Religion in changing times: an overview of the journal in its comparative scholarly and publishing contexts

ABSTRACT

This article offers an overview of the history and current status of the journal Religion (Routledge). Its authors have co-edited the journal since 2008. It reviews aspects of the journal’s history and its profile as a generalist, international disciplinary journal in the study of religion/s. It offers bibliometric overview of the journal, in comparison with 49 other SoR journals, followed by a discussion of journals as business venues and of changes brought about by Open Access, including challenges posed by new publishers and new types of (mega)journals. The article concludes with reflection on the peer review process.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic journals
• disciplinarity
• peer review
• publishing
• religious studies
• study of religion

Journals, alongside monographs and edited volumes, continue to be important in Religious Studies (the study of religion/s: SoR). Religion, though still one of the most highly-cited SoR journals (Table 2), is an old-school publication in many ways. After its more than a half-century of existence, it occupies a prominent niche in an increasingly complex ecosystem of scholarly publication venues. Recent developments make this an appropriate time for some reflection on aspects of this and other SoR journals. We will begin by reviewing aspects of the history of Religion and outlining its main profile as a generalist, international disciplinary journal in SoR and some of the editorial challenges that entails. We will then turn to a bibliometric bird’s-eye view of SoR journals, and the place Religion occupies in this niche. This leads to a discussion of journals as business venues and of changes brought about by Open Access preferences and policies, along with challenges posed by new publishers and new types of (mega)journals. Last, but not least, we reflect on the changing circumstances of the peer review process.

Historical overview

Religion was founded in 1971, as the result of ‘a convergence of interests among scholars working mainly in the northern part of Britain’ (Sharpe 1971, v). This group centered around Ninian Smart, who at the time chaired the new department at the University of Lancaster (founded in 1964). Religion was the seventh generalist journal in the history of SoR, after Revue de l’histoire des religions (RHR, founded in 1880), Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni (SMSR, 1924), Journal of Bible and History (1933, rebranded in 1966 as Journal of the American Academy of Religion [JAAR]), Numen (1954), History of Religions (HR, 1961), and Temenos (1965). Only Numen and History of Religions had an international target from the beginning, and of these only Numen has achieved and maintained that diversity (Table 4). RHR has catered mainly to French scholarship, SMSR to Italian, JAAR to American, and Temenos to Scandinavian.¹

Religion’s international outreach emerged only slowly. This was mainly the result of a developing transatlantic axis, which emerged in part as Smart’s students began getting jobs outside of the UK. In 1981, Smart’s former student Ivan Strenski was appointed as American editor, a position he retained until 2004. It was only around the turn of the century, after the late Robert Segal had become the European editor, that the European board slowly became more than a UK affair.² The journal has continued on the path of internationalization, but most contributors are still based in Europe and North America (Table 1 and Table 4).

Table 1. Percentage of authors by region in Religion (with percentages of regions by subregion). (Scopus data; 1971–2023, n = 1298)³⁴.

Region	%
USA/Canada	43.5
Europe	45.5
West (74.8%) North (20.1%) East/Central (3.6%) South (1.4%)
Oceania	4.3
Asia	2.6
East (56%) Southeast (24%) South (21%) Central (0%)
Middle-East	2.1
Africa	1.8
Latin America / Caribbean	1.1

Disciplinary location

Here is how Religion is positioned, in terms of some relative distinctions of journal types.

Religion is generalist not specialist, covering a broad range of topics and appealing to a wide academic audience. This contrasts with journals that focus on niche areas, offering detailed explorations of specific traditions, themes, or approaches, with an understandably narrow readership. In practice, it is our editorial policy we tend to reject submissions that we deem of little relevance for a general SoR readership, in historical, methodological, or theoretical terms. We tend to reject articles in which religion appears as one variable, but not as the main issue of concern, and where results speak to other issues, not directly to religious phenomena; in these cases we recommend that authors submit to a journal devoted to the study of those issues. We also desk-reject articles that adopt straightforward insider religious perspectives: for example, we reject several articles each year that seek to explain why certain readings of the Qur’an are more religiously appropriate than others.

