About the Journal
Focus and scope
IRRJ will provide a rigorous international forum and archival record for research in all areas of Information Retrieval, including work that is grounded in statistics, machine learning, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, recommender systems and perhaps many other fields of research. Information Retrieval is a growing field that is served, in part, by a number of excellent conferences and journals. Yet, all these conferences and journals require authors or readers to pay a fee, either article processing fees or subscription fees. At IRRJ, the author does not pay, the reader does not pay, and the editorial and publishing process is entirely self-funded, running on the volunteer work by editors, reviewers, technicians, admins, university publishers and on micro-donations by friend organizations. We hope IRRJ will attract new researchers from low-income countries to Information Retrieval that cannot afford article processing charges and whose institutions cannot afford subscription fees. Currently, many researchers from for instance Africa, South and Middle America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia have no possibility to meaningfully engage with Information Retrieval research.
Types of submissions
IRRJ emphasizes technical correctness over subjective significance, to facilitate scientific discourse on topics that may not yet be accepted in mainstream venues but may be important in the future. IRRJ accepts normal papers, extended papers and opinion/review papers. Normal papers (about 20 pages) are original contributions of a length similar to papers submitted to conferences like SIGIR and ECIR that do not reuse the authors' prior work. There should not be any reuse of written text, figures or results between the submitted normal paper and any paper which has been published, accepted for publication, or submitted in parallel at another archival, peer-reviewed venue. Extended papers (about 40 pages) may be original work like normal papers but with more depth than a typical conference paper. Extended papers may also be expanded versions of conference papers if they contain at least 50% new material, and the submission clearly cites the paper that was expanded. Opinion/Review papers are typically short papers (about 10 pages) that discuss other papers other books, or that provide a new perspective on Information Retrieval.
Publication process
IRRJ has a commitment to rigorous yet rapid reviewing. All published papers will be freely available online. Final versions are published electronically immediately upon receipt. Paper volumes are published and sold by Radboud University Press. Papers will be assigned a DOI and the journal will be assigned an ISSN once the first issue is published (planned end of 2024).
Peer review policy*
IRRJ provides single blind reviewing and fast turnarounds by employing a rolling submission and publication process, a fixed review period, and sustained interactions among authors, reviewers, and associate editors.
The review process runs in four phases*: In Phase 1, the manuscript is submitted; In Phase 2, the reviewing phase, an associate editor will be assigned to the submission within a week. They will evaluate the submission, and may advise the editor-in-chief to reject it immediately for being out of scope, or poor quality, or for having format violations. Otherwise, the associate editor will assign at least three qualified editorial board members for review; In Phase 3, the rebuttal and discussion phase, reviews will be sent to the authors by the associate editor including the associate editor's synthesis of the reviews; Authors may post rebuttals and update their papers in response to the reviews, and the reviewers and associate editor may privately discuss the paper. Reviewers will be requested to submit their final recommendations once two weeks have elapsed after all 3 reviews are submitted. In Phase 4, the final decision is made, which is one of the following: Accept as is: the authors are notified, and, once the camera ready version is submitted and verified, the manuscript is published; Accept with minor revision: the author is notified of the required revisions, and, once the revised camera ready version is submitted and verified, the manuscript is published; Reject: the author is notified of the rejection, and the associate editor indicates whether they would be willing to consider a significantly revised version of the manuscript. If so, the authors may revise and resubmit their paper to be entered as a new submission with a link provided to the previously rejected submission as well as a description of the changes made since.
* IRRJ’s submission guidelines and editorial policies are based on the policies of sister journals like the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Transactions on Machine Learning Research the Journal of Artifical Intelligence Research, and ACM Transactions on Information Systems.
Open Access Policy
IRRJ is a diamond open access journal which means that all content is freely available while IRRJ does not charge its readers subscription fees, nor does IRRJ charge its authors article processing fees. Readers are permitted to download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or to use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the authors, so long as attribution is given to IRRJ and the authors. Authors retain the copyrights of their papers. All of the content in IRRJ is published under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license.
Archiving policy
All issues are online available in open access. This journal uses Portico and the PKP Preservation Network to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.
Repository policy
Authors are permitted to post and distribute the published version of their work in any format on any repository, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in IRRJ.
