About the Journal

The VRA Bulletin is the journal of the Visual Resources Association, a multidisciplinary, international organization dedicated to furthering image management education and research by providing leadership in the field, developing and advocating standards, and offering educational tools and opportunities for the benefit of the community at large. The Association actively supports the primacy of visual information in documenting and understanding humanity’s shared cultural experience through collaboration, partnership, and outreach with the broader information management, cultural heritage, educational, and commercial communities. For more information about the Association, see their website.

The mission of this journal of professional practice is to:

  • Promote scholarship applicable to the field of visual resources,
  • Provide the option of juried research to VRA members and like-minded information professionals,
  • Disseminate information, ideas, and experiences in image management.

The VRA Bulletin publishes articles pertinent to our membership including association news, editorials, perspectives, reviews, interviews, and lesson plans, as well as double-blind peer reviewed research articles. We invite content covering all aspects of the life cycle of visual assets, from conceptualization to use, and the workflows, technologies, standards, and best practices relevant for each phase. This may include project planning, acquisition, digitization, metadata and cataloging, database management, collection development, curation, instruction, outreach, preservation, digital scholarship, visual literacy, and intellectual property. Of particular importance is highlighting and addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility needs and concerns within each life cycle phase. 

The VRA Bulletin is published twice a year. Volume 1 was printed in 1974, and volume 37, the last formal print edition, was in 2010. The electronic version starts in 2011 with volume 38, issue 1, with back issues being uploaded incrementally, based on availability. The Visual Resources Association Bulletin is a fully open access journal and issues are available to anyone immediately upon publication. All costs of publishing are borne by the Visual Resources Association; there is no cost to the authors in order to publish.

We welcome submissions from VRA members and non-members. See our Information for Authors for more information on the submission and publication process.

Policies:

Retroactive Name Change
The VRAB editors encourage any authors (published in this journal) who wish to change their name as it appears on an existing article to do so. Name changes can be effected in the metadata for those who submitted to the current site; in order to change biographical information, please login to your account and make the desired changes. The VRAB also allows for inclusion of the author’s ORCID ID.

Because articles are published as PDFs, the change will only affect the metadata on the website itself, not on the article. In order to have name information updated on the article itself, or for those whose article submission did not involve creating a user account on the current site, please email vrab@vraweb.org.

Review Process
The VRAB utilizes a combination of editorial review and double-blind peer review. Association news, reviews, editorial letters, perspectives, and affiliate news undergo editorial review while each feature article submission undergoes both peer review and editorial review. Please contact the editors for more information.

Plagiarism Policy
The editors of the VRAB screen for plagiarism as part of the review process using Dupli Checker plagiarism checker software.

Rights and Permissions
The VRAB does not require copyright transfer, only permission to publish and archive the article. Copyright holders retain copyright ownership, granting a nonexclusive license to the journal and OJS to publish the article, meaning that the author may also publish it elsewhere. Before submitting an article to the journal, please be sure that all necessary permissions have been cleared in any third party material.

Open Access Statement 
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. All issues of the journal beginning with the first issue are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Thanks to Refract of UC Santa Cruz for the language utilized in the "Policies" section.