Sage to Launch Open Access Journal Dedicated to Disinformation Research

The academic publishing world is turning its attention to one of the defining challenges of the digital age, as Sage announces the launch of Disinformation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a new peer-reviewed, open access publication dedicated to understanding how false and misleading information is produced, circulated, and understood across societies and cultures. The journal, which will begin publishing in January 2027, is now accepting submissions from researchers around the world. Its arrival reflects a growing consensus among scholars that disinformation can no longer be treated as a niche concern of media studies or political science alone, but demands sustained, rigorous, and genuinely cross-disciplinary inquiry that draws on communication research, rhetoric, political science, environmental studies, and the rapidly evolving field of disinformation studies.

The scope of the new journal is deliberately broad. According to the announcement, Disinformation will welcome contributions exploring disinformation in contexts including politics and elections, war and conflict, science, health, climate change, and the environment. This wide remit acknowledges that deceptive content does not respect disciplinary boundaries. The strategies used to distort public understanding of vaccines, for example, often overlap with those used to undermine confidence in climate science or to manipulate electoral discourse. By providing a single venue for theoretical, empirical, and methodological research across these domains, the journal aims to make it easier for scholars working on very different manifestations of the problem to learn from one another and to build a more coherent body of knowledge.

One of the more distinctive features of the publication is its Interventions and Commentary section, which is designed to create a forum for timely dialogue between researchers and practitioners working to understand and address disinformation. This is a notable departure from the traditional model of academic journals, which often publish research months or years after the events it analyzes. In a field where platform policies, geopolitical crises, and technological shifts can transform the information landscape within weeks, the ability to publish rapid commentary and intervention-oriented pieces may prove essential. The section signals an ambition to connect scholarly analysis with the practical work of journalists, fact-checkers, educators, and policymakers who confront disinformation in real time.

Leadership of the journal takes an unusual form: rather than a single editor-in-chief, Disinformation will be guided by an editorial collective, with a different member serving as managing editor each year. The collective comprises Niki Cheong of King’s College London in the United Kingdom, Gabi Mocatta of the University of Tasmania in Australia, Raquel Recuero of the Universidade Federal de Pelotas in Brazil, Felipe Bonow Soares of the University of the Arts London in the United Kingdom, and Robert Topinka of Birkbeck, University of London. Together, the group brings expertise spanning digital media, communication, climate communication, political communication, rhetoric, and disinformation studies, giving the journal a foundation that is international in composition and methodologically diverse.

The editors have been candid about the moment in which the journal is launching. In a statement accompanying the announcement, they said they were excited to launch the journal at a time when disinformation is more rife than ever and when the term itself is hotly contested. They emphasized that the journal will serve as a forum both for studying how disinformation spreads and for critically interrogating what gets labelled as disinformation, and why. That second commitment is significant. In recent years, the word disinformation has become politically charged, deployed by governments, platforms, and commentators in ways that scholars argue require careful scrutiny. A journal willing to examine the category itself, and not only the content it describes, positions itself at the center of an ongoing debate about how societies define and respond to deceptive communication.

The question of definition is far from academic. Researchers have long distinguished between misinformation, which is false but shared without intent to deceive, and disinformation, which is deliberately fabricated or manipulated to mislead. Yet in practice, intent is difficult to establish, and the boundaries between propaganda, strategic communication, satire, and honest error are contested. Different cultures and political systems draw these lines differently, which is one reason the journal’s emphasis on international perspectives matters. Understanding how disinformation operates in electoral politics in Brazil, in conflict reporting in Eastern Europe, or in public health debates in Southeast Asia requires attention to local media ecosystems, languages, political histories, and trust in institutions, rather than assumptions derived solely from research on English-language platforms.

That commitment to global perspectives is explicit in the journal’s call for contributions. The announcement states that Disinformation encourages international perspectives and contributions by researchers from the Global South, a community that has often been underrepresented in mainstream communication journals, where datasets and authorship remain heavily concentrated in North America and Europe. Much of what is known about the spread of false information online comes from studies of platforms such as Facebook, X, and YouTube in wealthy democracies, leaving substantial gaps in knowledge about how deceptive content circulates through messaging apps, local social networks, and state-linked media in other regions. Scholars such as Recuero, whose work examines misinformation on Brazilian social media, bring direct expertise in these under-studied contexts, and the journal’s editorial composition suggests that broadening the geographic base of the field is a central priority.

The publishing model is equally noteworthy. Disinformation will be published through Sage Community Open Access, an initiative that enables selected journals to publish with no fees for authors and no barriers for readers. Open access publishing has expanded rapidly across the sciences and social sciences, but the dominant article processing charge model can exclude researchers at institutions without significant funding, particularly those in lower-income countries. A community-funded model that removes both author fees and paywalls addresses both sides of that inequity, allowing researchers anywhere to submit work and readers anywhere to access it. For a journal explicitly concerned with global understanding of a global problem, the alignment between mission and business model appears deliberate, and it removes a practical obstacle for the very contributors the editors say they most want to attract.

The launch also reflects broader institutional recognition that disinformation has matured into a distinct field of study. Over the past decade, research on false news, computational propaganda, and information operations has grown from scattered case studies into a substantial scholarly literature, with dedicated research centers, funding programs, and policy engagement across multiple continents. Yet the field has often been fragmented, with relevant work dispersed across communication studies, computer science, psychology, political science, law, and area studies. A journal that positions itself explicitly as interdisciplinary, and that treats both the mechanics of dissemination and the politics of labeling as legitimate objects of study, could play a consolidating role, giving the field a shared venue in which methodological debates, comparative findings, and theoretical frameworks can be developed and contested.

Rachel Hunter, Vice President for Journals Editorial at Sage, framed the launch as a response to an urgent global need. Disinformation, she said, is a pressing challenge for societies around the world, and understanding it requires perspectives from across disciplines and cultures. She described the timing of the journal as driven by the growing importance of rigorous research and debate in the area, and argued that international and interdisciplinary collaboration will help deepen understanding of disinformation, its impact, and how societies respond to it. With elections, armed conflicts, public health emergencies, and climate-related crises all increasingly entangled with contested information environments, the demand for such collaboration is unlikely to diminish. Whether the new journal can help build the shared, globally representative knowledge base its editors envision will become clearer as submissions arrive and its first issues appear in 2027, but its founding commitments to openness, interdisciplinarity, and critical scrutiny of the field’s own categories mark an ambitious starting point.

Subject of Research: Launch of a new peer-reviewed open access journal dedicated to interdisciplinary disinformation research

Article Title: Sage launches Disinformation: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Article References: Sage launches Disinformation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: disinformation, Sage, open access, academic journal, misinformation, interdisciplinary research, Global South, media studies, political communication, climate communication, editorial collective, peer review