This policy on desk-rejects is correlated with the journal’s disciplinary location. Religion publishes work that is self-consciously situated within SoR: i.e., articles that cite literature from within the discipline in order to address established and emerging issues. At the same time, SoR is largely interdisciplinary, and Religion accepts work that takes a broad (but not all-inclusive) range of approaches to the study of religious phenomena (broadly defined). As the journal’s Aims & Scope statement says,

Religion accepts papers on all religious studies topics, including the history, literature, thought, practice, material culture, and institutions of particular religious traditions and communities from a variety of perspectives such as social scientific, cultural, cognitive, ethnographic, economic, ecological, and geographic (but excluding theology or philosophy of religion).³

Beyond this, Religion tends not to publish heavily quantitative work (as commonly done in subdisciplines like the psychology or sociology of religion), preferring qualitative approaches. The journal’s inaugural editorial, in 1971, stated, ‘a rounded approach to […] the study of religion […] requires a variety of disciplines [… .] The aim of Religion is to bring the disciplines together’; and this was reasserted in later editorials, e.g., Michael Pye underlined the importance of ‘plurality of methods’ and ‘friendly cooperation between those who have complementary specialisms’; and one of the journal’s ‘main aims was to publish articles representing work in a wide variety of disciplines concerned with the understanding of religion, with due regard for the inclusion of discussions of methodology’ (Anonymous 1974, iii; Sharpe 1971, iv; Pye 1973, 3, 4).

In our own initial editorial, in 2008, we summarized this founding agenda as follows:

[Sharpe’s editorial] set out a series of practical principle[s …]: ‘to bring the disciplines together and to pay particular attention to problems of methodology’; ‘to resist the Occidental tendency to limit the comparative study of religion to the study of the ‘“non-Christian religions”’; to include consideration of ‘apparently “non-religious” movements and phenomena [which] have strong analogies to what are conventionally recognized as religions’ [… .] This goal and these principles seem as valid in 2007 as they were in 1971 [… .] (Stausberg and Engler 2008, 2)

Reflecting back, after seventeen years as co-editors of the journal, we would add that reflection on disciplinary categories and identity continues to be prominent (for example, work on the concept of ‘religion,’ the self-positioning of scholars, and scholarship as advocacy). Religion places explicit emphasis on the importance of conceptual, theoretical, and analytical work, and on methodological issues (though we rarely receive submissions on the latter issues). This is part of the explicit focus on the journal since its founding, and it also resonates with our own work (e.g., Engler 2024; Stausberg Forthcoming; Stausberg and Engler 2016).

The journal’s very first editorial, in 1971, set out a series of practical principles, among them the objective ‘to bring the disciplines together and to pay particular attention to problems of methodology’ (Sharpe 1971, iv). In our editorial practice we continue to emphasize the importance of methodology: feedback to authors, from both reviewers and editors, often includes a request to be more explicit and detailed concerning methods. Our concern for methodology also finds expression in the two editions of our co-edited methods handbook (Engler and Stausberg 2022; Stausberg and Engler 2011).

The issue of interdisciplinarity reveals a certain degree of ambiguity. What was meant by the phrase ‘bring the disciplines together,’ in the inaugural editorial cited just above? Was this a call for the journal to publish work by scholars from other disciplines, or for scholars in the discipline of SoR to proceed in dialogue with other disciplines? In his article on the early years of the journal, Ivan Strenski noted that ‘Religion thus became a venue where scholars from these cognate disciplines to religious studies frequently published’; he also recalls that ‘the diversity of the religions ideally demanded fundamentally comparative, cross-cultural, empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to their proper study – even if we were not always successful in meeting this lofty standard’ (Strenski 2020, 22, 19). It is a disputed question whether SoR is better described (and normatively devised) as a discipline or as an interdisciplinary field of study.⁴ In our editorial practice, we emphasize a middle path, with a pragmatic tactical policy.

There are themes for which involving scholars from other disciplines is instrumental. This is true not only for the composition of thematic issues, but also for peer review: leaving aside the need for specific expertise on occasions, any attempt to rely solely on colleagues with a firm grounding in SoR would reduce the pool of potential referees, making peer review in many cases impossible. The initial ‘Statement of Editorial Policy’ expressed a certain conception of disciplinary boundaries when it closed the doors on ‘straight philosophy of religion or theology, Christian or otherwise, except in so far as philosophical and theological articles may be illuminating methodologically.’ As an example of how this works in practice, we desk-reject dozens of articles every year because they are clearly theological, which we define in our response to those authors in these terms: ‘taking a perspective from within a religious tradition, rather than a scholarly comparative and/or analytical perspective about religions.’ The insider/outside division is not a sharp one, and Religion has published work that engages with this boundary: e.g., our recent thematic issue on ‘Emic Categories and New Paths: Case Studies in the Scholarly Use of Indigenous Concepts’ (Engler and Whitesides 2022). The distinction here is based on a sense of disciplinary approaches and interests, not a misleading reified boundary between disciplines. For example, though we reject traditional (often Christian-centered) philosophy of religion, we will shortly be publishing a thematic issue on the Philosophy of Religious Studies.

