The Scholarly Communications team had a chance to ask some questions to the editors of the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College! The undergraduate journal is sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts here on campus and has been in publication since its first volume in 2015. Recently, the journal has moved its online editions to Boston College Libraries’ Open Journal Systems platform iteration, which ensures that the journal will be preserved and search engine results optimized.
The Q&A below gets into some of the best practices for undergraduate journals and the history and future of the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College.
What kinds of pieces are generally solicited? How do you approach your call for submissions?
A variety of pieces! We accept short stories, poems, works of art, photographs, research papers, narratives etc. We usually post on our Facebook page (@BostonCollegeMedicalHumanitiesJournal) when we are accepting submissions with instructions on how to submit!
From what disciplines do most of your submissions come from – where do most of your articles come from?
Our journal is very interdisciplinary so we receive submissions from a variety of disciplines! Although the journal is based on medicine and the humanities field, we receive and publish submissions ranging from Biology and sociology to majors in CSOM.
What was the main motivation for adding your journal to our digital collection on OJS?
With the difficulties of the pandemic and reduced physical interactions, we thought that adding the Journal to a digital collection such as OJS would be more convenient and easily accessible to the public. Additionally, now our journals can be read anywhere and at any time – even on the go!
Is there a reason that Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College has decided to publish Open Access – was it always an OA journal?
We liked the idea of a sort of repository where a bunch of BC Journals lived and wanted to be a part of it! MHJ has always been open access, but we think that this platform will make our Journal easier to find and on an editorial level, easier to manage.
