Open Access Stories - Leyla Rouhi

In the summer of 2018, two dear colleagues — Sonia Pérez Villanueva at Lesley University and Irene Mizrahi at Boston College — and I decided to co-found a journal dedicated to Peninsular Spanish culture. Our dream became a reality in 2019 when we produced the first issue of ConSecuencias: A Journal of Spanish Criticism, housing it in Boston College.

Our mission was and is to make more space for early career scholars: those who have exciting and original research ideas, and for whom compassionate and rigorous feedback by experts in their area is of great benefit. Unfortunately some peer reviews can be needlessly cruel and off-putting. This is damaging, especially for an early career scholar, so our aim was to stay as far away from that tone as possible. We make sure that all of our peer reviews come from a position of cooperation & encouragement without sacrificing rigor.

It’s a pleasure to see the journal thriving as we head into the 5th issue. ConSecuencias is completely Open Access. No one has to pay to read an article, which is the way it should be. On our end, among the many benefits of Open Access is that we can track, globally, the downloads as well as the viewings, allowing us to see the range of readers’ interests. It’s enormously gratifying to see that across the world people have clicked on the journal and downloaded the research!

Leyla Rouhi
Chair and Mary A. and William Wirt Warren Professor of Romance Languages
For more information about Leyla’s work, visit: https://spanish.williams.edu/profile/lrouhi/

This story is published in celebration of International Open Access Week 2024.  If you want to chat about OA and the library, reach out to your librarian liaison.

To read the complete set of the Open Access 2024 series, visit: https://library.williams.edu/category/openaccess/