About Creative Education

Creative Education

Quick facts

Overview: an open-access education journal from SCIRP

Creative Education is an open-access journal in the field of education, published by Scientific Research Publishing, known as SCIRP. Its print ISSN is 2151-4755 and its online ISSN is 2151-4771, the two numbers carried in the Journals World record for this post and shown on SCIRP's own journal pages. Articles carry digital object identifiers under the prefix 10.4236/ce, and the journal's archive reaches back to Vol. 1 in 2010 — an early article, Robina Shaheen's Creativity and Education, appeared in Vol. 1 No. 3 in 2010 at pages 166–169 — so this is a title with a publication history of well over a decade and an archive running to thousands of articles.

Despite its name, Creative Education is not confined to the single topic of creativity in the classroom, and it is not a journal only about art education. The name signals an origin and an emphasis — the place of creativity, innovation and original thinking in education — but the published archive is much broader. SCIRP's special-issue programme for the journal ranges across higher education, education and skills development, excellence, innovation and creativity in education, medical education and health education, and education and information technologies. The archive itself contains work on mathematics education, pedagogy, medical education, curriculum and higher education as its recurring centres of gravity. A prospective author should therefore read the title as a broad education journal with a creativity-and-innovation accent, and should test fit against the archive rather than against the title alone.

The journal is published by a commercial open-access publisher and funded, on SCIRP's own account of its model, by article-processing charges rather than by reader subscriptions: SCIRP states for this journal that no library or reader will have to buy a subscription or pay a pay-per-view fee to read the electronic version, and that the costs of the publication process are covered by the charge paid when a manuscript is accepted. That model has practical consequences — free reading for anyone with an internet connection, and a fee decision for the author — that are worked through in the sections below. Authors should approach those consequences with clear eyes, in both directions: open access genuinely widens readership, and a charge of the size SCIRP lists genuinely needs institutional or funder support for many researchers.

Publisher and model: how SCIRP presents itself

Scientific Research Publishing presents Creative Education as one journal within a large portfolio of open-access titles, with a central paper submission system, journal-level editorial offices, and standardised author pages covering aims, editorial board, article-processing charges and author guidance. For Creative Education, SCIRP lists a regular article-processing charge of US $999 on its charges page for the journal. That figure is stated here as the publisher's listed price at the time of research; charges change, discounts and waivers are matters for the publisher, and any author who needs an exact figure for a budget or a funder application should take a dated copy of SCIRP's own charges page and confirm the position with the editorial office before submitting.

Submission is electronic, through SCIRP's paper submission system, and SCIRP's author guidance asks prospective authors to read the journal's For Authors material carefully before submitting a complete manuscript. Special issues are a prominent part of the journal's life: calls are published with a named research field to select in the submission system, a submission deadline and a planned publication date, and topics in recent calls have included education and information technologies — e-learning, distance and online learning, learning analytics, gamification, virtual and augmented reality in education, artificial intelligence in education, digital literacy, educational robotics and related themes — as well as higher education and education and skills development.

An author should also understand what kind of publisher relationship this is. A large commercial open-access publisher processes many manuscripts across many titles; the author experience is system-driven, from submission portal to charge invoice at acceptance. That can be efficient, and the archive shows a journal that has sustained a high volume of publication over many years. It also means the author should do the diligence that a system cannot do for them: verify indexing claims in the databases themselves, read recent papers in the journal critically, confirm the charge and any waiver in writing, and check that the journal's current editorial board and activity on SCIRP's own site match what any third-party website says about it.

Scope in depth: what Creative Education publishes

The journal's centre of gravity, visible across its archive and its special-issue programme, is education research in a broad sense: pedagogy and teaching practice, curriculum and course design, learning and student development, assessment and evaluation, teacher education and teacher professional development, educational policy and systems, and the use of technology in teaching and learning. Creativity and innovation run through that breadth as a recurring theme — creative pedagogy, fostering creativity through education, innovation in lifelong learning, and student-centred and personalised learning all appear in the journal's own topic language — but they are a theme, not a fence.

