Open access policy

The Journal of Discourse, Culture & Society (JDCS) is a fully committed diamond open-access publication. All scholarly articles are made freely, permanently, and immediately available online for reading, downloading, searching, linking, and sharing upon publication.

To ensure equitable access to academic publishing, JDCS charges no fees: there are no article submission charges, article processing charges (APCs), publication fees, or subscription paywalls for either authors or readers.

Licensing and Author Rights

  • Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): All articles in JDCS are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This licence permits unrestricted use, distribution, adaptation, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided that the original author(s) and source are properly credited, and any modifications are clearly indicated.
  • Copyright Retention: Authors retain full, unencumbered copyright and all proprietary publishing rights to their work without restriction. Authors grant JDCS the right of first publication under the aforementioned CC BY 4.0 licence.

Rationale and Commitment to Equity

JDCS operates on the conviction that knowledge—particularly critical research examining culture, language, and society—is a universal public good that must remain democratically accessible. Diamond open access dismantles commercial barriers, ensuring that the dissemination and consumption of scholarly inquiry are never conditioned by geography, institutional funding, or socio-economic privilege. In line with the foundational principles of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the journal supports inclusive, globally collaborative research ecosystems.

Self-Archiving and Repository Policy (Green Open Access)

JDCS actively encourages authors to deposit and disseminate their scholarly work across institutional and subject repositories:

  • Preprints & Postprints: Authors may archive the submitted version (preprint), accepted version (postprint/author accepted manuscript), and final publisher’s version (i.e., Version of Record) on personal websites, institutional repositories, or non-commercial preprint platforms (e.g. SocArXiv, OSF) at any point without an embargo period.
  • Citation Integrity: In all self-archiving deposits, authors are requested to cite the original JDCS publication and provide the permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) link.

Persistent Identifiers and Digital Preservation

  • Digital Object Identifiers: Every research article published in JDCS is assigned a persistent DOI to ensure permanent citation linking and cross-referencing across international indexing services.
  • Long-Term Preservation: To safeguard the scholarly record against unforeseen platform loss or discontinuation, the journal is committed to permanent digital preservation. All published volumes and metadata are archived in persistent digital repositories, ensuring long-term accessibility for the global academic community.