Religion is international, aiming for a global readership (though necessarily hampered by its publisher’s for-profit pay-wall),⁵ with contributions from a diverse array of countries (though only in English). This contrasts with journals whose contributors, readership, focus, issues and approaches are more relevant to specific geographical, cultural and linguistic contexts. Journals like SMSR or the German Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft (ZfR) are generalist, but the majority of readers and contributors is mostly limited to speakers of Italian and German respectively. (Neither of these journals, among others, are included in Scopus to a degree that would allow us to include them in our list of 50 journals, see Table 2. The same is true, for example, with Brazilian journals like Horizonte, REVER and Estudos de Religião which, along with many other journals in many countries, are relevant in principle but less visible because they are excluded by the bibliometric industry.)

Table 2. Citation and content data for 50 selected journals (ranked by average citation number of top ten most-cited articles)³⁵.

Journal	Citations		Publication data				Percentage of authors by region							Journal
	Mean Cites (top 10)	h5	Start	Art	OA (%)	Engl (%)	AFR	ASIA	EUR	LA/CAR	MID-EAST	OCE	USA/CAN
JSSR	462.3	25	1977	1045	26.9	100	0.2	3.6	14.4	0.5	2.4	1.9	77.0	JSSR
SocR	265.1	21	1964	1103	9.3	100	0.0	1.8	8.0	0.3	1.2	1.2	87.6	SocR
Rls	284.6	38	2010	6366	100	100	2.9	14.7	37.8	1.7	4.8	4.5	33.6	Rls
JRA	182.1	5	1967	730	11.6	95.9	25.4	0.7	39.2	0.7	1.8	1.3	31.1	JRA
Rel	149.7	17	1971	1100	14.0	100	1.8	2.6	44.5	1.1	2.2	4.3	43.5	Rel
JAAR	128.1	14	1933	2029	7.5	100	0.7	1.0	5.8	0.2	0.9	0.7	90.6	JAAR
SoCo	122.8	18	1953	1285	12.5	76.1	2.0	4.1	61.3	7.6	2.3	2.0	20.9	SoCo
JCR	115.0	11	1995	536	19.8	100	0.9	3.9	61.5	1.6	3.3	6.3	22.5	JCR
MTSR	110.5	11	1989	547	18.5	99.6	1.3	1.6	29.5	0.3	0.9	2.0	64.4	MTSR
Num	104.7	11	1954	977	10.6	88.4	1.3	4.8	47.8	0.3	5.3	3.1	37.4	Num
Zyg	92.9	14	1966	2075	21.4	99.6	0.5	2.4	24.3	0.7	1.1	1.9	69.1	Zyg
RBB	85.4	26	2011	367	42.0	100	1.3	2.2	40.7	1.3	1.2	9.7	43.7	RBB
HR	83.2	8	1966	149	14.1	99.7	0.0	3.7	18.0	0.4	4.0	1.8	72.1	HR
C&R	66.2	–	2010	275	19.6	100	3.2	9.0	44.6	2.3	3.5	6.7	30.7	C&R
RRR	62.0	16	2011	346	37.0	100	1.6	7.3	13.0	0.5	2.0	2.5	73.2	RRR
RSS	60.1	–	1992	647	23.5	100	1.0	4.1	74.5	0.6	2.4	1.8	16.5	RSS
CI	58.9	13	2007	336	29.8	100	3.9	15.2	35.2	0.7	3.7	6.0	35.6	CI
JRE	54.5	10	1974	578	17.0	100	0.5	3.2	7.3	0.2	1.1	1.6	86.2	JRE
JR	50.3	–	1982	274	11.7	100	0.2	2.2	10.1	0.2	8.7	3.2	75.4	JR
