ACCESS: Thirty years of academic publishing

An introduction and brief history of ACCESS This issue of ACCESS commemorates thirty years of continuous publication, no mean feat in today’s world of changing research and publication practices. The idea of a special issue was to mark this moment by bringing together significant contributors to ACCESS during its history, to reflect on where the journal has come from and where it is going. This is a watershed moment in the journal’s history as negotiations have been undertaken successfully with the Learned Society, Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) to incorporate ACCESS with the highly successful journal Educational Philosophy and Theory from the beginning of 2014. The significant opportunities for ACCESS are further discussed below and also in Michael Peters’ article “In Praise of Small Journals”. In 1982 James Marshall and Colin Lankshear established ACCESS at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. It was organised and published until 2001 by the Cultural and Policy Studies academic group at the University of Auckland, first as Access, then ACCESS: Critical perspectives on education studies, then ACCESS: Critical perspectives on cultural and policy studies in education with Michael A. Peters acting as the main editor during this period. From 2002 to 2008 it was published by the Centre for Communication Research at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, changing its title to ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on communication, cultural and policy studies and including research on communication with on-going reference to educational contexts. Elizabeth Grierson was invited to be editor in 2001; an international Advisory Board was established, and two previous editors, James Marshall and Michael Peters became Consulting Editors. In 2005 the journal migrated across the Tasman, with the appointment of Elizabeth Grierson, as serving executive editor, to the Head of School of Art at RMIT University. It was subsequently published under Elizabeth’s management at RMIT. Scanning these last thirty years it becomes apparent that ACCESS has acted as a kind of scholarly barometer of the cultural policy and practice landscapes in New Zealand and Australia, and more broadly internationally.