About the Journal
Journal of Exchanges, Clearing & Settlement (JECS) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access online journal dedicated to bridging the gap between academic research and market practice. It publishes original practitioner-relevant research and practitioner-adapted versions of academic scholarship on the exchange and post-trade industry. Coverage spans the full lifecycle from trading through clearing, settlement, and custody.
JECS seeks high-quality, original research articles that engage with the relevant academic literature while addressing issues of contemporary importance to financial market infrastructures. The journal adopts an international perspective and prioritises contributions with relevance beyond a single jurisdiction. It does not consider opinion pieces or industry white papers.
The scope of JECS encompasses the full spectrum of exchange and post-trade infrastructures, including exchanges and trading venues; central counterparties (CCPs) and clearing houses; central securities depositories (CSDs) and securities settlement systems; as well as related developments in technology and market architecture.
Focus areas
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
- Market design, market microstructure, and trading technologies
- Clearing, CCP risk management and default processes
- Settlement, custody, and post-trade innovation
- Governance, ownership, and industrial organisation aspects
- Regulation of market infrastructures and international standards
- Cross-border links, regional integration, and interoperability of infrastructures
- Impact of digitalization, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), and tokenization
- The development of market infrastructures in emerging and developing markets
- Systemic risk, contagion modelling, and network analysis
Why publish with JECS?
Peer-reviewed - Rigorous double-blind peer review with an international set of reviewers from industry, regulatory bodies, and academia providing relevant feedback and ensuring that accepted articles meet the highest standards of rigour and relevance.
Free to publish. JECS does not charge fees for submission, review or publication.
Open Access publication - Articles are freely available and are accessible immediately upon publication, without paywalls, ensuring wide dissemination of the research.
Online-only, continuous publication - This model permits faster publication as articles no longer need to wait for an issue to be completed. Articles are published solely online in their final, complete form, and are downloadable in PDF format and can be fully cited as soon as they have completed peer review and typesetting.
Exposure across industry and academia - through an international reviewer network comprising academics, policy makers and practitioners, and promoted through the WFE's global network of over 250 market infrastructures comprising exchanges, clearing houses, and CSDs.
DOI assignment - Articles are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), ensuring articles are permanently citable and discoverable across academic databases and search engines.
Retained copyright - Copyright of any article published in the Journal is retained by the author(s). The journal is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence. Under this licence, the material may be freely shared and adapted for any purpose, provided appropriate credit is given and the original publication in JECS is acknowledged and referenced.
Indexing - Articles are indexed in Google Scholar and the journal is actively pursuing wider indexing and listing, including in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EconLit, and Scopus.
Permanent archive - Articles are preserved in Portico, a leading digital scholarly preservation archive, ensuring long-term access to published content.
Access to a practitioner community — JECS benefits from close synergies with WFEClear, the WFE's flagship clearing and derivatives conference, providing authors with a platform to present and discuss their research with a senior international audience.
Solicited practitioner-focused articles
In addition to unsolicited research submissions, JECS publishes solicited articles designed for practitioner accessibility. These shorter pieces, invited from authors with strong academic publication records, undergo editorial review to ensure quality and relevance while maintaining a format that serves the needs of industry professionals and policymakers.
This section is a curated knowledge-translation layer between frontier academic research and market infrastructure practitioners. It is a way to increase industry readership, raise citation and visibility of academic work and position the journal as a field-defining hub.
