ACCESS* now accepting student submissions

ACCESS*: Interdisciplinary Journals of Student Research and Scholarship a peer-reviewed journal open to all UW Tacoma students, is accepting student submissions for its second annual issue. The deadline is June 20 for students to submit their work and research.

ACCESS* is open to undergraduates, graduate students and alumni who have graduated within the last year to submit their research. The journal accepts many different genres of student submissions, from research papers, personal essays and case studies, to field notes and capstone papers.

Margaret Lundberg, editor for ACCESS* and instructional writing consultant at the Teaching and Learning Center, talked about the inspiration for the journal.

“It started with an idea I had,” Lundberg said. “Before I worked here, I was a student here. And before I was a student here, I was a student at TCC. I spent one quarter over there working on a similar publication. I was incredibly intrigued by how it worked. It made a big impression on me, and it was something I always wanted to do here.”

The journal is published through Digital Commons, an open access platform and distributor which is used to enable growth and access of scholarly articles and peer-reviewed journals. One of the goals of ACCESS* is to promote the scholarly work of UWT students to a worldwide audience. The public at large can read, download and share the works of UWT students through this publication. Since the release of the first issue, student work has been downloaded a total of 648 times from people all across the globe.

Submissions to the journal are reviewed from a combination of faculty, TLC staff and peer writing consultants, and library staff. After a submission has been reviewed, it then goes back to the student with recommendations on grammar, structure and ways to improve the clarity of the piece. Students then edit their submissions and resubmit them for a second round of revision by the editorial board. Finally, the submissions go back to the students for final edits, and then are sent to Lundberg for a final proofread. This process is done after the end of spring quarter, so students who are submitting their work must be willing to make corrections and adjustments during the summer.

Lundberg also offered advice for students who are thinking about submitting their work, but are unsure of themselves.

“I would say make an appointment with one of us here at the TLC, bring the paper in or email us, and just have someone read it,” Lundberg said. “My recommendation is that it would be me or one of our graduate tutors look at it, because our graduate tutors are on our board, so they know the kind of work we are looking for.”

Some future goals of ACCESS* are to include a separate issue solely for graduate students, as well as one possibly for first-year writings. Another plan is to include and improve on projects which utilize more than one form of presentation, such as a video which accompanies a research paper.

Interested in submitting your work or want to read last year’s
published submissions? Visit:
digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/access