About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Australian and International Journal of Rural Education (AIJRE) [Online ISSN 1839-7387, Print ISSN 1036-0026] is an international medium for educators with an interest in the provision of education in rural contexts. The Journal is interdisciplinary and publishes integrative reviews, scholarly accounts of educational research relevant to rural education, research reports, book reviews and feature articles likely to be of interest to the readership. The focus of the Journal is on addressing issues, challenges, developments and opportunities in rural education globally.

Contributions are welcome from both members and non members of SPERA, as are contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives at any level of education.

The Journal will publish submissions which, for example:

Promote the development of rural education scholarship;
Disseminate innovative ideas, actions, programs and policies in rural education;
Link people interested in providing quality learning experiences in rural contexts;
Provide a forum for new ideas and innovations in rural education;
Share information and findings related to rural education issues and the development of programs.

Peer Review Process

All Journal Paper submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed by experts in the field. Reviewers generally include the Editorial Committee, Associate Editors, Consulting Editors, authors of work previously published in the journal and other recognised experts at the invitation of the editorial committee and as relevant to the submission under review. Reviewers are asked to identify any potential conflict of interest before review, and where a conflict of interest exists a new reviewer is assigned. All reviews are anonymous and all reviewers agree to maintain strict confidentiality. The Editorial Committee will make publication decisions based on the objective judgement of reviews and the objectives of the journal. Where mixed reviews are received a third review may be sought.

Authors can expect to receive constructive feedback on their submissions. Reviewers, and the editorial team, take a pedagogical approach to their reviews and actor feedback. As such they aim to provide feedback related to the paper's aims, objectives, literature, methodology, data analysis, results and discussion as appropriate. Where revisions are sought, minor revisions will be subsequently considered by the editorial committee with major revisions sent for further peer review.

AIJRE aims to provide a prompt and efficient review process. From the receipt of a manuscript, we aim to provide reviewer reports within six (6) weeks from the submission date. Author(s) will be provided with reviewer comments and the outcome of the review process which may fall under the following categories:

Accepted;
Conditionally Accepted: minor revisions to be made by the author(s);
Revise and Resubmit: major revisions needed; or
Declined.

Articles submitted to our 'Rural Connections' section are subject to editorial review. Two editors will provide feedback to authors. Authors must respond to editorial feedback in this case. More information about Rural Connections papers can be found in the author guidelines .

Evaluation Guidelines for Reviewers

These Evaluation Guidelines are based on those developed by Jon Yorke for evaluating conference submissions for the Australian Technology Network Assessment Conference 2011.

See our Youtube presentation on how to write reviews.

Publication Frequency

The Australian and International Journal of Rural Education publishes three Issues each year (March, July and November) and endeavours to offer authors an efficient process with a short turn-around time for accepted submissions.

Open Access Policy

The Australian and International Journal of Rural Education is published Open Access under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. This allows for immediate free access to the work and permits any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose. Authors retain full copyright (see Copyright information in section 5 of the Author Guidelines). There are no Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Repository Policy

Authors may upload a copy of their accepted or published article to an institutional repository or a repository of their choice.