The International Communication Association (ICA) is the discipline's leading international scholarly society for communication research. Founded in 1950 as the National Society for the Study of Communication and renamed the International Communication Association in 1969, it is headquartered in Washington, DC, has roughly 4,500-5,000 members across 80-plus countries, and has held official NGO status with the United Nations since 2003. ICA organises 30-plus divisions and interest groups and runs a large annual conference.

ICA does not operate its own publishing house. Its journals are published under contract by Oxford University Press, with one long-standing exception: Political Communication, published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis) jointly for ICA's Political Communication Division and the APSA Political Communication Section. That split matters in practice, because OA options, charges and submission systems follow the publisher, not the society.

ICA's portfolio is small and deliberately so: around seven peer-reviewed journals rather than a large catalogue. Six sit with Oxford University Press - Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Annals of the International Communication Association (which moved to OUP for 2025) - plus Global Perspectives in Communication, the society's first gold open-access journal, launched in 2025 under inaugural editor Nick Bowman. Political Communication is the Routledge-published joint title with APSA.

All of them are general or sub-field journals in communication and media studies. There is no book programme, no proceedings series, and no mega-journal.

Two practical points. First, ICA's OUP titles fall inside Oxford University Press's read-and-publish agreements, so if your institution has an OUP deal your OA charge may already be covered - check the ESAC registry or your library before you pay anything. Second, published APC figures for the hybrid titles change annually; treat the commonly quoted "$3,000 and up" as a rough order of magnitude and read the journal's own open-access charges page at submission time. Licences on the OA route are Creative Commons, with CC BY the default for funder-compliant publication.

Double-anonymized review is the norm across the ICA journals. That is an editorial requirement, not a preference: manuscripts must be stripped of author-identifying material and self-citations written in the third person, or they will be returned before review. Editors at the flagship titles are explicit that desk rejection is common, so the fit question in the table above is worth taking seriously.

1. Pick the journal. Scope statements differ sharply between the empirical, theoretical and critical titles; read two or three recent issues before choosing.
2. Check the publisher. OUP titles submit through ScholarOne Manuscripts; Political Communication goes through Taylor & Francis's own system.
3. Anonymize the manuscript. Remove names, affiliations, acknowledgements and identifying self-citations.
4. Format to APA 7th edition. ICA journals use the American Psychological Association style, 7th edition, for references and in-text citation.
5. Prepare the files. Use the ICA formatting template on SciSpace, then upload the manuscript, tables, figures and a cover letter.
6. Declare funding and OA intent. If you want the OA route, flag your funder and any institutional OUP agreement early.

Publication ethics for the ICA journals are administered through the publishers. Oxford University Press is a COPE member and applies COPE guidance to corrections, expressions of concern and retractions across its journals, including the ICA portfolio; ICA itself maintains professional conduct expectations for its members and conference participants. Self-archiving is permitted under OUP's standard green route with per-title embargoes on the subscription journals, and immediately for the fully OA titles.

ICA titles are indexed in Scopus and in Clarivate's Social Sciences Citation Index, and several sit in the top tier of the Communication category. The society is the definitive international body in the field, and its journals carry no elevated-scrutiny concerns - the practical questions for authors are fit, selectivity and cost, not legitimacy.