On the factory floor of the knowledge production plant: editors’ perspectives on publishing in academic journals

Abstract

Debates about the asymmetries in global scholarly production have highlighted the problems that hound African scholarship, ranging from the political economy of publishing to epistemological bias among peer reviewers. Surprisingly little research has, however, been devoted to the views of the journal editors who play such a central role in the process of dissemination of scholarship, and setting and maintaining the boundaries of disciplines, as well as their perspectives on the imbalances of global knowledge production. This article reports on a pilot project which set out to shed some light on these views. As editors of two peer-reviewed journals in the fields of journalism and journalism studies, the authors initially drew upon their own experience to identify common issues facing journal editors. Their approach was also informed by perspectives acquired from the personal experience of their own global positioning – one located on the periphery of the Global North and the other in the Global South. An online questionnaire was distributed to the editors of 24 journals in the fields of communication, journalism and journalism studies. The article reports that the responses received suggest that journal editors are not only conversant with a plethora of complicated and vexing problems, but have also developed a range of successful strategies for responding to them. At the same time, however, publication – or, rather, non-publication – of papers authored in the Global South is a contentious issue which produced divergent responses. The authors conclude that this is the issue most likely to become politicised in the future.

Keywords:

• academic publishing
• journal editors
• non-publication
• peer-reviewed journals
• publication

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Herman Wasserman

Herman Wasserman is Professor and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Ian Richards

Ian Richards is Professor of Journalism at the University of South Australia. [email protected]