JLR	49.9	10	1983	581	33.4	100	2.2	2.5	10.8	0.3	5.2	2.9	76.1	JLR
MR	47.1	11	2011	457	20.1	100	3.0	4.4	44.9	1.7	0.6	1.4	44.3	MR
SR	46.0	8	1971	1850	8.6	85.2	0.3	1.2	5.0	0.6	0.6	0.9	91.3	SR
Tem	40.7	–	2003	110	100	100	1.2	1.8	83.6	0.6	0.0	0.6	12.1	Tem
MJ	32.3	5	1981	504	5.6	100	0.0	0.2	4.4	0.0	32.5	0.0	62.9	MJ
JJRS	31.4	6	2002	239	84.5	100	0.0	38.3	10.4	1.1	1.9	1.5	46.8	JJRS
JRH	31.4	6	1960	730	14.5	100	1.3	1.3	22.1	0.3	1.3	48.8	24.9	JRH
JFSR	30.8	11	2002	233	6.4	99.5	3.9	3.6	10.7	1.0	2.6	1.9	76.4	JFSR
JSRNC	30.6	9	2013	149	35.6	100	1.1	5.7	27.2	0.0	2.3	6.8	57.0	JSRNC
CRR	29.3	10	2013	213	32.9	100	2.3	4.2	26.7	1.5	5.0	9.5	50.8	CRR
ASSR	29.0	6	1988	472	100	13.9	1.4	1.5	86.0	3.4	1.2	0.3	6.2	ASSR
Aries	28.8	6	2001	165	18.8	84.5	0.5	1.1	70.5	0.0	5.3	5.8	16.8	Aries
SWC	28.0	7	1996	350	8.6	100	13.6	16.0	38.3	1.6	1.3	4.7	24.7	SWC
CB	27.8	7	2010	209	22.0	100	0.4	20.2	42.9	0.4	0.4	4.6	31.1	CB
­JMR	27.5	–	2010	174	12.1	100	1.1	2.1	10.1	0.5	3.7	3.2	79.4	­JMR
JREu	26.6	5	2008	159	42.1	100	0.4	2.5	87.4	0.4	1.4	0.4	7.7	JREu
IR	25.2	–	2011	184	23.9	100	0.7	5.9	54.6	0.0	0.7	3.3	34.8	IR
NR	24.5	8	2009	138	38.4	100	1.0	2.9	25.6	0.5	2.4	2.9	64.7	NR
JSRI	17.8	12	2002	703	100	79.6	3.0	8.8	73.2	0.6	8.3	0.3	7.0	JSRI
JASR	16.0	6	2013	152	9.9	100	0.0	1.2	13.1	0.6	0.0	76.8	8.3	JASR
JMJS	15.5	10	2010	371	15.6	100	1.0	1.5	30.8	1.2	34.7	2.2	28.9	JMJS
JRMDC	14.7	8	2014	131	51.1	100	2.0	4.1	44.6	0.7	5.4	5.4	37.8	JRMDC
RHE	13.4	2	2002	196	12.8	39.1	1.4	0.3	83.3	3.4	0.0	2.0	9.8	RHE
IJLAR	12.7	12	2017	177	32.8	100	0.5	0.5	17.1	65.4	1.4	0.5	14.7	IJLAR
JHS	12.5	6	2009	145	24.2	100	0.0	6.0	25.0	0.5	1.1	1.6	65.8	JHS
RHR	10.5	4	2008	133	100	8.0	0.6	0.3	92.1	0.6	1.8	0.3	3.9	RHR
R&S	9.2	7	2015	124	58.1	100	0.0	2.6	51.7	4.3	5.2	2.6	33.6	R&S
JCSR	8.9	–	2019	54	27.8	100	1.4	1.4	63.5	2.7	2.7	2.7	25.7	JCSR
JRAT	7.2	9	2016	146	100	85.3	0.9	0.9	85.8	0.4	2.2	0.9	8.8	JRAT
JAR	6.0	5	2017	52	3.8	100	9.2	0.9	11.9	10.1	1.8	0.0	66.1	JAR
IJSNR	6.0	–	2016	56	28.6	100	0.0	2.9	68.1	0.0	0.0	15.9	13.0	IJSNR
Journal	Mean Cites (top 10)	h5	Start	Art	OA (%)	Engl (%)	AFR	ASIA	EUR	LA/CAR	MID-EAST	OCE	USA/CAN	Journal
	Citations		Publication data				Percentage of authors by region

Religion by the numbers

For comparative context, we present data on 50 SoR journals, drawn from Elsevier’s bibliometric database, Scopus, and to a lesser extent Google Scholar (Table 2).⁶ (Abbreviations of journal titles are listed in the Appendix.) This is a broad selection of comparable journals, not merely a sample. However, it is selective and limited to journals indexed by Scopus.

