Written by: Thomas Apperley and Christopher S Walsh
When Digital Culture & Education was conceived in 2006, as an output of the Australian Research Council Linkage project ‘Literacy in the digital world of the 21st century: Learning from computer games’, open access publishing was not receiving the attention it does today. Our motivation for publishing DCE as an open access journal was simple. We wanted to make all articles available to education practitioners—especially classroom teachers—who might not have access to an academic library, and to scholars from institutions who are unable to fund that access. Open access was, for us, a way of disrupting the hegemony of academic publishing (Walsh and Kamler, 2013) to intentionally reach a wider audience, particularly anyone who might find the work published in Digital Culture & Education useful. Since 2006, the discussions and debates around scholarly open access publishing have become considerably more politicised