The Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care

Aim and Scope

The Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care (SJRCC) is a peer-reviewed, open access e-journal which aims to provide a rich forum for debate and dissemination about the topical issues in residential child care research, policy and practice.

We currently publish two issues per year (spring and autumn). In previous years we have published more issues. Previous issues and published articles are available in our back catalogue. We also publish occasional special themed issues and have published a special series of individual articles related to COVID-19.

The topics covered are wide ranging and relate to all aspects of residential child care, including the interface between residential care and other contexts, such as health, education and other care settings, as well as topics relating to children’s wellbeing in public care.

We publish:

1. Original Research papers, including conceptual and review articles (max. 6,000 words)
2. Short Articles, including reflections on experience, accounts of innovative practice, commentaries on research, new policy, or practice (500-3,000 words)
3. Methodological papers from doctoral studies (max. 3,000 words)
4. Reviews of relevant conferences (max. 1,000 words)
5. Book reviews (max. 1,000 words)
6. Obituaries (max. 1,000 words)

Copyright and Open Access Policy

The Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care is published by CELCIS (the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection), a centre of the Department of Social Work and Social Policy in the University of Strathclyde. The journal is published in accordance with the requirements of platinum/diamond level of open access. Publication is provided on a non-profit basis: there is no charge to authors and we do not pay authors for their submissions; articles can be read and downloaded free of charge. From 2002 until 2011, no licensing requirement or restrictions were listed for the hard copy journal whose articles have been digitised and made available through the SJRCC web pages. From Vol 12, Issue 1 (2013) until Vol 21, Issue 2, articles were published under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND international license. From Vol 22, Issue 1 (2023), and continuing, articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (4.0) License. Articles are also assigned a digital objective identifier (DOI) for persistent citation and discovery purposes. Authors retain copyright and full publishing rights without restriction, though we do request that publication in SJRCC is acknowledged in any other use of the article. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website, prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of the published work. The journal is archived at this website and in the University of Strathclyde's institutional repository, Strathprints.

Editorial Policy

The Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care aims to meet high standards of quality control procedures, shared with other outputs published by CELCIS. In addition, there is oversight by an international editorial board comprised of respected scholars and practitioners. All papers are peer-reviewed. Original research articles are double-blind peer reviewed. Shorter articles are single peer reviewed. All other submissions, such as book and conference reviews and correspondence, are subject to editorial review. Original research papers must include information about ethical considerations in research practice and confirmation of ethics committee approval for the research. Articles submitted for double-blind peer review must not be under consideration by another journal. The SJRCC occasionally seeks permission to publish short articles which have been previously published elsewhere. Such articles will still be subject to our publishing requirements for short articles.

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