JOCA

The Journal of Computational Audiology (JOCA) will become a community-driven, Diamond Open Access journal dedicated to advancing hearing healthcare through computational and other digital approaches. We aim to break down barriers in academic publishing by offering a free, global, and truly open platform for researchers and clinicians. Diamond OA journals are free for authors and readers, run by academic communities rather than commercial publishers.

JOCA Survey

Please fill out our JOCA survey

Motivation

  • Vicious cycle of academic publishing
  • Lack of free, global, true open-access (OA) peer-reviewed journal
  • Incentive of governments, funders to avoid hybrid and gold OA
  • Gold OA is not “open” (high fees, free work from academics)

See this spot on critique by Dr. Glaucomflecken.

Timely opportunity

  • Wider push to establish Diamond OA journals and reduce dependence on publishing powerhouses (Elsevier, Sage, Springer/Nature etc)
  • Funding available to start community-based, institutional journals
  • Platforms and open-source frameworks available to manage and implement journals
  • Increasing interest and motivation (less funding!) in research community to get out of current situation

Hosting & Platform

JOCA will be hosted via HOPE at UZH—a service provided by the University Library Zurich to publish open-access journals. HOPE’s core values of being open, free, and global align perfectly with the mission of VCCA and the Computational Audiology Network (CAN).

We are using Open Journal Systems (OJS) as the platform for JOCA. OJS is a fully customizable, open-source solution for managing and publishing scholarly journals, and it supports:

  • CC-BY licensing (with flexibility to choose other licenses if needed).
  • No costs for building, publishing, or reading papers.
  • No strings attached—JOCA retains full editorial and management control.
  • DOI management (via Crossref) and basic indexing support.

Next steps

  • Gauge interest at WCA2026 and VCCA2026 for submitting to JOCA. Estimate submission numbers, set-up a publishing platform, find volunteers and supporters. Please fill out our JOCA survey