AERA has announced the appointment of Mark Warschauer, Greg J. Duncan, and Jacquelynne Eccles as the inaugural editors of AERA Open, effective July 1. All three are professors at the University of California–Irvine (UCI). Warschauer will serve as editor in chief, and Duncan and Eccles as co-editors.
AERA Open is a new open access journal approved by the AERA Council last year. It is among only a handful of open access journals being published by social and behavioral science associations. Warschauer, Duncan, and Eccles were selected after an extensive nomination and application process.
“Education research is a field that seeks to study and lead in innovation and learning,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “Who could hope for anything more than the Warschauer, Duncan, and Eccles team as inaugural editors?”
“Across arenas of science and scholarship, the three are known for openness, innovation, and thought leadership,” said Levine. “Each is a highly distinguished scholar, educator, and mentor with a track record of boundary crossing.”
AERA Open will publish important cumulative and incremental research. It also aims to publish at the cutting edge, serving as a forum for innovation, new inquiry and ideas, interdisciplinary bridge building, and work that fosters the connection of research to policy and practice.
"The editors will have the latitude to take the journal’s ambitious mission and inventively make it a reality,” Levine said. “Their selection was based on this premise.”
Mark Warschauer is a professor of education and informatics at UCI and associate dean of UCI’s School of Education. He has extensive publishing experience as an author and editor, and is the founding editor of the successful open access journal Language Learning & Technology. Warschauer’s research focuses on technology in learning and its relationship to educational achievement and equity among diverse learners in fields ranging from language and literacy to STEM.
He is also the director of the Digital Learning Lab at UCI, which focuses on a wide range of projects for both K–12 education and higher learning. Under Warschauer’s leadership, the lab has studied such innovative topics as the impact of virtual learning on student achievement and the use of interactive mobile robots for virtual inclusion. He is author of Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools With Digital Media.
Greg J. Duncan is a Distinguished Professor at UCI’s School of Education. His research focuses on the effects of families, peers, schools, neighborhoods, and public policy on the life chances of children and adolescents. In particular, he is interested in the relative importance of early academic skills, cognitive and emotional self-regulation, and health in promoting children’s eventual success in school and the labor market.
For the first 25 years of his career at the University of Michigan, Duncan worked on and ultimately directed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. He has served as president of the Population Association of America and the Society for Research in Child Development. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Education. In recognition of his contributions to understanding child and youth development, he was awarded the 2013 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize.
Jacquelynne Eccles, also a Distinguished Professor at UCI’s School of Education, is well known for her work on adolescence. Her research has focused on adolescent and student development, including classroom influences on student motivation, teachers’ expectations, the social development of students, and gender-role socialization. She has served as editor for many highly ranked journals, including Developmental Psychology, where she was the lead editor.
In addition, she has served as president of the Society for Research on Adolescence, member of the Governing Board of the National Academy of Education, associate editor of Child Development, associate editor Research on Human Development, and editor of Journal of Research on Adolescence. Most recently, Eccles won the American Psychological Association’s 2013 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest.
AERA is publishing AERA Open in partnership with SAGE publications, which currently publishes a suite of six other journals on the Association’s behalf. AERA Open will commence receiving manuscripts on July 1, with the start of the inaugural editors' four-year term.