ISSN

1817-4434 (PRINT)
2415-2005 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa (TD) is a journal dedicated to promoting the concept of transdisciplinary research. It is aimed at creating knowledge with the collaboration of the formal sectors of the natural and human sciences as base. Over and above this, the intention is to focus on levels of knowledge that are to be found at grassroots level. It is important to explore this knowledge because it becomes the groundwork for further knowledge, which is often not confined to a fixed formal discipline or area of knowledge. The editorial team of the journal welcomes contributions of a theoretical nature, as well as material based on empirical research. Preference is given to southern Africa as a region of focus. However, should submitted articles show the potential for making a contribution towards our understanding of science beyond the confines of single disciplines, it would enjoy favourable consideration.

Historic data

TD was established in 2005 with seed funding of the Dean of Humanities at North-West University's Vaal Triangle Campus in Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng South Africa. At the time the objective was to create a potential platform for research publications working on the boundaries of existing disciplines. The search was on for research exploring new areas of knowledge. In many respects the journal has subsequently been an important platform for research work in multi- inter- and transdisciplinary (MIT) fields in academia. Both African and international experts in the field have made contributions to TD on the theoretical aspects of transdisciplinasrity. In recent years there has been a growing interest amongst IT specialists to explore new technologies to publish in TD. Also educationists busy with alternative and different strategies of creating knowledge for teaching and better insights into strategies that work. Also researchers in the field of music studies have used TD in their creative work. A number of philosophers have published in the field which constantly appears to put to the test many conventional assumptions about disciplinarity in a rapidly changing knowledge society that is no longer confined to academia, but also presents itself in citizen science, social media and conventional disciplines in which researchers combine their knowledge skills in specialist fields and agree to collaborate for some boundary work in exploring new fields of knowledge. The type of material suitable for TD should typically deal with some theory on MIT and the methodology used in the research work. Transdisciplinarity is the preferred field for contributions. Authors should clearly be in a position to identify at least three or four disciplines, or knowledge fields, for which their material would be interesting to explore. The themes they deal with should be exciting and be explorative with the prime objective to contribute to new ways of creating an understanding knowledge forms.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes at least one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• AGORA
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCO Host
• GALE, CENGAGE Learning
• GOALI
• Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, Level 1
• OARE
• ProQuest
• Web of Science Other Coverage, Emerging Sources Citation Index, ESCI

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• Portico
• SA ePublications, Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.