Strengthening Education Research Publications Through Open,Principled,and Pragmatic Experimentation: AERA Open Editors’ Vision Statement 2025–2027

Abstract

This editorial presents our vision for AERA Open, highlighting open access, innovation, and responsiveness to current challenges in education research. As AERA Open’s new editors, we critique rigid publishing standards, indirect metric-driven evaluations, and political threats to academic freedom. In response, we propose reforms such as diverse article formats, a new AERA ReOpened series, and increased engagement with global and multilingual scholarship, among other initiatives. We advocate for more inclusive, timely, and transparent research dissemination, including new abstract formats to extend the accessibility of AERA Open articles even further. As such, we, as AERA Open’s new editors, aspire to offer a dynamic space for scholarly exchange that fosters rigorous, trustworthy, usable, and transformative research to tackle complex education issues and support a more equitable future.

Advancing Education Research Through Open Access and Innovation

A dictatorship means muzzles all around and, consequently, stultification. Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech. (Einstein, 1977, p. 107)

One of the most beautiful and practical contributions of conducting research in education during these uncertain times is, paraphrasing the late Argentine scholar Beatriz Sarlo (d. 2025), that we start in a state of not understanding the why and how of a situation. To move forward, we explore, read, analyze, engage in dialogue with others, and seek to understand more. Then, when we eventually arrive at a possible explanation, we consult with others and question our conclusions, allowing our understanding to continue evolving. In that process, scholarly journals play crucial roles, and we, as AERA Open’s new editors, want to remain an essential agent in this journey.

The Current Context: Fears and Structural Challenges in Education Research

AERA Open stands at the forefront of education research, distinguished by its open-access nature, interdisciplinary scope, accessibility, and global reach. As the new editors of AERA Open, we are committed to making the journal an essential forum for scholars, both established and emerging, who seek to engage with the most pressing issues in education today. Through rigorous scholarship, timely publication, and open-access dissemination, we aim to advance knowledge that is conceptually and methodologically sound, trustworthy, usable, and transformative.

AERA Open is published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the world’s largest organization of education researchers. AERA, as a United States (U.S.)-based institution, is facing profound shifts marked by the U.S. federal government’s many executive orders focused on decreasing autonomy, dismantling academic freedom (e.g., via sanctions), suppressing words and their foundational ideas and ideals, and determining what sort of research can be funded or published based on ideological preferences. These orders are generating uncertainties and anxieties, as directly related to the destabilization of research funding and weakening of educational research infrastructures, for example, given closures of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and its National Center for Education Statistics (NCES); drastic reductions in the budgets of organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH); and the precarious status of federal and state education agencies (e.g., the U.S. Department of Education). At the same time, initiatives that focus on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and sustainability are under express attack, with many universities and colleges dissolving their DEI initiatives, threatening the commitments of many institutional leaders and scholars to meaningfully engage with pressing and still-imperative educational and social issues.

Beyond these funding and political constraints, the field simultaneously grapples with perennial anxieties about its impact (Berliner, 2002; Kaestle, 1993; Taylor et al., 2021). Education research articles are often perceived as disconnected from policy, practice, and theoretical development, and these concerns have been increasingly compounded by broader societal mistrust in science, as well as fueled by ideological divisions and skepticism about researchers’ methodological and conceptual approaches (Berliner, 2006; Zhao, 2018).

Concurrently, the academic profession is undergoing significant transformations. Tenure-track positions are declining, with a growing reliance on part-time and contingent faculty. The uncertain expansion of higher education—particularly in graduate studies and teacher education—further weakens the opportunities for training future generations of education researchers and practitioners, respectively. In this climate, academic publishing plays an increasingly central role in determining scholars’ careers, alongside intensifying pressures to conform to dominant publication models (Springer Nature, 2025).

Structural Conditions Affecting Academic Journals in Education

These broader challenges intersect with specific challenges confronted by those leading journals in education research. According to James Butcher, using data from Dimensions, the publication of journal articles in education has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 15% and a total growth rate of 263% over the last decade (i.e., from 41,529 articles published in 2015 to 150,950 articles published in 2024). Yet, this growth has been accompanied by a troubling overemphasis on indirect impact measures such as those derived via Google Scholar, Journal Citation Records (JCR), and Journal Impact Factors (JIF; Alperin et al., 2019; Simons, 2008) despite long-standing criticisms regarding the fairness, validity, and effectiveness of their meritocratic claims (G. Fischman et al., 2022; Zuiker et al., 2019). As a result, researchers and institutional leaders often conflate increasing publication counts and citation metrics with genuine scientific and pedagogical impact—a phenomenon we termed the “simplimetrification of education research” (G. E. Fischman, 2016).

