In “Activism, Legitimation, or Record: Towards a New Tripartite Typology of Academic Journals,” Casey Brienza aims to typologize academic journals based on their social or professional purpose. To do so, she reviews and critiques previous typologies of journals, and develops her own typology in response. Brienza argues that there are 3 types of journals: journals of professional legitimation, journals of record, and journals of transformational activism. She suggests that publishers “would do best to focus on playing a mutualistic role in the development and legitimation of new disciplinary formations and geographic concentrations of intellectual excellence” (155), rather than on supporting or promoting journals of record or transformational activism. These latter journal types, Brienza states, do not have a comparable capacity for growth and development, and do not need further support as they are, generally, already well established.

Work cited

Brienza, Casey. 2015. “Activism, Legitimation, or Record: Towards a New Tripartite Typology of Academic Journals.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 46 (2): 141–57. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.46.2.02.