We are pleased to share an important announcement from the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Board of Directors:

Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus will be published through Cambridge Core beginning in January 2025. Cambridge Core is the non-profit publishing unit of Cambridge University Press. This change will allow APJJF to continue to produce exactly the same mix of high-quality research articles and news it has featured for over twenty years, despite the fast-changing publishing environment that has made the original platform for doing so increasingly difficult.  Every article in the journal — past, present, and future — will remain completely free through Open Access to all readers via either the Cambridge Core portal or our own website, which will continue to operate. Editorial policies, including all peer-review, will continue to be set by APJJF, the expectation of all journals that publish with Cambridge Core.  We also expect that this change will make it easier to publish rapidly, always one of our goals.  

We will maintain and expand the independent APJJF website to feature content not included in the CC site, such as more innovative work in a variety of formats and our own take on today’s fast breaking headlines about the Asia Pacific. We are committed to continuing our long-standing strategy of contextualizing today’s headlines about the Asia Pacific region by publishing both deeply researched scholarship and providing informed context for fast-breaking news. 

What will change is our reach:  joining Cambridge Core means that APJJF will be easily accessible globally and into the foreseeable future. This step vastly expands our discoverability and provides us with expertise in the ever-increasing hidden tasks of maintaining a glitch-free, secure website.  We expect that many of our readers will hear about newly released articles through our monthly newsletter, just as they now do, but it will be much easier to find older publications through university library catalogs, the CC website itself, and the broad range of places that CC engages.  The individual articles will have enhanced HTML and dynamic PDF capabilities that will be regularly updated as the technology changes.  They will also now be archived on CLOCKSS and Portico, which is the closest to “forever” that the internet offers.

CC also offers the metrics of academic achievement that younger scholars in particular require when they place their work. APJJF has long been much more influential than these metrics purport to document but small independent journals such as ours struggle to meet the reporting requirements. CC is assigning DOI numbers to the entire backlist of articles as well as doing so on an ongoing basis, for example.  In other words, one major reason for taking this step is to better respond to the needs of our authors and potential authors.  All articles will be covered by Creative Commons licenses, with authorial freedom to republish versions of the work on a non-commercial basis.

There are many advantages of this arrangement, some of which are directly conferred through the use of the online system, ScholarOne Manuscripts, which we will inaugurate in a few days on October 15, 2024 for formal article submissions.  We hope that authors will appreciate the benefits of doing so, and we apologize for the impersonality and rigidity that is intrinsic to any interface such as ScholarOne. Please continue to connect with us directly for all else!

Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Board of Directors

A Note from the Coeditors:

As we transition to publication through Cambridge Core, we are here to actively support all authors and potential authors. Please continue to contact us with any inquiries at [email protected]. An abstract and bio is no longer required prior to submission; instead you will be asked to provide those with your submission to ScholarOne. But we are always happy to discuss any project or proposed project prior to submission. So do not hesitate to connect with us.

The first step of the transition is the new submission system through ScholarOne. Recent authors and those whose submissions are currently in the pipeline will receive (or have received) instructions on completing their account and updating their user profile through ScholarOne. You do not need to resubmit any manuscript that is still going through the peer review process, but if you are revising and resubmitting a manuscript previously reviewed, we do ask you to submit through ScholarOne.

We are excited about this new era for Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus and the great potential it will unlock for our journal and our authors!

Mary & Tristan