The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review. These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production. As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted. We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.

Science in Formation: The Indexed Scientist and the Inaccessibility of Scientific Information

“…5 Similar to the macro perspective of global inclusion, the OA developments discussed here increase a division in the scientific community within Western regions. Even 5 The problems of predatory publishing (Mills and Inouye 2020;Mouton and Valentine 2017;Nwagwu and Ojemeni 2015) or the rise of OA publishing platforms (Crosetto 2021;Knöchelmann et al 2022;Oviedo-García 2021) and their impact on the communicative practices of scientific information is not yet accounted for in this discussion. though expectations of early career scientists to publish with the highest ranking high impact journals did not change, expectations were raised to do so in OA mode.…”

Navigating the complex space of journal editing: Exploring the tensions between the intellectual and commercial dimensions of academic publishing

“…Is the publisher just the communicator and processor of knowledge? Or, as publishing becomes marked by new modes of activity and frequency of activities, does this also become a process of agenda setting, so publishers begin to shape the knowledge field itself in ways perceived to be financially astute (see Knöchelmann et al, 2022)? Do editors therefore become mere facilitators in enacting an agenda directed from elsewhere?…”