Launching Fall 2026  ·  Diamond open access  ·  Five methodological branches

Where scholarship
pivots

A new multidisciplinary academic journal — organized by how knowledge is produced, not what department it comes from. Free to read. Free to publish. Built for the scholarship that matters.

No spam. No fees. Just updates on what we're building — and first access when submissions open.

You're in. Welcome to the founding community.
Empirica
Empirical & experimental
Data-driven, observational, and experimental research across all fields. If you measure it, test it, or observe it — it belongs here.
Theoria
Theoretical & conceptual
Pure mathematics, philosophical inquiry, critical theory, and formal frameworks. Knowledge produced through argument and proof.
Praxis
Applied & professional
Research that moves knowledge into action — clinical practice, engineering, policy, education, professional ethics.
Poiesis
Creative & artistic
Scholarship where making is thinking. Creative writing, design research, practice-based art, performance scholarship.
Historia
Historical & archival
Reconstructing and interpreting the past. Archival research, oral history, historiography — across every discipline.

The problem we're solving

Academic publishing is broken in three specific ways

The infrastructure of scholarly publishing has remained largely unchanged for generations — organized around disciplines, gated behind paywalls, and built on a model that serves publishers more than scholars.

The most important questions of our time don't respect the lines between sociology and biology, between philosophy and engineering. Yet the journals designed to publish research enforce exactly those lines.

CARDINAL is the answer to all three failures — simultaneously.

The silo problem
Interdisciplinary research is routinely rejected by specialist journals as 'outside scope.' The scholar who works across boundaries is penalized by the very system designed to advance knowledge.
The access problem
A researcher in Lagos cannot access the same literature as their counterpart at Oxford — not because of any difference in capability, but because their institution cannot afford the subscription fees.
The recognition problem
Interdisciplinary work, creative scholarship, and research from non-Western traditions are systematically undervalued by metrics designed to measure citation rates within established disciplinary clusters.

"We organize by how knowledge is produced, not what it is about. That one shift changes everything."

— CARDINAL Founding Manifesto

Our founding commitments

What CARDINAL promises — in writing

01
Diamond open access — without compromise
Free to read. Free to publish. No article processing charges. No paywalls. No embargoes. Ever. Funded by institutional memberships and grants — not by charging authors or readers.
02
Rigorous, constructive peer review
First decision in 6–8 weeks. Substantive feedback for every submission. Review that improves your work, not just evaluates it — with guaranteed written rationale for every decision.
03
Methodology over discipline
Five branches organized by how knowledge is produced. Your empirical work is reviewed by empirical scholars. Genuine methodological community — not disciplinary gatekeeping.
04
Global and genuinely inclusive
Minimum 40% of editorial board from the global south. Language support for non-native English speakers. Automatic fee waivers for low-income institutions — not inclusive in aspiration, but in architecture.
05
Cross-branch dialogue by design
Quarterly Cross-Branch Dialogues. Annual Parallax Perspectives series on grand themes. Interdisciplinarity as structure, not slogan — built into every editorial process.
06
Integrity over impact factor
We will not manage editorial decisions to optimize for any metric. Our success is measured by whether the work we publish is genuinely important — and universally accessible.
The road to launch

Where we are and where we're going

Spring 2026
Foundation
Website live. Editorial recruitment begins. Founding community growing.
Summer 2026
Community built
100+ editorial board members globally. Submission portal opens.
Fall 2026
We launch
Volume 1, Issue 1 across all five branches simultaneously.
2027–2028
We establish
Scopus and Web of Science indexing. 50+ institutional partners.

Be part of building
something that matters

The journals that shape fields are shaped by the scholars who commit to them early. Join our founding community and be the first to know when submissions open, editorial positions become available, and the scholarship begins.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

You're in. Welcome to the founding community.
Join the editorial board → Submit founding author interest → Institutional partnership enquiry →