be a source of publication bias, as currently discussed in the scientific community in general.
Scope
Q Open aims to be an inclusive forum for applied economics research broadly in the area of agricultural and environmental economics and cognate fields. The main areas of coverage are:
- agricultural economics
- environmental and climate economics
- natural resource economics
- development economics (agricultural/rural topics)
- food economics (and related nutrition- and health economics topics)
Q Open welcomes replications and ‘null-result’ research. It also welcomes pre-registered experimental research, where an empirical research project and its methodology are peer-reviewed prior to data collection. The final article is then provisionally accepted on condition that the author follows the registered methodology.
Proposals for special issues are encouraged.
Peer-review
Q Open is committed to fast peer-review, and aims to provide authors with a first decision within 4-6 weeks of submission.
Q Open’s acceptance policy is based on a sound-science approach, meaning that scientific rigour is the primary consideration, and the editors’ and referees’ subjective evaluation of relevance, importance, novelty, and interest to readers is minimized.
Authors are encouraged to share the decision letter and reviews from previous submissions to assist the editors and to make the review process as efficient as possible. In most cases, the editors will seek at least one further review.
Authors have the option to choose a no-revision review. This means that they are guaranteed not to receive a decision requiring them to do a major revision. Under this option, submissions that require substantial revision will be rejected.