Journals as an Input Tool to Build up Cosmopolitan Academics: The Complexity, Advantages and Challenges

This article aims to explore the world of scholarly journals with their status, standards, and potential. Being a justifiable academic is a social need in academia that expects a dynamic personality. While an academic is expected to be free of all interferences, her/his social responsibility is inevitable. In this sense, an academic is expected to play several roles such as a teacher, a researcher, an author, and a social figure. Out of all these, publishing has become vital in the context of the technologically advanced world of academia. As a prominent way of publishing scholarly works, there are millions of knowledge sources and thousands of journals among them. This type of publication (journal articles) is the prominent and dominant way to build up the calibre as a cosmopolitan academic rather than being a local/home-grown academic who publishes locally. Having wide international sophistication can be designated as ‘cosmopolitan' in this context. Though there are thousands of ways to publish, academics are required to meet some standards and they are confined to named sources of publication by the relevant universities and institutions. Publishing has come across several challenges such as meeting high standards, paying higher amounts as processing fees, and distinguishing genuine and predatory journals. Those who publish among all these hinders have been able to capture unique opportunities as academics, besides, growing up as cosmopolitan scholars. Some universities and academic institutions have developed mandates for publishing to be stable and climb up the career ladder. This article tries to explore all these ways and means by understanding the local and global requirements, boundaries and reach of scholarly journals.