Focus and Scope

The IU Journal of Black Student Experience provides graduate students with a creative space to share their work that is not always welcome to other academic journals. The journal will to encourage and strengthen the professional development of graduate students by providing academic support and opportunities to showcase their work.  In addition, the journal will highlight and centralize Black narratives, livingness, and experience in anti-deficit perspectives. IUJBSE seeks works that humanize and appreciate Black communities through multitudes of scholarship.

Peer Review Process

IUJBSE uses an open peer review process in which editorial board members and/or external experts evaluate and provide feedback on submitted manuscripts. Open review helps to reframe peer review as a collaborative, mentoring relationship between author and reviewer in which each participant is working together to produce the best submission possible.

In an initial desk review stage, each submission is evaluated by the managing editor to determine if it is a good fit for the journal and ready for peer review. Upon submission, authors may suggest up to 3 potential reviewers they feel are well-qualified to evaluate their work without any conflicts of interest. They may also indicate if they feel that anyone should not review their work. These suggestions should be made in the "Comments for the Editor" text box during the initial submission stage.

Reviewers are usually given 3 to 5 weeks to complete their review. Reviewers should evaluate all aspects of a submission in making their decision, including supplemental material like data and appendixes. After evaluating a submission, reviewers must make one of the following recommendations: accept, decline, revision required, resubmit for review, or resubmit elsewhere. In some cases, another round of reviews may be required. Reviewers are expected to give constructive, unbiased evaluations of the submissions they are assigned. They should consider a submission as objectively as possible and without regard to the race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author. The editors reserve the right to edit or fully reject any review containing biased content and to end a biased reviewer’s association with the journal if we see fit.

Editors in consultation with the peer reviewers and editorial staff make the final determination to accept or decline a submission. Peer reviews are not posted with the article.

Publication Frequency

IUJBSE is published annually.

Open Access Policy

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their 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 BOAI definition of open access.

Publication expenses for authors

Thanks to the generous support of Indiana University, the journal has no publication fee or Article Processing Charge (APC). 

Research Misconduct and Plagiarism Policy

The editors of IUJBSE will take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others. In the event that the editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in their journal, the editor shall follow the Committee on Publication Ethic’s guidelines in dealing with allegations.

In addition, to guarantee originality, IUJBSE actively checks for plagiarism and self-plagiarism before accepting a submission. At the end of the review process, the editor in charge of a paper reserves the right to verify any submitted article through plagiarism detecting software before sending the acceptance letter. This allows IUJBSE to identify passages that may have been reproduced without permission from works already published elsewhere and to consider this in making the final decision. In general, finding a lengthy passage of duplicated text will be considered unacceptable and will result in the automatic rejection of the paper. (Adapted from SDH).