The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national professional association devoted to the scientific study of education. Founded in 1916 and headquartered in Washington, DC, AERA has more than 25,000 members - faculty, researchers, graduate students, and professionals working in universities, research institutes, federal and state agencies, school systems, testing organizations, and non-profits. Nearly 5% of members live outside the United States, representing more than 85 countries.

AERA publishes seven peer-reviewed journals, all produced under a publishing partnership with Sage. AERA owns the journals and appoints their editors; Sage handles production, hosting, and distribution on the Sage Journals platform. That split matters for authors: editorial standards and review policy come from AERA, while APCs, licences, and any Read & Publish coverage run through Sage's open-access infrastructure.

The seven titles are deliberately non-overlapping - each occupies a distinct slot between empirical research, synthesis, policy, methods, and commentary. Pick by the form of your contribution first, then by field.

AERA's portfolio is small and selective rather than broad. Six of the seven titles are subscription journals with an open-access option; AERA Open is fully open access. Volume across the portfolio is a few hundred articles a year, and acceptance rates at AERJ and RER are among the lowest in education research.

• American Educational Research Journal - flagship empirical research, published since 1964.
• Review of Educational Research - literature reviews and meta-analyses, published since 1931; AERA's highest journal impact factor.
• Educational Researcher - general-interest features and commentary for the whole field.
• Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis - education policy research and evaluation.
• Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics - quantitative methods, co-sponsored with the American Statistical Association.
• Review of Research in Education - annual thematic volume of analytic reviews.
• AERA Open - fully open-access, peer-reviewed, all areas of education research.

AERA also publishes books, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (jointly with APA and NCME), and reference works, but journal articles are the main route for research submissions.

There are three routes to open access with an AERA journal.

AERA Open's rates apply to manuscripts submitted from 1 January 2026 and are worth reading carefully, because membership status changes the fee by an order of magnitude - $150 for an AERA graduate-student member against$1,500 at the standard rate. The APC is waived entirely when every author is resident in a Research4Life Group A or B country, or in one of the listed World Bank lower-middle-income countries. AERA Open publishes under CC BY-NC by default, with CC BY available on institutional or funder request. Because Sage revises pricing annually, confirm the fee on the journal's submission-guidelines page before you submit.

Because Sage administers the open-access workflow, AERA titles can also fall inside Sage's transformative and Read & Publish agreements. Check the ESAC registry or ask your librarian whether your institution's Sage agreement covers AERA journals - if it does, an APC you expected to pay may already be funded.

All AERA journals use double-anonymized review: authors do not see reviewer identities, and reviewers do not see author identities. That places a real obligation on you at submission time - the manuscript must be scrubbed of names, affiliations, funders, acknowledgements, institution-identifying data descriptions, and self-citations phrased in a way that gives you away.

Review is handled by AERA-appointed editors and editorial boards drawn from the association's membership. Turnaround varies by title; AERA Open is designed for faster review and dissemination than the subscription journals, while AERJ and RER decisions typically take longer given the depth of review those formats require.

1. Choose the journal using the table above - editors do desk-reject for scope mismatch, and the AERA titles are unusually easy to mismatch because their boundaries are formal rather than topical.
2. Read the title-specific submission guidelines on Sage Journals. Each journal sets its own abstract length, word limits, and structural requirements.
3. Format in APA 7th edition. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, is the style guide for all AERA journals. AERJ, for example, asks for a 100-120 word abstract.
4. Anonymize the manuscript thoroughly for double-anonymized review, and keep a separate title page with author details.
5. Submit through ScholarOne Manuscript Central, the Sage Track system - each journal has its own portal (AERA Open, for instance, submits at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aeraopen).
6. Add ORCID iDs and any required declarations, then track the decision through your ScholarOne author dashboard.

AERA maintains its own Code of Ethics and Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Publications, both of which apply to submitted manuscripts and are referenced in editorial decisions - reporting standards for AERA journals are more explicit than at many general publishers, particularly around sampling, measurement, and analytic transparency. AERA is a COPE member, and Sage applies COPE guidance for corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions across the platform. Human-subjects research is expected to carry appropriate IRB or equivalent ethics approval, and authors should disclose funding and conflicts of interest at submission.