 The journal was first conceived in 2005 and since its relaunch in 2010 it has been published annually. It is run solely by SOAS postgraduate students. The editor is voted by the SOAS student community and all positions are voluntary. The objective of the journal is to showcase and promote the work of postgraduate students and also to prepare them for their more academic careers. This year the journal is run by myself. My name is Romina Stratti and my colleague Monika Hirmer who is currently in field work. We are both PhD students in the department of religions and philosophies. Well when Monika and I took over the journal last November we noticed that it was fairly inquate. We therefore committed to consolidate work that had been done previously by other editors and incorporated a standardized layout and logo and also a rigorous double-blind period process. As part of this effort we also communicated with library staff to try and upload the articles into SOAS research online which enables articles to come up in library searches thus increasing their visibility. As part of this process we had to think for the first time about copyright and publication rules. There was no doubt between the two of us that the journal had to be open access while safeguarding the publication rights of the authors. Ultimately our decision reflected our ethical concerns as researchers in non-western societies which have been traditionally misrepresented or generalized through ethnocentric frameworks. Going open access reflected our need to do something to make knowledge more accessible and also open to use and critique by the people in the very societies that have been dismissed or misrepresented previously. Monika comes from an anthropological background. I come from a gender and development position. The twins of anthropology and development have been quite patronizing and colonial for the most part of their existence. So both of us were aware of the urgency to change the way knowledge is being made and shared. We strongly believe that knowledge is helpful not when it is made within hierarchical relationships but within an equality of sharing, speaking and criticizing each other openly. In effect going open access brings to the realm of publishing what Monika and I have tried to do in the field as researchers that is showing openness, disentering our own categories and trying to use alternative epistemological lenses and engage actively within other lifestyles. We firmly believe that the journal is read by the SOAS students and staff community and also their extended networks which might trickle down up to the local societies in which they work, the research or liaison with. As you know the SOAS community is a very diverse multicultural community. If we were not open access then members would have to pay membership fee or subscription fee or it would be available to people by default of being students in some university. However we understand that not everyone can pursue an education, not everyone can afford a subscription fee especially when you consider less advanced societies economically. So we were trying to make it as accessible as possible. We firmly believe that the more open the journal is the more likely it is that it will be found by a diverse segment of society, transcending economic class position and other differentials that currently impede universal access to knowledge. Well the whole debate about open access made us more aware about the implication of publication online. So Monika and I had quite a fourth debate about uploading journal content into academia EDU. Academia EDU as you know is a for-profit private initiative but it does help with dissemination of academic knowledge. We felt that in a way we would be contradicting our own creative commons license because it is not for profit for commercial purposes but we would be in a way commoditizing the content of the journal by uploading it on academia EDU. So we oscillated quite a bit between this fact and our belief that uploading on academia EDU could make the content of the journal more accessible to people globally and especially non-western societies and this was premised on my observation that my own papers for instance had been read by people in 70 countries all time analytics and a lot of papers that were written on specific African countries had been accessed by people from those very countries which means that the knowledge was reaching them. So we eventually decided to upload the editorial for which we had authorial rights but only provided a link to the full journal to direct people from academia to the official website. Obviously we don't have all the answers, there is a lot of concerns that we need to consider and we try to contemplate these issues as editors and we do hope that our own dilemmas and ethical concerns will feed into the initiatives that are taking place at SOAS and especially this open access week.