Call for Papers

About This Special Issue

The Matilda Effect describes the systematic under-recognition of women's contributions to science and scholarship, whereby their work is attributed to male colleagues or quietly absorbed into the record without credit. Since 2012, int.WOJDE has published a continuing series of studies recovering the work of women who shaped open, distance and online learning. This special issue gathers that line of inquiry into a single volume and invites new contributions to it.

We welcome papers that recover, document and critically examine the contributions of women to open and distance education — as theorists, practitioners, institution builders, policy makers and learners — and that examine the mechanisms through which those contributions have been overlooked.

Topics of Interest

• Biographical and oral-history studies of women in open and distance learning
• Recovery of unattributed or under-attributed scholarly contributions
• Citation practices, authorship order and gendered credit in ODL research
• Women's institutional leadership in distance teaching universities
• Gendered access to distance and online education in the Global South
• Intersectionality: language, geography, disability, caregiving and Anglo-dominated knowledge production
• Archival and methodological approaches to recovering women's work
• Policy interventions that reduce the Matilda Effect in ODL scholarship

Submission Types

Research Articles, Review Papers, Case Studies, Theoretical Papers, Oral History Interviews and Educational Innovations. Manuscripts are normally between 10 and 15 single-spaced pages including references, figures and tables; research briefs, notes and reviews may be shorter.

Important Dates

Submission deadline	15 November 2026
Reviewer decisions	20 December 2026
Publication	late December 2026

How to Submit

Guest Editor

A guest editor for this special issue will be announced here. Scholars working on the recovery of women's contributions to open and distance learning who would like to be considered are invited to write to editor@wojde.org.

Rolling Call — General Submissions

Outside this special issue int.WOJDE accepts submissions on a rolling basis for its regular April and October issues. General submissions follow the same guidelines and the same address; see Topics of Interest for the full subject list and Submission Guidelines for formatting requirements.