Table 2 presents several interesting findings. Religion is the most highly cited generalist SoR journal in the world. The two most highly cited journals on our list are more specialized social-scientific journals. Publications in the social sciences tend to be cited much more often than those in the humanities, for various reasons: e.g., prominence of co-authorship, disciplinary cultures of citation and individual creativity, greater proportion of open-access publications, divergent conceptions of the growth of knowledge etc. (Engler 2014, 199–200). Religions is an outlier in many ways, as discussed below: being a megajournal, it serves more as an open-access repository, with no clear relation to SoR, than as a disciplinary journal. The Journal of Religion in Africa is a specialized journal, and its success is a tribute to the internationalization of SoR. Over a quarter of its published articles are from Africa; Studies in World Christianity, at 13.6%, is the only other journal on the list with more than 10% of articles from Africa.

Other points illustrated by Table 2 include the dominance of articles from Europe and North America, the predominance of English as the lingua franca of SoR (tempered slightly by the fact that the main bibliometric databases, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, do not include many relevant journals published in other languages), and the significant prominence of open access offerings in what are generally quite traditional journals (the hybrid model that leads to this is discussed in the section on open access below).

Tables 3 and 4 shed light on the important point of international diversity. Over 70% of all articles across the 50 journals come from authors located in North America and Europe (Table 3). Table 4 zeroes in on generalist journals, including Religion and what we consider the most closely comparable publications. The story is again one of dominance of scholarship from these two regions. There is a relatively small list of countries outside of North America and Europe with over 1 percent representation in any of these eight journals: Australia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Nigeria, Singapore and South Africa.⁷ Though the Journal of the Academic Academy of Religion and History of Religions are sometimes considered international flagship journals, Table 4 underlines their parochially US-centered author pool.

Table 3. Countries by percentage of total published items in 50 selected journals (all countries ≥ 1%). (Scopus data; n = 34 264).

Country	%	Country	%	Country	%
USA	40.4	Israel	2.7	Belgium	1.4
UK	9.4	Netherlands	2.3	Poland	1.2
Canada	7.8	China	1.7	Spain	1.1
Australia	3.4	Italy	1.6	South Africa	1.1
France	3.6	Romania	1.5	Norway	1.0
Germany	3.2			Denmark	1.0

Table 4. Distribution of published items by country for selected journals, ranked by from most to least diverse (all countries ≥ 1%). (Scopus data)³⁶.

Country	%	Country	%	Country	%	Country	%
Numen (1954–2024, n = 977) Diversity rank: 11/50
USA	31.9	Canada	5.5	Sweden	3.4	Switzerland	1.6
UK	8.6	Netherlands	5.2	Australia	2.2	Austria	1.4
Germany	7.8	Denmark	5.0	Japan	2.0	Spain	1.4
Norway	5.9	Israel	5.0	Italy	1.7	Belgium	1.2
Culture and Religion (2010–2024, n = 275) Diversity rank: 12/50
USA	24.9	India	2.6	Switzerland	1.5	Poland	1.2
UK	24.1	Finland	2.0	Turkey	1.5
Canada	5.8	Israel	2.0	Japan	1.2
Netherlands	5.2	Indonesia	1.5	Nigeria	1.2
Germany	3.2	Sweden	1.5	Norway	1.2
Journal of Contemporary Religion (1995–2024, n = 536) Diversity rank: 21/50
UK	38.7	Finland	2.7	Italy	1.9	Russian Fed.	1.1
USA	16.6	Denmark	2.5	Sweden	1.7
Canada	5.9	Norway	2.5	Poland	1.4
Australia	5.2	Belgium	2.0	Austria	1.1
Israel	2.8	Germany	2.0	New Zealand	1.1
Religion (1971–2024, n = 1298) Diversity rank: 24/50
USA	35.6	Germany	4.7	Netherlands	2.6	Finland	1.6
UK	23.1	Norway	3.9	Denmark	2.3	New Zealand	1.3
Canada	7.9	Australia	3.0	Israel	2.1	Japan	1.0
Critical Research on Religion (2013–2024, n = 213) Diversity rank: 25/50
USA	41.2	Germany	4.2	India	1.5	Nigeria	1.2
Canada	9.5	Finland	2.7	Italy	1.5
Australia	9.2	Iran	2.7	Norway	1.5
UK	8.0	Sweden	2.7	Netherlands	1.2
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (1989–2024, n = 547) Diversity rank: 29/50
USA	50.5	Denmark	4.0	Australia	1.5	Italy	1.1
Canada	13.9	Finland	2.1	France	1.5	Netherlands	1.1
UK	7.8	Switzerland	2.1	South Africa	1.2
Germany	4.6	Sweden	1.6	Belgium	1.1
History of Religions (1966–2024, n = 149) Diversity rank: 38/50
USA	67.3	Germany	3.3	Switzerland	1.8	New Zealand	1.1
Canada	4.8	Israel	2.9	Denmark	1.5	Turkey	1.1
UK	3.7	France	2.6	Singapore	1.5
Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1933–2024, n = 2029) Diversity rank: 49/50
USA	86.0	Canada	4.6	UK	3.2