• Areas visible in the journal's archive and special-issue calls include:
• Pedagogy, teaching methods and classroom practice
• Curriculum design and course study
• Higher education: study activities, performance and student development
• Medical education and health education
• Educational technology, e-learning and distance education
• Learning analytics and educational data mining
• Creativity, innovation and creative pedagogy
• Assessment, evaluation and academic achievement
• Teacher education and professional development
• Educational policy, systems and international education
• Problem-solving, collaborative and student-centred learning
• Cross-cultural and global education, and lifelong learning

The archive's shape is instructive. A single monthly-era issue — Vol. 13 No. 6, June 2022, in the archive consulted — contains papers on nursing education under decentralised and traditional training models, blended teaching built on a mobile learning platform, the use of analysis of variance in comparing learning patterns for university students, academic lectures in colleges in ethnic-minority areas, and students' metacognitive consciousness in solving geometry problems, alongside a special-issue grouping on medical education and health education. That is the journal in miniature: empirical, classroom- and institution-focused, international in authorship, and comfortable with quantitative, qualitative and descriptive designs alike.

Medical and health education deserve a special note, because authors sometimes assume an education journal will not take them. Creative Education has carried a sustained stream of medical-education work — teaching clinical subjects, courseware design for pre-service teachers sits beside clinical case-based biochemistry teaching in a doctoral programme in the wider archive — and its special-issue programme has named medical education and health education explicitly. A well-designed study of teaching, assessment or curriculum in a health-professions programme can therefore be in scope, provided the paper is about the education and not only about the clinical content.

Article types and the special-issue route

The journal publishes original research articles and review-type contributions across its scope, and its archive includes empirical studies, comparative and survey work, intervention reports, conceptual and framework papers, and case studies of teaching practice. Among its most-cited papers, as summarised in secondary research profiles of the journal, are a conceptual piece on creativity and education, a framework paper on fostering creativity through education and creative pedagogy, and an empirical study of teacher stress and teacher self-efficacy as predictors of engagement, emotional exhaustion and motivation to leave the profession — a trio that usefully illustrates the range the journal rewards: a clear idea, a usable framework, or a well-executed study of a real educational problem.

Special issues are the second route in, and for many authors the most practical one. A special issue gives a paper a defined theme, guest-editor attention and a readership assembled around that theme. The calls published by SCIRP specify the field name to select in the submission system, the deadline and the intended publication date, and they list potential topics in detail. Authors should follow those instructions exactly — selecting the named research field is an administrative step that is easy to get wrong and that determines where the manuscript is routed — and should be realistic about deadlines: a special-issue timetable is a commitment by the publisher, and a manuscript that misses the stated deadline may be handled as a regular submission instead.

Whether submitting to a special issue or to the regular stream, authors should prepare the manuscript to SCIRP's own author guidance, submit a complete electronic copy through the paper submission system as SCIRP instructs, and keep their own dated records of the submission, any charge quoted, and any indexing or timetable statement made to them. In a high-volume open-access environment, the author's own file is the reliable record of what was agreed.

Peer review, quality and the questions an author should ask

SCIRP presents its journals as peer-reviewed, and Creative Education's own pages describe a submission and editorial process run through its paper submission system and editorial office. This profile does not add detail that the publisher has not stated in the material consulted — for example, it does not claim a particular number of referees or a particular review model for this journal — because an author is entitled to have those answers from the publisher directly, in current form, before submitting. Asking is normal professional practice: how many reviewers will read the paper, whether review is blinded, what the current decision and publication timetable looks like in practice, and who the serving editor-in-chief and editorial board are on the journal's own page today.

Quality assessment of any high-volume open-access journal should be done by reading, not by slogan — in either direction. Read three recent papers in your own sub-field in Creative Education, closely. Are the designs sound, the data actually reported, the conclusions proportioned to the evidence, the references real and relevant? Read the editorial board page. Check the archive for continuity: a journal publishing regularly, with complete issues and working DOIs, is a different proposition from a stalled title. That reading test, applied honestly, tells an author more than any ranking list, and it is the test this profile recommends for this journal as for every other.

Two cautions follow from the publisher's scale. First, verify indexing for yourself: secondary sources make varying claims about this journal's presence in large databases, and claims change as database coverage changes. If your institution, funder or promotion system requires Scopus, Web of Science or another named index, confirm the journal's current presence in that index itself, on the day you submit, and keep the evidence. Second, treat unsolicited invitations with care: invitations to submit, to join boards or to guest-edit circulate widely in open-access publishing, and a genuine opportunity will always survive the simple check of finding the same call on the journal's own website.

