Editing a higher education journal: Gatekeeping or development?

ABSTRACT

Editors of academic journals play a key part in the production of knowledge and the continuation of scholarly conversations about practical and intellectual issues of the day. While peer review, an essential part of journal processes, has received considerable attention in the scholarly and the popular press, much of it critical, the role of the chief editor remains rather shadowy and underexplored. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 11 editors of academic journals in the field of higher education probed for editors’ thoughts about their work. The editors, located in seven countries, described dual roles as gatekeepers – keeping up standards in the field – and academic developers – supporting and encouraging novice and other potential authors. They searched for balance between these often contradictory expectations amidst complexities and challenges of contemporary academia.

KEYWORDS:

• Editors
• journals
• higher education
• gatekeeper
• academic development

Acknowledgments

Sandra Acker would like to thank Senior College of the University of Toronto for a small research grant used for compiling bibliographic resources and Dr Pushpa Hamal for his research assistance. Mika Rekola would like to thank Teachers’ Academy at the University of Helsinki for financially supporting some of his work. The authors thank Liam Wisker for transcribing and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. We are especially grateful to the participants for their enthusiastic cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. University of Toronto, Social Sciences, Humanities & Education REB, Protocol #37,730; University of Brighton, file number no longer available. University of Helsinki did not require a review of a low risk study.

2. Two did not reply; one stated that he did not consider his journal to fall within ‘higher education’ and two others agreed to participate but did not respond to follow-up communications or a suitable date could not be agreed.

3. Incentivising publication in high-ranking journals is a feature of developed countries too (Opstrup, 2017; Pietilä, 2019). One of our participants indicated that if she published in her own journal, she would receive ‘points’, while for editing the journal there was nothing.

4. These categories overlap: at the time we began the study (2019), our list of 33 journals indicated that most of the editors of teaching and learning higher education journals were women and most of the editors of generalist higher education journals were men.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Acker

Sandra Acker is Professor Emerita in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research is on academic work; the social construction of social science research; and gender, leadership and higher education. She is Principal Investigator of a project entitled ‘Academic researchers in challenging times’, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (see http://arictproject.com). [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3662-2314

Mika Rekola

Mika Rekola is University Lecturer in Forest Economics, Director of Master of Science programme in Forest Sciences, Department of Forest Sciences at University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests are in forest education, educational sciences, human resources and ecosystem services. [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5744-9226

Gina Wisker

Gina Wisker supervises doctoral students at the University of Bath, and co-runs supervision courses at the UiT - The Arctic University of Norway at Tromsø. Gina is also a visiting Professor related to the SARChI Chair at the University of Johannesburg; Emeritus Professor of the University of Brighton and Chief Editor of IETI. [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8017-8244