About the journal

Aims and scope

The Journal of Sociotechnical Inquiry publishes peer-reviewed research on the entanglement of technology, institutions and social life. We are interested in work that takes both the technical and the social seriously, and that is prepared to follow a question across disciplinary boundaries.

We welcome submissions that address, among other things:

• the design, procurement and everyday use of algorithmic systems in public and private organisations;
• digital labour, platform work and the reorganisation of occupations;
• data infrastructures, classification and measurement;
• participatory and democratic approaches to technology development;
• methodological contributions to the empirical study of sociotechnical systems.

We publish empirical, theoretical and methodological work. We have no house methodology and no house theory. We do have a house standard: claims must be supported by evidence that a careful reader can evaluate.

What makes us different

Diamond open access. Every article is free to read from the moment of publication, and we charge authors nothing. There are no submission fees, no article processing charges and no colour figure charges. The journal is funded by its publisher and by institutional membership.

Authors keep copyright. Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Authors may deposit any version in any repository at any time, without embargo.

Reviewing that respects everyone's time. We desk-screen quickly, we decline quickly when a paper is out of scope, and we tell reviewers what we need from them. Our median time to first decision is under five weeks.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes four issues a year, in March, June, September and December. Accepted articles appear online ahead of issue assignment and are fully citable from that point, with a registered DOI.

History

The journal was founded in 2019 by a group of researchers dissatisfied with the cost and pace of publishing in the field. It has been fully open access from its first issue and has never charged an author fee.