Charges, licensing and what open access means here

Creative Education is open access: readers pay nothing, and SCIRP states that no subscription or pay-per-view fee will ever be charged for the electronic version. The author side carries the cost. SCIRP's charges page for this journal lists a regular article-processing charge of US $999, payable, on SCIRP's general account of its model, when a manuscript has been accepted for publication. Authors should confirm the current charge, what it covers, any waiver or discount policy, and the point at which liability arises, directly with the publisher, and should never pay an invoice that does not come through the publisher's own system and match the journal and manuscript concerned.

That charge needs context rather than either celebration or dismissal. For a funded project with an open-access budget, a charge at this level may be straightforward and may satisfy a funder's open-access requirement, subject to the licensing terms that apply to the article. For an unfunded teacher-researcher, a doctoral student or a scholar in a low-income setting, the same charge may be decisive against submitting unless a waiver is available. Neither reaction is a judgement on the journal; both are ordinary budgeting. The mistake to avoid is discovering the charge after acceptance, when withdrawal feels difficult. Establish the money position before you submit.

Licensing should be checked on the article and journal pages at the time of publication and recorded in the author's file: what licence the article is published under determines how it may be reused, translated, deposited and text-mined, and it is the licence stated by the publisher for your article, not a general statement about open access, that governs. Authors with a funder licence requirement should confirm compatibility with SCIRP before submission, in writing.

Who should submit — and who should pause

Creative Education is a plausible home for education researchers with a sound empirical, comparative, intervention or framework paper who want open-access readership, an international authorship community, and a journal whose archive visibly includes work like theirs: classroom studies, curriculum and course-design reports, higher-education research, teacher-education work, educational-technology studies and medical-education research. The special-issue programme can be a particularly good fit when a call matches a paper's theme closely, because the paper then enters a conversation that has already been convened.

Pause, and do the checks first, if any of the following apply. Your institution requires a named index or a particular ranking band: verify the journal's current position yourself before submitting. Your budget cannot carry the listed charge and no waiver has been confirmed: settle that first. Your paper is outside education — a clinical study with no educational question, a pure technology paper with no learning application, or a general psychology paper with no educational setting: the archive will not support fit, however the title sounds. Or your work depends for its value on a small, specialist readership that expects a particular society journal: open-access breadth is not a substitute for the right community.

Handled with those checks, a submission to Creative Education is a rational choice that many authors in its archive have made over more than a decade of publication. Handled without them — on the strength of an invitation email, an aggregator's claim, or a promise made by a third party — it is a gamble. The journal's own website, charges page, archive and editorial office can answer every question raised in this profile, and an author who asks them first is in the strongest position whichever journal they finally choose.

Frequently asked questions

What is Creative Education?

An open-access education journal published by Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), print ISSN 2151-4755 and online ISSN 2151-4771, with an archive from Vol. 1 in 2010 and article DOIs under the prefix 10.4236/ce.

Is Creative Education only about creativity?

No. Creativity and innovation are a recurring emphasis — creative pedagogy and fostering creativity through education are among its recognised themes — but the archive covers pedagogy, curriculum, higher education, educational technology, assessment, teacher education and medical education broadly.

How much does it cost to publish in Creative Education?

SCIRP's charges page for the journal lists a regular article-processing charge of US $999 at the time of research. Charges change; confirm the current figure, waiver policy and payment point with the publisher before submitting, and never rely on a third-party price list.

How do I submit?

Through SCIRP's paper submission system, following the journal's For Authors guidance on SCIRP's site. For a special issue, select the research field named in that call and meet its stated deadline, as SCIRP's calls instruct.

Is Creative Education indexed in Scopus or Web of Science?

Do not rely on a directory summary for this. Secondary sources make varying claims and database coverage changes. If you need a named index, check that index directly for the journal's current coverage on the day you submit, and keep the evidence for your institution.

Does Creative Education publish medical education papers?

Yes — medical education and health education appear in its archive and have been named in its special-issue programme. The paper must still be an education paper, about teaching, learning, assessment or curriculum, rather than a clinical report alone.

What should I check before submitting to Creative Education?

Read recent papers in your area in the journal, confirm the current charge and waiver position, verify any indexing you require in the database itself, check the serving editorial board on SCIRP's own site, and keep dated records of your submission and of any terms quoted to you.

Sources and verification

This profile is based only on sources consulted for this batch, listed in the accompanying sources file. Facts that could not be verified from an official or publisher source are described in the text as not published, not publicly disclosed, or could not be verified, rather than being guessed. Journal policies, charges, editors and indexing change over time, so readers should confirm the current position on the journal's own website before submitting a manuscript, paying any charge, or relying on an indexing claim for an institutional requirement.