100th Article JQD Update

2025-01-31

With the publication of our 100th article, and as we re-open submissions for 2025,  we’d like to make a few announcements about the first four years of the JQD:DM.

In 2024, we published our first special issue in collaboration with the International AAAI Conference on the Web and Social Media (ICWSM) – here, in case you missed it.

We also inaugurated best paper awards for the journal, with the two awards and recipients here:

Best Paper Using Data from the Global South:

Best Paper Engaged in Quantitative Description on an Under-studied Phenomenon:

On the demand side, internal statistics show a solid upward trend in monthly visits to our articles.

Our publications are also achieving wider recognition; Inequalities in Online Representation: Who Follows Their Own Member of Congress on Twitter? (McCabe et al, 2023) was awarded the 2024 American Political Science Association Information Technology Policy section award for “the best scholarly article published about Information Technology and Politics.” The award has recently gone to papers published in specialized disciplinary outlets like the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics, so it’s nice to see recognition for interdisciplinary outlets like the JQD:DM as well.

Now, onto the future! 

One of our founding co-editors, Eszter Hargittai, is stepping aside from an active editorial role. We’re immensely grateful to Eszter for her work in getting the JQD:DM off the ground and shepherding it through the first four years; the journal simply would not exist without her. She’ll be joining the Advisory Board moving forward.

We’re extremely excited to welcome two new co-editors! Kenny Joseph and Homa Hosseinmardi. Kenny is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He has published before in JQD:DM and was a prior General Chair at ICWSM, where he helped to put together a special issue of JQD:DM that we’re hoping is a stepping stone to broadening the pool of JQD:DM submissions to a new community. Homa is an Assistant Professor of Computational Communication and Data Science in the Department of Communication at UCLA. Formally trained in computer science, she has applied her expertise to the field of social science, actively contributing to computational social science over the past five years, both publishing and serving as a reviewer for prestigious journals, including Nature, Science Advances, and PNAS. 

The composition of the group of four co-editors reflects our experience of trends in the demand side of publishing. While we are still extremely interested in publishing research primarily using survey methods and speaking to traditional topics in Communication, our submission pool is distinctly skewed in the direction of research using Computational Social Science methods and digital trace data, and we wanted to expand our editorial capacity to reflect this. 

The fiscal situation

The landscape of academic publishing has continued to move towards open access, but the adoption of our diamond-access model (where articles are published online immediately and are free to both access and publish) remains limited. We have adopted a model where we ask authors to make a completely voluntary donation in lieu of an article processing charge, but this has generated only a few thousand dollars in two years – the rest of the funding for editorial assistance and web hosting has come from our institutions and our personal research accounts.

If you’re interested in supporting our mission, we’d appreciate it if you could put us in touch with your university library. We’re working to streamline the process of the setting up these payments, and the more library workflows we have experience with, the easier this will be moving forward. 

That’s it! Our LOI submissions are now open, we look forward to receiving your submission.

Kevin, Andy, Homa and Kenny

Co-editors, JQD:DM