EXARC members will soon be receiving their 2024 edition of the EXARC Journal Digest, which was already announced in a previous news item with more information here. The physical Digest includes articles taken from the EXARC Journal, which is online and available for everyone. Here at EXARC, we strongly believe that research publication should be affordable for authors, and openly accessible for readers. For that reasons, we have no costs for publication, and all of our issues are freely available open-access on our journal website. This means that we have significantly lower funds that other comparable journals, and we are incredibly grateful to our wonderful team of reviews and editors who volunteer their time in order to make the EXARC Journal the valuable and free resource it is today.

This decreased level of funding has other consequences too. From 2025, EXARC commits to going completely digital. We began this transition in the last years by moving our administration online. Now, we have decided to stop with the last physical part of EXARC, which is the annual EXARC Journal Digest. This will therefore be the last edition of the physical digest that we will send out to members. This decision was not a quick nor an easy one to make, but it was finally confirmed this year by the EXARC Journal management team, and the EXARC board. Part of this decision was influenced by the limited funds available for the journal - unfortunately, posting the digest out every year is no longer affordable in its current state. Another major influence was the increased sustainability that would be created through being fully digital, not just in terms of environmental impact, but also of data accessibility. 

All of the articles included in the physical EXARC Journal Digest are abridged versions taken from existing issues of the online EXARC Journal, so we wish to make it clear that stopping the Digest does not mean that any of the research presented in it no longer becomes accessible. However, we do understand that sometime it is nice to have a physical copy of something, and so we are thinking of some more sustainable replacement solutions which will still allow our members to have a tangible part of EXARC. Watch our communication channels for more information on that in the coming year!