Despite consensus on the need for research that informs and improves education (Anderson et al., 2021; Figuerola et al., 2023; Penuel et al., 2017), there is no generalizable, fair, and effective system to assess the full scope of scholarly contributions in a field as diverse as education. In this context, conventional tenure and promotion models reinforce rigid academic publishing structures that, while effective in generating more research output and expenditures, need a more sensible response to address contemporary challenges that include but are not limited to:

• The dominance of the “Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion” (IMRaD) format that has streamlined scholarly communication in education journals but also constrained them. IMRaD, adapted from the natural sciences, has encouraged education research journals to adopt more standardized, rigid, and predictable writing modes, limiting more essayistic and heterogeneous inquiry forms.

• The prevalence of “research nationalism” and “methodological localism,” or one’s loyalty to a particular research or methodological perspective that assumes the nation-state is the primary unit of analysis, overlooking transnational and intersectional dimensions of education. This inward-looking trend contradicts the openness and global collaboration values that define AERA Open.

• The pervasiveness of the “Revise and Resubmit” (R&R) process for publishing articles. The R&R model is resource-intensive, requiring multiple revisions that delay publication and burden both peer reviewers and authors. It raises concerns about fairness and efficiency. These challenges highlight the need to explore alternative reviewing models, such as “Open Reviews” (see more about this later in Other Initiatives), perhaps while limiting R&R rounds and aiming for more timely research dissemination.

• Overloaded peer review systems that, with an increasing volume of submissions, stretch thin journal editors and peer reviewers (Ruiz Cuéllar, 2022). Searching and successfully soliciting appropriate peer reviewers has become a significant challenge, especially over the last five years, given increased publication volumes, reviewer burnout, and interdisciplinary scholarship complexities (Goldberg et al., 2025). The most innovative papers are also often the hardest to review, especially as authors of these papers attempt to break new ground. Yet, some researchers prioritize producing presumed high-impact findings over methodological rigor in an academic culture driven by citation metrics, further complicating the peer review landscape.

• Uncertainty about using artificial intelligence (AI) in research and the ambiguous role social media plays in scholarly communications present new challenges. While AI has the potential to streamline academic work, it also raises multiple ethical questions about authorship, originality, and bias in and beyond peer review (e.g., historical, societal, and sampling biases inherent in the data sampled when using AI).

Our Proposal for Addressing These Challenges

Recognizing these challenges, we, as the new editors of AERA Open, seek to innovate in ways that enhance the trustworthiness, usability, and accessibility of education research. As leaders confronting and effectively navigating these challenges, we also intend to innovate by leading a new series of experimental projects:

• New AERA ReOpened Section: Staying current with the newest findings in a field is critical in today’s fast-paced research environment, but considering foundational work from previous scholars can be just as important. AERA ReOpened, launched in October 2025, is committed to cultivating dialogue across generations of scholars and epistemic communities—qualitative and quantitative, critical and empirical, practice-based and theoretical. By revisiting foundational texts, all of which will have been originally published in this or any other AERA-sponsored journal (see https://www.aera.net/Publications/Journals), through contemporary lenses, AERA ReOpened will promote reflection and debate among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike. These pieces will serve as platforms for critical rereadings, applications in new contexts, constructive critiques that open new lines of inquiry, and the like. Submissions will undergo streamlined peer review by an appointed advisory board (to be approved by the AERA Publications Committee) to ensure relevance and scholarly integrity. Contributions will be amplified through coordinated outreach, including social media, interactive webinars, and live events at AERA annual meetings, reinforcing the section’s commitment to dynamic and inclusive academic exchange. We aspire that AERA ReOpened will honor the intellectual labor of the past while connecting it to the future.

• Diverse Formats: We will actively encourage more varied formats of scholarly communication beyond IMRaD, welcoming theoretical essays, methodological reflections, critical analyses, and multimodal scholarship that better reflect the complexity of education inquiry. We will also seek to provide complementary abstract approaches (e.g., key insights, plain-language abstracts, visual abstracts) and follow the convention of structured abstracts.