To get a better sense of diversity among these 50 journals, we calculated the Simpsons’ diversity index for each.⁸ This gives a measure not of the total number of countries represented in a journal, but of how equally distributed the various articles are among these countries. (So, a country with one publication from every country in the world – but thousands from a single country – would have extremely low diversity.) The most diverse journal of the full set of 50 journals that we looked at is Social Compass, followed by Aries, Journal of Religion in Europe and International Journal for the Study of New Religions–in sum, all journals with a heavy European presence. At the bottom of this ranking, the least diverse is the Canadian journal, Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses, followed by three quite exclusively American journals (in order from least to slightly more diverse): Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics and Sociology of Religion. Religion falls in the middle in terms of this measure of diversity, 24th among 50 journals: it publishes articles from many countries, but almost 60% come from the USA and UK. Table 4 ranks eight journals – Religion and those we consider most comparable to it – in terms of their diversity, as measured by their SDI. Numen is the most diverse of this selected short-list of comparable journals, which is not surprising given its status as the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). More generally, citation numbers for scholarship produced on a country-by-country basis vary strongly with cultural variables such as GDP, the overall number of scholars, individualism and the gendered nature of social values (Esparza, Lee, and Rubio 2024).

Other dimensions of diversity are also important. For example, authors of articles in the last ten issues of Religion (52/1–54/2) consisted of forty-three women and forty-nine men.⁹ However, it is difficult to begin thinking about intersectional approaches to cultures of publication when the main bibliometric databases are largely blind to race, gender, class, sexuality and other dimensions of identity. The issue of representativity among cited authors is receiving increasing attention. An important special issue has been published in Studies in Religion/sciences religieuses (Castor 2024; Halvorson 2024; Hovland 2024; Hovland and Halvorson 2024; Imhoff 2024; Klassen 2024; Pérez 2024). This set of articles raises important questions:

Who do we read and why […] ? How do practices at each step of knowledge production, from reading to the collection and interpretation of evidence to peer review and publication, contribute to these issues? Who is elided or not imagined as a central source of knowledge in particular conversations and why is that the case? […] What does it mean to engage in an ethical practice of citation in the academic study of religion?¹⁰

Women’s scholarship is cited less often than that of men, especially by men (Ferber 1986; 1988; Ferber and Brün 2011; Rossiter 1993).¹¹ Data on gender in a relevant subfield underline the significance of these questions. Sarah Imroff finds that ‘Women make up about half of Jewish Studies scholars, and they are 42% of tenure-track faculty at universities. Yet in peer reviewed journals, women made up only about a quarter of cited authors (Imhoff 2022).¹² Susannah Heschel and Imhoff are currently looking more closely at the field of Jewish Studies in the USA.¹³ They find that women (who have earned the majority of humanities Ph.D.s since 1990 [American Academy of Arts and Sciences n.d.; see Weeden, Thébaud, and Gelbgiser 2017]) are under-represented not only in citations, but as editors, authors, full and associate professors (taking longer to be promoted), endowed chairs, prestigious fellowships and appointments; and they are over-represented in academic service positions and in having caretaking duties outside the profession. Regarding citation, they found clear gender-bias in citation practices: ‘In Jewish studies journals, 19.3% of male authors’ citations were to scholarship by women, whereas 34.7% of female authors’ citations were to scholarship by women. In religious studies, men cited women at roughly the same rate (19.0%), while women cited women in 41.4% of their citations’ (Heschel and Imhoff Forthcoming, Ch. 1). The paucity of data on adjunct, contract, and sessional faculty members itself indexes another important dimension of this problem of representation.

