Date: Monday, June 23, 2025
Greetings from Oxford, Mississippi! I’m Sarah Mason, Director of the Center for Research Evaluation at the University of Mississippi and Co-Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Evaluation (NDE), a journal sponsored by the American Evaluation Association.
In our first two years as Co-Editors-in-Chief, my colleague Dr. Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead and I have seen the many structural barriers that make publishing in NDE difficult—especially for those outside of traditional academic roles. While evaluation is a practice-driven field, most of our contributing authors and guest editors are academics who benefit from institutional support like publishing incentives and expectations for writing.
For new voices—first-time authors, evaluation practitioners, and people newer to the field—those supports often don’t exist. Instead, they face a pile of hurdles: lack of time, limited access to publishing know-how, and fewer professional connections. It’s enough to make publishing feel out of reach.
And yet—these are exactly the voices we need to hear to push our field forward.
That’s why, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NDE and AEA have launched a two-year pilot initiative: Inviting New Voices into Evaluation Publishing (INVitE-Pub).
INVitE-Pub is designed to open new doors for first-time authors, aspiring guest editors, and individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in evaluation publishing. We are doing this by addressing three core ingredients for getting published:
Watch for upcoming opportunities to get involved with INVitE-Pub through the AEA newsletter, the NDE LinkedIn page, and AEA email lists. Here’s what’s coming:
And stay tuned—we’ll soon announce our INVitE-Pub Project Manager, who will help us guide this exciting work forward!
The American Evaluation Association is hosting New Directions for Evaluation (NDE). The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from the NDE team. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.