• Enhanced Collaboration and Engagement: To counteract the fragmentation of research, we will encourage more collaborative authorship models, interdisciplinary submissions, and rigorous developmental reviews. We will strongly encourage reviewers to use a “strength-based approach” and explicitly comment on a paper’s strengths and gaps, making peer review more “developmental” and less focused on the shortcomings of a paper. We will also seek to bridge the divide between academic research and public discourse by exploring new ways to share findings beyond traditional academic audiences (e.g., via podcasts, social media, videos, visual material, and public engagement events).

• Broadening Perspectives: We emphasize the importance of broadening the perspectives and contexts represented in the journal. The scholarship produced in languages other than English is relevant and must be recognized in AERA Open (García-Ruiz et al., 2025; Walsh et al., 2018). Authors are encouraged to engage with and cite relevant research conceptually, methodologically, and contextually, including studies published in other languages or from diverse geographic regions. While we are not advocating for a quota system for all submissions, U.S.-based researchers should make a more systematic effort to consult international scholarship. Similarly, authors based outside the United States should endeavor to clearly contextualize their work while acknowledging significant contributions from other languages and academic spaces (Curry & Lillis, 2024). Refer to the reference list provided in this proposal as an example to illustrate this point.

• Ethical AI Integration: Per AERA guidelines, we currently do not use AI in the peer review process. However, we remain open to exploring AI’s potential in assisting the editorial process. For example, we are currently exploring the use of AI to select our most appropriate manuscript co-editors (CEs) and associate editors (AEs) to manage manuscripts, as well as Editorial Board members (EBs) to match their expertise as peer reviewers of some of the manuscripts we have received. It is crucial to state that to maintain confidentiality, we use LLMs/AI offline. Here, we are proceeding and will continue to proceed cautiously, ensuring clear ethical guidelines while distinguishing between editing and authorship, protecting intellectual property, and remaining attentive to the biases inherent in AI-driven and -enabled processes. We also intend to continuously examine these practices to, perhaps, inform the practices of other leading journals in relatively more innovative ways.

• Other Initiatives: As a future idea that has yet to be discussed and approved by the AERA Publications Committee, we also intend to propose a small experiment with Open Peer Review Options. We plan to offer authors the choice to opt into an open peer review process, like the F-1000Research open research publishing model, or use the current double-anonymized review process.

AERA Open: A Space for Scholarly Innovation

We conclude this introductory essay with two acknowledgments that may seem obvious, but we want to state explicitly. First, we recognize that we are building on the innovative work of previous editorial teams, the efforts of AERA’s publications committee, the managing editors, and the technical support of SAGE. Without their efforts and scholarly wisdom, AERA Open would not have gained the recognition and influence it has in its 10 years of existence. Second, the field of education research and its scholarly publications, like any intellectual community, can sometimes be fragmented, contentious, ineffective, and even ideologically skewed, especially in periods of acute affective political polarization. However, this is not a new phenomenon; ideological differences and social dynamics have always been present in education debates, policies, and practices. And yet, recognizing these dynamics requires seeking an answer to a simple question: Why should we care about protecting and improving education research scholarly publications, both processes and outcomes? Our answers are principled and pragmatic:

• Because conceptually rigorous and empirically sound education research benefits us all; if journals in the field publish more usable and trustworthy education research, we will be able to more comprehensively and collaboratively interrogate and improve the broad field of education, one of the essential systems that frame our collective future.

• Because more accessible, usable, and trustworthy scholarly publications can help researchers exercise the conceptual freedom to question long-held assumptions about teaching, learning, and equity. By doing this, we can explore alternatives that are not solely driven by political agendas or market demands.

• Because improving timeliness, fairness, creativity, innovation, and diversity in education via scholarly publications is one of the best alternatives to equip us with the tools to think critically, examine policies, explore practices with nuance, and envision better education futures.

Ultimately, we believe AERA Open should be more than just another good journal. It should be a dynamic space for reasonable experimentation, knowledge creation, and exchange. It should engage scholars worldwide to join all involved with AERA Open (see our new editorial board: https://journals.sagepub.com/editorial-board/ERO) in reimagining how education research is produced, reviewed, and shared. By fostering transparency, inclusivity, and epistemological diversity via AERA Open, we aim to advance research that informs and transforms education—making it more just, equitable, and responsive to the complex and multifarious challenges of our time.