Innovating Editorial Practices: Academic Publishers at Work

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Background: Triggered by a series of controversies and diversifying expectations of editorial practices, several innovative peer review procedures and supporting technologies have been proposed. However, adoption of these new initiatives seems slow. This raises questions about the wider conditions for peer review change and about the considerations that inform decisions to innovate. We set out to study the structure of commercial publishers’ editorial process, to reveal how the benefits of peer review innovations are understood, and to describe the considerations that inform the implementation of innovations Methods: We carried out field visits to the editorial office of two large academic publishers housing the editorial staff of several hundreds of journals, to study their editorial process, and interviewed editors not affiliated with large publishers. Field notes were transcribed and analysed using coding software..Results: at the publishers we analysed, the decision-making structure seems to show both clear patterns of hierarchy and layering of the different editorial practices. While information about new initiatives circulates widely, their implementation depends on assessment of stakeholder’s wishes, impact on reputation, efficiency and implementation costs, with final decisions left to managers at the top of the internal hierarchy. Main tensions arise between commercial and substantial arguments. The editorial process is closely connected to commercial practices of creating business value, and the very specific terms in which business value is understood, such as reputation considerations and the urge to increase efficiency. Journals independent of large commercial publishers tend to have less hierarchically structured processes, report more flexibility to implement innovations, and to a greater extent decouple commercial and editorial perspectives.Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that peer review innovations are partly to be understood in light of commercial considerations related to reputation, efficiency and implementations costs. These arguments extend beyond previously studied topics in publishing economics, including publishers’ choice for business or publication models and reach into the very heart of the editorial and peer review process.</jats:p>

Editorial bias in top‐tier education journals: Factors influencing publishable scholarship in China

“…Short‐staffed editorial teams . Horbach and Halffman (2020) observed that many academic journals in China had small editorial offices with only a few editors, a simple staff structure, and little task specialization while, by contrast, the large international publishers featured a highly specialized division of labour and long procedural production chains. The editorial offices of journals, then, are often short‐staffed in China, with relatively few individuals being responsible for everything from the screening of preliminary manuscripts and the second review to copyediting, proofreading, and distribution.…”

Editorial Work and the Peer Review Economy of STS Journals

“…Second, we also propose community-led experimentation with new technologies for peer review, albeit in ways other than the simplistic technological fixes offered by commercial publication infrastructure. To be sure, infrastructural tools are useful to tackle well-defined issues like plagiarism (Horbach and Halfmann 2020), but they are of very limited use in assisting editors with more substantive tasks such as reviewer match-making. We specifically propose to think about technological possibilities for establishing new forms of gift exchange.…”

“…Such literature is often produced by scientific practitioners with a personal interest in addressing shortcomings of peer review; for example, failure to detect misconduct or bias (Abramowitz, Gomes, and Abramovitz 1975;Peters and Ceci 1982;Weller 2002). Rather than focusing on aberrations from a posited epistemological norm, STS scholars have tended to analyze peer review as constitutive of and legitimating particular forms of interaction between authors, editors, and reviewers (Hackett and Chubin 1990;Hirschauer 2010Hirschauer , 2015Pontille and Torny 2014;Horbach and Halffman 2020;Horbach 2019;Eve et al 2021;Siler and Strang 2017). Despite these efforts, the political-economic organization of peer review remains understudied, both in regard to the labor it draws on and in terms of how scholarly publishing as a business mediates its epistemic workings.…”

When Shooting for the Stars Becomes Aiming for Asterisks: P-Hacking in Family Business Research

“…Separate models are estimated for first-versus aggregate-author characteristics. 11 Author gender (cf. H2) is captured by a dummy variable taking value 1 if an author is female, and 0 otherwise.…”