The fact that women, BIPOC and genderqueer authors are cited less often is part of a vicious circle: it explains in part why these authors do not turn up as often in searches for relevant sources. We cannot avoid the issue by saying we cite who we find, when white, male voices are the easiest to find. Affirmative-action citation practices involve, first, paying attention to the identities of those we cite, and, second, proactively looking for broader sets of sources. We can begin by noting the various functions of citation: e.g., establishing one’s primary sources; acknowledging sources of and influences on one’s ideas; situating one’s discussion in relation to others; pointing to a single fact, a complex claim, an argument, or a broad theoretical framework for agreement, praise, supplementation, disagreement, critique, dismissal etc.; acknowledging and publicizing one’s own previous work or that of networked colleagues; making (ideally) legitimate appeals to authority; etc. (Engler 2014, 198; Imhoff 2024, 267).

The easiest way to start addressing this moral issue is to respond to a potential threat that affects us all. Put the following facts together: (i) university administrators are placing greater emphasis on comparative assessment and accountability, with citation counts being a central tool for this; and (ii) authors in the humanities cite less than authors in the social sciences and far less than authors in the natural sciences, which is only one reason that existing bibliometric measures are not well oriented to assessing scholarship in the humanities (Engler 2014; Franssen and Wouters 2019; Linmans 2010; Nederhof 2006; Van Leeuwen 2013). As a matter of self-interest and ethics, all scholars in SoR should cite each other’s work more: this is a matter of survival as well as ethics. In addition, all SoR authors could make their work more easily accessible, and so citable, by making their titles less poetic and more descriptive: on average, article titles in the humanities are less ‘informative’ than those in the natural and social sciences (based on the number of ‘substantive’ words, i.e., excluding articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs) (Yitzhaki 1997).

The problem of biased citation comes baked into existence scholarly practices, like peer review. Elizabeth Pérez underlines that scholars are ‘taught to ‘cite upward,’ or give credit to more favorably placed or renowned scholars with whom they would want to be socially and conceptually connected,’ which often involves a form of ‘ancestor veneration practices’; and she notes that ‘peer-reviewing structures as currently configured (with a paucity of BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, and other people of color—in referee pools) militate against the ‘calling out’ of scholars for both citational refusal and plagiarism’ (Pérez 2024, 190, 187; see Bailey and Trudy 2018; Smith and Garrett-Scott 2021). Conversation might begin by addressing a complex question: what might affirmative-action peer-review look like when double- and triple-blind processes fail to compensate for biases? A crucial issue is the need to include voices from the Global South in these discussions, especially those that bear on policy-making debates (Jacob 2020).

Journals as business models – issues of ownership

Any discussion of journals raises issues of power, money, and other resources. The location of a journal like Religion – owned by a major multinational corporation and marketed primarily to relatively well-funded libraries in wealthy countries – reflects and maintains cultural, institutional, and economic inequalities. The dominance of English is a hurdle for scholars around the world. The cost of subscriptions and physical copies of publications limits access to disciplinary discussions. And the very idea of SoR as a ‘discipline’ – with its norms of scholarly discourse, style, and citation – is constructed within a privileged historical and institutional context. Linguistic, institutional, and economic dominance converge in a manner that privileges certain voices in the global scholarly community: ‘The top-tier journals and the major universities […] constitute a kind of de facto citation cartel, colluding in a shared economy of cultural, social, and scientific capital’ (Brunton 2020, 248). As we often discuss as co-editors, editing a major academic journal involves mains sales, in Sartre’s sense.¹⁴

Religion’s rather unusual institutional history is a reflection of corporate convergence in the publishing industry. While most prominent journals have stayed with their original publishers – Numen with Brill, JAAR with OUP, HR with University of Chicago Press – Religion has changed hands repeatedly. Started by enthusiastic scholars, who considered it their collective enterprise, it was initially published by Oriel Press (1971–1972), a minor UK publishing company. It was purchased by Routledge & Kegan Paul (1973–1980) and then transferred to Academic Press (1981–2000). In 2000, Harcourt, Brace & World – the company that had acquired Academic Press in 1969 – was bought by the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. During the IAHR congress in Toronto in 2010, it was rumored that the journal we were editing was up for sale (the representative of a publisher with which we had published other works mentioned that it had been offered to their company). Shortly afterwards we were informed that Religion was sold to Taylor & Francis (under its Routledge brand), where the journal has been situated since 2011. This global publishing company also owns other SoR journals like The Journal of Contemporary Religion, Material Religion and Religion, Brain & Behavior.

