What Guides Us

Our values motivate everything we do: how we take submissions, review, and publish.

Openness: Information wants to be free; ditto knowledge and understanding. Criminology articles should be a public good: free to read, remix, and share. This benefits everyone: authors, fellow academics, students, policymakers, practitioners, and the general public. We care too much about criminology to put a price tag on it.

Innovation: Qualitative criminology is about making and trying new ideas. QC is a vehicle for sharing them. But QC is more than that. We not only encourage innovation; we do it and enable it, like never before in criminology. Because of our publishing technology, for example, we are the best place to disseminate non-textual media within articles.

Inclusivity: SWACJ started the journal to help give qualitative criminologists a voice. All forms of qualitative research are part of the conversation at QC. Moreover, we actively speak to quantitative researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.

Democracy: It is impractical for every criminologist to vote on whether a paper should be published in QC. Instead, then, three reviewers are given the responsibility. They represent our community. The editorial team selects reviewers, collects and tallies votes, and publishes articles that receive a favorable majority.

Efficiency: No paper can be made perfect through review. Time to decisions should be hurried, but not rushed. For the sake of authors and reviewers, the editorial team will “desk reject” papers that we deem unlikely to be accepted for publication. For other submissions, we will use each paper’s first round of reviews to accept or reject it for publication.

Authenticity: Our strategies for being efficient and democratic are designed, in part, to prevent reviewers and the editorial team from unduly shaping papers. Publications should maximally reflect their authors. QC articles are authentic to their authors.

Transparency: Bentham wrote that “the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.” The editorial team is open to criticism. We will make mistakes. What we won’t do is be secretive about the process behind decisions. Have a question? Email us to ask.