Revista Intercambio

What Revista Intercambio does

Revista Intercambio (legal name: Intercambio, Revista de Estudiantes de Economía) is a student-run, open-access academic journal published by students of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. Founded in 2018 and administered within the Portal de Revistas Estudiantiles UN of the Faculty of Human and Economic Sciences, the journal accepts academic submissions in economics from students of any university and across all schools of thought. Accepted content types include research articles, reflection articles, essays, short articles, letters to the editor, translations, academic practice results, and bibliographic reviews. The journal operates as a non-commercial publication with no fees charged to authors or readers.

The journal is hosted on the open-source Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, which provides manuscript submission, peer review, editorial management, and open-access publishing workflows. It sits within a multi-journal portal that also hosts three companion student journals: Ainkaa (Political Science), Kabái (Human and Economic Sciences), and Quirón (History, founded 2013). The editorial process is community-driven, composed of student editorial committees, and content is disseminated through the institutional OJS portal, email notifications, Spotify, and YouTube. The latest published issue is Núm. 8 (2024), featuring six articles on topics including capital formation, external debt, CBDC in Colombia, stock prediction using machine learning, and monetary policy in Latin America.

The journal operates without any commercial revenue model: no submission fees, no publication fees, no paywalls, and no subscriptions. It is fully funded and supported institutionally by Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a public research university. The operating model is therefore freemium in a nominal sense — free to all participants — but with no revenue-generating mechanics. Geographic scope is global for readers via open access, with primary editorial activity concentrated in Medellín, Colombia. Headcount is reported at approximately 10, and the journal functions as an academic and editorial training vehicle as much as a publication outlet.

Name

Revista Intercambio

Legal name

Intercambio, Revista de Estudiantes de Economía

Website

https://revistafche.medellin.unal.edu.co

Company type

Private

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Revista Intercambio is a student-run, open-access academic journal in economics published by Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín, serving undergraduate and graduate student authors and global readers at no cost.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Academic Journal Publishing

NAICS

Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities (541720)

SIC

Periodicals: Publishing Or Publishing & Printing (2721)

akta.pro primary industry

Business, Economics & Management Scholarly Publishing (EDAGAFAF)

akta.pro secondary industry

Interdisciplinary & Multidisciplinary Scholarly Publishing (EDAGAFAI)

Keywords

• Academic journal publishing
• Open access publishing
• Economics research journal
• Student academic publications
• Scholarly open access

Headquarters

HQ city

Medellín

HQ country

Colombia

HQ region

Latin America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2C

Offering type

Digital Commerce or Content

Cost components

Personnel, Operations, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. No Commercial Revenue: Revista Intercambio is a non-profit student publication of Universidad Nacional de Colombia. No commercial revenue model is described - the journal operates as an open-access academic publication platform with no publication fees charged to authors.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels4 records

Core offering

Revista Intercambio is an open-access, student-run academic journal in economics published through the Open Journal Systems platform of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. It accepts research articles, reflection pieces, essays, short articles, letters to the editor, translations, academic practice results, and bibliographic reviews from students of any university and any school of economic thought. The journal operates as part of a four-journal portal (alongside Ainkaa, Kabái, and Quirón) that disseminates scholarly content freely to readers worldwide.

Product overview

Revista Intercambio is part of a multi-journal open-access publishing portal hosted on Open Journal Systems (OJS) by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín, Faculty of Human and Economic Sciences. The portal encompasses four distinct student journals: Intercambio (Economics), Ainkaa (Political Science), Kabái (Human and Economic Sciences), and Quirón (History). Each journal operates independently with its own editorial board and peer-review process, and all contribute to the portal's mission of social appropriation of knowledge. The portal and its journals do not constitute a commercial SaaS product but rather academic publications distributed freely under open access. The platform uses OJS for hosting, submission management, peer review, and publication, and supports web feeds (Atom, RSS) for content syndication.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Intercambio, Revista de Estudiantes de Economía Student economics journal of Universidad Nacional de Colombia published through the OJS platform. Accepts academic products concerning economics from any school of thought, and any student from any university may participate in the editorial process. Publishes research articles, reflection articles, essays, short articles, letters to the editor, translations, academic practice results, and bibliographic reviews.
• Ainkaa, Revista de Estudiantes de Ciencia Política Political science student journal of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. A semi-annual publication initiated by undergraduate political science students to serve as an open, plural, and collaborative debate space. Functions as an academic and editorial bridge for the dissemination, discussion, and qualification of students and faculty.
• Kabái, Revista de Estudiantes de la Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Económicas
• Quirón, Revista de Estudiantes de Historia Digital student journal of History at the Faculty of Human and Economic Sciences of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín. Provides a space for different forms of historical study of human complexity, open to writings from all fields of human knowledge through a historical lens. Publishes research articles, essays, interviews, reviews, translations, transcriptions, and archive chronicles.
• Open Journal Systems (OJS) Publishing Platform

Quantifiable outcome

• Published 8+ issues with academic content on Colombian and Latin American economics topics

Segments1 record

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed No

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature1 record

Scale indicators3 records

Recent moves5 records

Expansion highlights4 records

Direct peers

• Redalyc: Open-access academic journal platform founded at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, indexing and hosting Iberoamerican scholarly journals. Highly comparable as a regional open-access publishing initiative with similar editorial scope.
• Cuadernos de Economía (Universidad Nacional de Colombia): Faculty-level economics journal published by the same Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Highly comparable as a sibling publication in economics from the same host institution, sharing audience and topical focus but operating at faculty rather than student level.
• SciELO: Latin American open-access journal platform hosting thousands of academic journals across disciplines. Directly comparable as an open-access scholarly publishing infrastructure operating across the same region with a similar mission of broadening access to academic content.

Others

• Public Knowledge Project (PKP): Developer of Open Journal Systems (OJS), the exact platform Intercambio uses. Comparable as the underlying technology provider and as an enabler of small open-access journals globally, though PKP operates as a software project rather than a journal publisher.
• Latindex: Regional cooperative indexing system for scholarly journals published in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal. Comparable as the primary indexing infrastructure that Latin American journals like Intercambio typically seek to enter for discoverability.

Broad incumbents

• MDPI: Large open-access journal publisher with hundreds of journals across disciplines. Comparable as a high-volume open-access publisher with similar article-processing-charge-free or low-cost models, though operating at global commercial scale.
• PLOS (Public Library of Science): Major open-access journal publisher operating across multiple scientific disciplines. Comparable as an established open-access publishing model, though at vastly larger scale and broader disciplinary scope than Intercambio.

Emerging players

• PeerJ: Open-access publisher focused on biological and medical sciences with a community-driven peer-review model. Comparable as an open-access publisher experimenting with non-traditional editorial and pricing structures.
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network): Open-access repository and preprint server for social sciences research, including extensive economics working papers. Comparable as an open-access dissemination platform for economics scholarship with overlapping contributor base.

Regional players

• Dialnet: Bibliographic database and document repository focused on Iberian and Latin American academic journals. Comparable as a discoverability layer for the same regional journal ecosystem Intercambio operates in.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat3 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/quiron_med
• YouTubeyoutube.com/@quiron.revistadeestudiante2022
• Facebookfacebook.com/quiron.revista
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/revista-intercambio-unal
• Instagraminstagram.com/quironrevista

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Subsidiaries4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Revista Intercambio