Policies

Editorial policy

Manuscript Admissibility

The Journal publishes three issues per year, regular or special. Are admissible articles that are relevant to its aims and scope, and that:

  • satisfy the principles, rules, and requirements governing rigorous scholarly communication in the domain;
  • respect the ethics policy of the Journal and its data sharing requirements;
  • conform with its manuscript presentation guidelines;
  • when applicable, reproduce only third-party works or substantial parts thereof with the copyright owner's permission.

The types of articles accepted for publication are:

  • editorials (mainly in special issues);
  • practical papers presenting experiences with technology, or evaluation of online courses, with critical discussion : advantages, disadvantages, limitations, etc. (with hyperlinks, screen captures, etc.: 1,500 - 2,500 words);
  • critical perspectives providing a particular vision or direction on technology in higher education (substantiated with references to the literature) (3,000 - 6,000 words);
  • full research papers with empirical data (3,000 - 6,000 words);
  • brief literature reviews or current research notes (500 - 1,200 words).

Word numbers quoted above are indications only. They convey the wish of the Editorial board to encourage shorter texts, more suitable to online reading and the intended audience.

Evaluation Procedure

All manuscripts considered admissible, according to the aims and scope and the editorial policy of the Journal, will be subject to double-blind peer review by two or three referees who have expertise in the given field and who are not from the same institution as the author(s).

The judgment of admissibility, the choice of reviewers, and decisions regarding revisions of the manuscript and its final acceptance are normally made by an assistant editor, under the responsibility of the Editor-in-chief.

Miscellaneous

There is no charge for submission or publication in the Journal.

The articles, in PDF format, are published in English or French, according to the author’s language preference. The abstracts are available in both English and French.

The Journal is permanently archived on Portico, through the Érudit platform.

The Journal is indexed in Mir@bel, the Web of Science (Clarivate) – Core Collection – Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), as well as in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Ethics policy

Each author of a manuscript submitted to the Journal must abide by the following five rules.

  1. Authorship credit. The authors byline includes all individuals who (1) have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the research and (2) have approved the final draft of the article, and only those individuals.
  2. Data integrity. Data are used as collected. Any further modification (correction, selection, omission, truncation, normalization, etc.) to data or results is described and justified in the article.
  3. No plagiarism. Any element (text, table, graphical object) included in the article and taken from or strongly inspired by someone else's work is duly signalled, with full acknowledgment of the source.
  4. No redundant publication. The article is in major part made of elements not included in any text currently submitted to or previously published in a journal or other peer-reviewed publication venue. However, this rule doesn't apply to documents (manuscripts, reports, theses, dissertations, etc.) made available on personal websites and institutional or subject-based repositories; posting on such sites does not constitute publication.
  5. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The use of AI tools for the production of the article (e.g. writing, translation, language improvement) or for the underlying research (e.g. literature review, data collecting, analysis and interpretation, etc.) must be clearly described in the article and rightly cited according to the Journal reference style. The author(s) remain responsible for the whole article, including any part generated by an AI tool.

The Journal may check for ethical shortcomings with any appropriate tool or method, for instance using appropriate software or consulting with individuals involved in the situation. Reviewers and readers may also bring suspicions to the attention of the Journal.

Any situation of suspected ethical shortcoming is examined by a committee formed of the editor-in-chief and two other members of the Board of Directors.

The committee analyzes the situation following the principles of natural justice, including the right for suspected individuals to explain their viewpoint. The content of the discussions of the committee and, when applicable, the hearing of suspected individuals, is confidential.

If the committee concludes that the Journal's ethics policy has been violated, it may, according to the gravity of the violation, require corrections or impose appropriate sanctions, up to the withdrawal of the article and a ban on further publication in the Journal.

The committee communicates its decision, which is final and without appeal, to the suspected individuals and the Board of Directors. If the committee concluded that the Journal's ethics policy had been violated, it may also notify external organizations or institutions, for instance other journals, or the home institutions of the individuals responsible for the violation.

Sharing of Research Data

Sharing of research data is one of the dimensions of open science. It is part of an international movement to make these data, often collected with the help of public funding, available for further research as well as for the public benefit. It is now required by many funding agencies.

Sharing your data, which may be formally cited through their DOI, increases the visibility and impact of your publications, and may bring new research collaboration opportunities.

Being part of this movement, the Journal requires, as of March 2024 that the submission of a manuscript include a data sharing statement, relative to the data collected during the research and supporting the article. This statement indicates if such data exist and will be made available (in whole or in part) and, if so, how and under which access and reuse conditions. It may also include a date of availability, which may be posterior to the publication date.

The Journal doesn't prescribe any specific sharing modality, but strongly encourages depositing data on a dedicated repository; it's indeed a condition for obtaining a DOI for a dataset.

However the Journal recognizes that it may be difficult, even impossible to share data collected in some types or contexts of research. One thinks notably of qualitative research with human participants, constrained by strict rules regarding confidentiality and participant consent.

In a later phase, sharing of data through a dedicated repository will become a condition for publication in the Journal, naturally taking into account the above-mentioned limitations concerning certain types or contexts of research.

For further explanations, see this page, which contains annotated links to relevant documents and resources.