Open access journals are sort of a bittersweet reality. While they’re very sweet for the reader, sometimes they’re bitter for the author who has to pay a publishing fee to offset the cost for users. Depending on your discipline this could have a pretty hefty price tag. The Clute Institute has various open access journals for various disciplines. One journal article that I found was the “Freshman Engineering Students At-Risk Of Non-Matriculation: Self-Efficacy For Academic Learning” by Ernst, Bowen, and Williams all from Virginia Tech. As I read through this article and the others published on the American Journal of Engineering Education I realized that while there aren’t many journal articles published in this journal, those that were published were very thorough and provides insight to different approaches to research with seemingly the same quality of work and writing you would see in a journal you’d have to pay to access. The purpose of the Clute Institute is to provide the public with scholarly research findings to which they explain along with other valuable information about the institute such as their mission, values and ethics.
