Founded in 2021, the Journal of Online Trust and Safety (JOTS) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to interdisciplinary research on online trust and safety. JOTS publishes two issues per year plus occasional special issues, with articles released on a rolling basis as they are accepted. The journal brings together rigorous scholarship from across disciplines and aims to spur new research that addresses the most pressing challenges facing online platforms and their users.
Aims and Scope
JOTS publishes research on the harms that arise on online platforms and the policies, products, and interventions used to address them. Priority areas include, but are not limited to:
- Child exploitation and non-consensual intimate imagery
- Suicide and self-harm
- Incitement and terrorism
- Hate speech and harassment
- Spam and fraud
- Misinformation and disinformation
We welcome research on these and related issues across a wide range of platforms — including social media, messaging and end-to-end encrypted services, gaming and virtual environments, generative-AI products, blockchain-based platforms, and the open web.
What We Publish
JOTS publishes three types of work:
- Peer-reviewed research articles — original empirical, theoretical, or methodological contributions.
- Peer-reviewed research notes — shorter manuscripts presenting preliminary findings, novel datasets, replications, or focused methodological contributions.
- Commentaries — letters, editorials, policy analyses, and practitioner reflections that fall outside the peer-reviewed sections.
While we expect many submissions to come from academic researchers, we actively encourage contributions from practitioners — particularly researchers at civil society organizations, governments, and online platforms. Trust and safety teams inside platforms conduct extensive multi-method research into online harms, much of which is rarely made public; JOTS aims to be a venue where this work can be shared in ways that benefit the broader field, including smaller platforms.
See the Submissions page for current deadlines, calls for papers, and detailed author instructions, or the For Authors page for an overview of submission types and the peer-review process.
Open Access and Fees
JOTS is fully open access. All articles are freely available to readers immediately upon publication under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and the journal charges no submission, processing, or publication fees to authors. For more information, visit Open Access and Fee page.
eISSN: 2770-3142
Peer Review
Research articles and research notes undergo double-anonymous peer review. The editorial team makes final decisions based on reviewer recommendations, with a typical first decision in approximately 36 days and an average submission-to-publication time of about five months. Commentaries are reviewed by the editorial board.
Trust and Safety Research Conference
In conjunction with the Journal, we host the annual Trust and Safety Research Conference (TSRC) at Stanford University each fall, bringing together hundreds of academic researchers, industry practitioners, civil society representatives, and government officials to share and discuss trust and safety research. Selected work from the conference is published in JOTS as part of an annual Conference Proceedings issue.
Publisher and Support
JOTS is published by the Tech Impact and Policy Center (TIP Center) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. We are grateful to the Omidyar Network for its generous support.