Building Bridging, One Journal Article at a Time by Frances Pinter

Recently the Association of University Presses (AUP), through its partnership with SUPRR, extended a helping hand to Professor Ilona Kostikova, Professor of Pedagogy at the Department of Foreign Language Teaching Methods and Practice at the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.

Last year I ran into Ilona at a conference. She talked enthusiastically about her journal, Educational Challenges. She’d flipped it a few years ago from a Ukrainian language publication to English, assembled a board from fifteen countries and proceeded to do all the things you’d expect of a reputable international journal. It’s hosted on OJS and is completely open access. Her university supports her efforts, but she has minimal funding, despite heightening the profile of Ukraine through registering with Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ and others.

I asked Ilona whether there was anything SUPRR could help her with. She said all she wanted was to perfect the English of the text. This was no easy feat as by then she was already receiving submissions from people from around the world, in various forms of English.

I approached Peter Berkery, executive director of AUP who in turn asked Jason Gosnell of the Marine Corps University Press for help. He and his colleagues then copyedited and proofed 10 of the16 articles.

Of the experience Ilona says ‘the work with Jason was very productive. He and his colleagues corrected stylistics and made corrections to references which always takes a lot of time’. Jason said ‘we would have liked to contribute more if we had a bit more time. It’s certainly an honour to contribute in this way to help the Ukrainian people’.

And so a human bridge was built, one journal article at a time between Kharkiv and Quantico in Virginia.