The Editorial Board

Firstly, apologies for the delay in posting. Since my last post, I've had a trans-continental move and adopted a new office assistant. She’s a border collie mix who has strong feelings about footnotes vs. endnotes and the Oxford comma.

But I digress.

A few months ago, we had the spring editorial board meeting for the journal I'm currently managing. I’m usually enthusiastic about these for one reason – there is always cake. But the more I think about it, the more I thought that it might be something worth explaining. What goes on behind those closed doors? What does a board of editors discuss? Do they talk about specific authors? So, as I usually do, I decided to blog about it.

Clearly a group of embryonic professors engaging in their
first official academic reaction to cake at a meeting. 

So what do we do in those meetings?

Here’s a typical agenda:

 A.) Welcome and Apologies

Yes, this is a ubiquitous part of any meeting. But for a national editorial board, it allows us to talk about the research interests of any new members, chat about any new developments with the expansion/contraction of the editorial board, and reacquaint ourselves with each other’s specialities, positions, and research centres. 

B.) Minutes from the last meeting

Another uniform item. Usually the bit where I realise I’ve forgotten to do something. Oops. Also a great way to see what’s developed since the last time we all met for cake. 

C.) Editor’s Report 

Paperwork from the Editor/Editorial Manager about the journal from an editing perspective.

D.) Publisher’s Report

Paperwork from the Publisher about the journal from a publishing and marketing perspective.

E.) Events, Seminars, Conferences, Award, etc. 

Pretty much just anything else project-wise the journal has going 

F.) Any other Business 

More ubiquitous meeting jargon. Though this can get interesting with a group of academics…I’ve seen everything from future meetings to interesting conferences and scholarship ideas to resignations happen in this part of the meeting.

So, basically, paperwork. It seems to be mostly papers.

Actual image of someone preparing for  an editorial board meeting giphy.com

We talk about submission trends and rejection rates. It’s basically a forum for the Main/Executive/Head editor to report to the wider editorial board what’s happening. How is the journal fairing? What does the backlog look like? Where does the journal need to focus its attention? What sort of papers is it receiving? How is the reviewing process going? 

Exactly what answering that random statistic question feels like

This includes looking at statistics of where the authors are from and who they are – is there a significant number of papers coming from a certain country? If so, why? We also try to find problems like a high number of submissions from a country but an extraordinarily high rejection rate for these papers – why are we getting such low quality submissions? What can we do to encourage higher quality papers from this audience? This is one reason why when you submit a paper, you have to provide so much information about your institution and country – the information gets separated from the paper and goes into our reporting. It’s also why you usually have to provide X number of keywords.

Side rant: Don’t get me started on keywords. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL ADMINISTRATORS AND EDITORS EVERYWHERE, follow the instructions on keywords. If it says pick from a list, PICK FROM THE LIST. If it says to type them in, type them in. And use as broad keywords as possible. Why? Well, we use them to match reviewers (the better and more uniform the keyword system, the faster we can find a broader pool of reviewers, which means the faster your paper goes through the system, which means the faster you get a decision and the quicker our turnaround time). We also use keywords to compile listings and reports about what topics are being submitted and what areas are being researched. It’s an important part of the system with which most people just get frustrated. With theEditor, I once trimmed down an inherited system that had thousands of keywords to 125. And then we were able to get the turnaround time down to 21 days. THAT. IS. FAST. (And I might be seriously proud of it).

Seeing your turnaround time work plotted on the publisher's line graph giphy.com

What else do we do at these meetings?

Some smaller, specialist journals rely heavily (or even solely) on their editorial board for reviewing. If that’s the case, then specifics are discussed about papers and whether they should be accepted. If that’s not the case, then the speed and quality of reviews usually comes up. Why? Because one of the single most visible parts of a journal’s reputation is the reviewing experience. [shameless plug alert] Check out this post – and this one! – on what journals face with reviewers. We suggest new reviewers if we have a need for an area, and new board members if we have a significant omission in research interests.

Money. We talk about money too. Not the publisher’s money (that’s another debate for another time), but the trends in royalties, which is a good way to see changes in subscriptions and circulation. Some journals are owned by the publisher, so this is less of a discussion point. Some are owned by societies or institutions, so this forms an important part of the editorial board’s role – allocation of funds to events, awards, scholarships, and other development endeavours. It’s usually a section that varies from paint-dryingly boring to hotly contentious.

Other than the Editor reporting to the editorial board, the meeting serves as a place for the Publisher to report their end of the process. The Production schedules, statistics, queries, and results all come out. We receive a Confidential Publishing Report every meeting with lots of fancy graphs and charts. It lets us know where the journal sits in context to other journals in the field. For example, we might have identified that our submission rates are down, but the Publisher’s Report tells us if it’s a cross-discipline dip or just us. It also compares subscription rates and downloads to our past as well as other journals in their catalogue. This can be really helpful in providing the context behind whether the journal needs to be more proactive in approaching authors or whether the rejection rate is about to jump because we simply don’t have room for all the papers on a given topic. Speaking of rejection rate, we usually breakdown the rejection reasons and have a whole section of statistics that separates papers rejected for non-research based reasons listed here, here, here, and here. It’s hard to evaluate the quality of the papers if we add in ones that get rejected for things like being totally the wrong subject area.

Journals usually also discuss their rankings and impact factor, if relevant to the discipline. These are statistics usually associated with citation rates rather than readership. I’ve always considered them 50% statistics and 50% magic, but they get discussed ad nauseum since every few years, academics and promotion committees seem to be obsessed with journal rankings.

And then we talk about development opportunities – conference attendance, scholarships, awards and prizes, and the like. This can be an interesting brainstorming session for new ideas on how to use these opportunities to develop the journal and reach a broader audience. Would having a graduate/postgraduate conference sponsored by the journal help to reach a new group of early career researchers? Or are we already getting plenty of ECR submissions? What can we do to encourage better papers from ECRs? Could we plan a workshop on the art of reviewing?

And that’s pretty much it. There’s always topics of interest or institutional politics to discuss, but these usually happen over coffee at the end. Some meetings are plain and simply a very boring waste of time. But some are really interesting, and some are highly political and highly contentious. It all depends on what’s going on with the journal, the academics and publishers involved, and the state of affairs in the academic world. But mostly, I go for the cake.

So, when you are invited to be on an editorial board for the first time, it’s safe to say that it probably won’t be exactly as you are expecting. Except for small journals, you rarely discuss individual papers, and it’s more about management. It can really be eye-opening and transform your perspective on academic publishing to see it so bluntly discussed from a management point of view. It can also help with your own submissions to hear a group of editors discussing why they reject papers and what, exactly, they are hoping to find in a submission, especially from ECRs.

Anyway, I hope this helped enlighten the area around editorial boards a bit. If you’re ever asked to join one, make sure you ask exactly what is expected of you because as with everything in journal publishing: each journal is different.

Take care

-theAdmin

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