By: Josiah Beharry, Graduate Student Researcher, Center for Humanities, University of
California Merced

Academia and scholarship face a complex, urgent challenge in the 21st century, defining their central purpose and determining whose perspectives they value and include. As institutions nationwide grapple with rising academic uncertainty and constraints on viewpoint, the imperative for public engagement in higher education is becoming undeniable. The integration of public service and community collaboration is now essential, whether welcomed by universities or not. Some academic journals have proactively addressed this shift for years , championing community engagement. The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) and Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, both established in 2008, serve as significant platforms within this evolving landscape. While they share a commitment to engaged scholarship, they differ in structure, tone, and how they operationalize accessibility, rigor, and participation.

Both journals are built upon the principle that meaningful scholarship is not confined to university settings. Rather, it is generated through the active fusion of teaching, research, and community involvement. JCES embodies this philosophy by offering a space where faculty, staff, students, and community partners can share work that unites these domains instead of keeping them separate. Similarly, Gateways positions itself as a refereed journal devoted to collaborative, critical, and change oriented community-university research. However, where JCES emphasizes integration across roles and institutional boundaries, Gateways places stronger emphasis on relational accountability, explicitly framing scholarship as something that exists within relationships—between universities and communities, between theory and practice, and between knowledge and responsibility.

A central characteristic of both journals is their embrace and acceptance of diverse forms of scholarship. JCES actively seeks submissions across all disciplines and welcomes multiple methodologies, including empirical studies, reflective practice, creative approaches, and community-authored perspectives. This broadened definition enhances accessibility, allowing readers with varying interests and knowledge backgrounds to genuinely engage with the work. Gateways mirrors this openness but leans more heavily into critical and evaluative case studies, partnership analyses, and theoretical reflections that interrogate the very structure of engagement. In practice, this means JCES may feel slightly more flexible and inviting for emerging scholars experimenting with form, while Gateways may appeal to those looking to situate their work within a more explicitly critical and globally comparative framework.

This flexibility reflects a practical understanding of how knowledge is generated. Scholarship stems not only from controlled research and statistical models but also from lived experiences, collaborative partnerships, experimentation, and thoughtful reflection. Today’s audience seeks a relational connection with scholarship, moving beyond distant academic pronouncements. Both journals respond to this shift, though in distinct ways. JCES achieves this by centering practitioner voices and lived experience, as seen in Cody Harris’s (2025) article on juvenile justice education, which illustrates how community partnerships reshape institutional environments and student identity. Gateways, by contrast, often interrogates the conditions of that relationality itself, asking whether engagement produces real change or simply reproduces institutional narratives.

One of the most consequential similarities between the two journals is their commitment to Diamond Open Access, journals that are free for readers to access and free for authors to publish in, with no processing charges. JCES’s open access policy functions as a foundational “golden master key,” ensuring that all content is freely available without embargo and without article processing charges. Gateways operates under the same model, removing both reader paywalls and author fees. In contemporary publishing environment frequently characterized by restrictive access and high costs, this shared commitment is deeply significant. For graduate students, early-career researchers, and community scholars, these journals make participation possible.

Where the journals begin to diverge more clearly is in their publishing ecosystems and editorial framing. JCES demonstrates a strong commitment to inclusivity through flexible submission guidelines and notably includes a dedicated graduate student submission section. This separate track is highly beneficial, as it lowers barriers for students who might otherwise struggle to compete with established academics. Gateways, while also accessible, is embedded within the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) ePress ecosystem, which emphasizes structured peer review, ethical governance, and global scholarly standards. Its use of double blind peer review, plagiarism screening, Codes of Conduct for Journal Publishers and Journal Editors (COPE)-aligned ethics practices, and transparency requirements,including disclosures around funding, conflicts of interest, and AI use, signals a more formalized and internationally standardized publishing infrastructure.

For graduate students, this distinction is important. JCES offers a more entry-accessible pathway, particularly for those producing practice-based or community-centered work for the first time. Gateways, while still accessible, may require a stronger alignment with established research frameworks and a clearer articulation of theoretical contribution within global conversations on engagement.

Another key difference lies in scope and scale. JCES is deeply rooted in community engagement within a broadly U.S. focused context, with an emphasis on practitioner knowledge and local impact. Gateways operates at a distinctly international scale, publishing work from across multiple continents and framing community-engaged research as part of a global intellectual and political movement. Its themed volumes— such as the 2025 focus on “writing research differently” and the 2026 call questioning whether engagement produces real change or institutional window dressing—demonstrate a willingness to push the field conceptually and methodologically. This gives Gateways a slightly more theoretically provocative and globally comparative edge, while JCES maintains a strong commitment to accessibility and grounded practice.

Despite these differences, both journals are united by a shared philosophy that challenges conventional academic publishing norms. They operate from a set of guiding assumptions that scholarship can be intellectually rigorous without being exclusionary, community knowledge is not peripheral but foundational, students are contributors rather than subjects, and accessibility is an ethical responsibility. JCES embodies this through its inclusive authorship model and practitioner centered approach, while Gateways extends it through critical interrogation and global dialogue.

Ultimately, the choice between these journals depends on the goals of the author. For graduate students seeking an accessible entry point into publishing, especially those working with community partners or practice-based research, JCES represents an intellectual commons where diverse forms of knowledge are welcomed and valued. For those aiming to situate their work within broader theoretical debates about engagement, accountability, and global research practices, Gateways offers a platform that is both rigorous and expansive.

For the general public, both journals offer something equally important, a vision of scholarship that is not trapped behind institutional walls. They demonstrate that research can be collaborative without losing rigor, critical without losing hope, and scholarly without becoming inaccessible.

That, ultimately, is what makes both journals worth paying attention to. Not just because they are free. Not just because they are established. But because they ask a deeper question that should sit at the center of all public scholarship; What would it mean to build research in a way that communities can actually recognize it as theirs?

This is one in a series of five essays reviewing public humanities journals. This series was inspired by Wendy Belcher’s website Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences