About the Journal

Mission & Scope

Founded in 1994, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes the latest research and scholarship on higher education abroad and student mobility in order to advance our understanding as a field and encourage critical reflection that impacts practice.  

For our purposes, we define education abroad as: 

“education including, but not limited to enrollment in courses, experiential learning, internships, service learning, and other activities which occurs outside the participant’s home country [or] the country in which they are enrolled as a student” (The Forum on Education Abroad, 2020).  

This definition refers to programming that may also be labeled “study abroad” or “[short-term] student mobility,” or “international [student] exchange” (Dietrich & Besana, 2024), as well as blended or hybrid learning experiences that pair mobility components with online learning or virtual exchange.  

We welcome research and scholarship on education abroad programming happening in any country and educating learners from any country in the world, as well as explorations of the field and the practice at large which extend beyond scholarship on student learning and development outcomes, including outcomes for educators or communities, and critical examinations of the practice. 

Frontiers welcomes studies and conceptual scholarly articles informed by various theoretical perspectives and disciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses.  

We encourage scholars, practitioners, practitioner-scholars, educators, researchers, and policymakers from all world regions and at all stages of their career to submit their work to our journal.  

To learn more about the history of Frontiers, click here.

Visit our Policy Library for more information on the policies and procedures that guide Frontiers.

Open Access Statement
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad is a platinum open access journal. All articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication and at no cost to readers or authors.

Open access is beneficial to authors and readers because it offers:

  • Free, immediate access to readers and researchers around the world
  • Increased visibility and readership
  • Fast publication
  • Open length limits (5,000 to 10,000 words preferred)

All accepted manuscripts are published online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. Authors retain the copyright to their work. Users may read, copy, and distribute the work in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes, provided the authors and the journal are appropriately credited. The users are not allowed to remix, transform or build upon the published material.

At Frontiers we believe that no matter where you are in the world or in your career, you should have access to the latest research and scholarship to support your learning and growth. Our open-access model is funded by the generosity of donors and members of The Forum on Education Abroad. If you believe in our work, please consider supporting it today. Thank you.

Mission Statement and Open Access Statement last updated April 1, 2024.