Many readers will already know of Taylor & Francis’s Conflict, security and development and perhaps of Oxford’s Journal of conflict and security law  (whose recent issue focuses on Cyberwar and International Law and includes time-limited open access articles from Mary Ellen O’Connell and Michael Schmitt, who have made prominent – and different! – contributions to the current debate over drones).

Now there’s a new entrant to this rapidly expanding field. Started late last year, Stability: international journal of security and development is available on open access here; the journal publishes contributions on a continuous basis, grouped into two issues at the end of May and the end of November.  The international editorial board includes Mary Kaldor.

Contributions to the second issue have now started to appear.  The editors write:

Stability: International Journal of Security & Development is a fundamentally new kind of journal. Open-access, it publishes research quickly and free of charge in order to have a maximal impact upon policy and practice communities. It fills a crucial niche. Despite the allocation of significant policy attention and financial resources to a perceived relationship between development assistance, security and stability, a solid evidence base is still lacking. Research in this area, while growing rapidly, is scattered across journals focused upon broader topics such as international development, international relations and security studies. Accordingly, Stability’s objective is to foster an accessible and rigorous evidence base, clearly communicated and widely disseminated, to guide future thinking, policymaking and practice concerning communities and states experiencing widespread violence and conflict.

The journal will accept submissions from a wide variety of disciplines, including development studies, international relations, politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and history, among others. In addition to focusing upon large-scale armed conflict and insurgencies, Stability will address the challenge posed by local and regional violence within ostensibly stable settings such as Mexico, Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Stability is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal. It cultivates research and informed analysis and makes it available free of charge and without the delays commonly encountered in traditional journal publishing.  Stability’s content combines the best of academic research with insights from policy-makers and practitioners in order to have a tangible and timely impact.  The journal features research into those interventions, including stabilisation, peacekeeping, state building, crime prevention, development cooperation and humanitarian assistance, which address conflict, criminality, violence and other forms of instability.

I’m interested in the content, obviously, but also in the continuing search for new platforms that seek to reach wider audiences than conventional academic journals.