While scholars tend to look at journals as a forum for academic debates and outlets for their research, they are a commodity and source of profit for publishers. Compared to monographs and edited volumes (unless subsidized), subscription-based journals are a lucrative business model with a relatively dependable cash flow. Hence, publishers are interested in constantly launching new journals and they are eager for the editors to maintain high standards (granted a certain divergence in what this means), so that subscriptions increase or at least remain constant, and to provide sufficient content to meet contractual obligations with customers (mainly libraries). In our experience, publishing too many pages is not a problem for publishers: publishing too few is. Other journals have been pressured to increase the number of issues per year. This results in a degree of competition between journals: the number of journals increases, but we see no correlated increase in the number of quality submissions (if anything the reverse, as scholars become more overworked). With the transition to predominantly online publishing, the relevant units have changed from minimum page numbers per year to a minimum number of published articles per year (irrespective of length). For publishers, editors are in the business of ensuring an adequate supply of product.

In the case of Religion, the publisher (Taylor & Francis) appoints the editors; and we, as editors, are free to appoint the members of the editorial board. Being enthusiastic scholars, the founders of Religion did not draw up legal documents that would prevent the commodification of ‘their’ journal. Our present contracts with the publisher stipulate that we can be fired if we fail to deliver the expected product. (We cannot disclose particular details here.) This is, sadly, what happened to our predecessor, Robert Segal, in 2007 (Stausberg and Engler 2008, 4). (His American co-editor, Thomas Ryba, and several board members resigned in solidarity.) Other journals have different arrangements. Numen, for example, is owned by the International Association for the History of Religions, but it is published by Brill (though the corresponding Numen book series is owned by Brill). Hence, editors are appointed by the IAHR. Similarly, editors of JAAR operate on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. Even though it prides itself as being an international journal, HR traditionally has editors based at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Open access

The growth of Open Access (OA) publications is making scholarly work more accessible to a global audience without the barrier of subscription fees. This has challenged the subscription-based business model. At the same time, universities and other funding agencies have exerted pressure on scholars to publish their work OA. Importantly, in 2018 ‘a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality.’¹⁵ The initiative is built around Plan S, where research funders ‘mandate that access to research publications that are generated through research grants that they allocate, must be fully and immediately open and cannot be monetised in any way.’¹⁶ This contributed to increasing the demand for OA publishing models.

There are several OA models:

1. Gold OA: No subscription fees. Articles are freely available to readers immediately upon publication. Authors (often subsidized by their institutions) pay article processing charges (APCs) to cover publication costs. These tend to vary from a few hundred to as much as three thousand US dollars.

2. Hybrid OA: This model combines both subscription-based and open access publishing. Authors can choose to make their individual articles open access within a subscription-based journal by paying APCs, while the majority of articles remain behind a paywall. Major research grants often require OA dissemination, with part of the grant being dedicated to paying APCs under gold or hybrid models. For example, European cOAlition S funders allow their funding money to be used for publishing in hybrid journals in the framework of ‘transformative arrangements’, meant to encourage a transition of subscription-funded journals beyond paywalls.

3. Diamond OA: Also known as platinum or community-supported OA, makes articles fully available with no charges to readers or authors. Funding for publishing is typically provided by academic institutions, libraries, or non-profit organizations. This model in particular has been endorsed by cOAlition S.¹⁷ Zygon recently left Wiley (with its hybrid model) to be part of the stable of journals with the diamond-OA Open Library of Humanities. Zygon was able to do this because its legal ownership remained out of the hands of the publisher: it is ‘community-governed by a not-for-profit scholarly corporation’ (Vega 2024).

4. Green OA: Authors can publicly self-archive a version of their manuscript in an institutional or subject-specific repository or on a personal website. This work is fully accessible via the Internet with no charge. Contracts with publishers specify conditions: (i) which type(s) of repository or site; (ii) postable version (usually before or after peer review, but almost never the final formatted publication version); and (iii) embargo period (authors might need to wait, usually six to eighteen months, before archiving).

5. Bronze OA: Articles are openly available, either as part of hybrid journals’ offerings, on preprint servers or on institutional websites. This sometimes offers immediate access to pre-review research findings (primarily in the sciences). This category includes ‘free access’ material, which publishers choose to make available for as long as they wish, but which is not ‘open access’ (guaranteed to remain available).

The push for OA publication is growing. As of Jan 1, 2024, UK Research and Innovation requires that all UKRI-funded articles, chapters, and monographs be published in OA venues (UKRI 2023). In the USA, the results of federally funded research must be OA by 2026 (White House 2022). This makes knowledge more accessible. At the same time, because large publishers have the financial leverage to dominate OA through the Gold model, it also runs the risk of concentrating ownership of knowledge:

With paid open access, the academy is being asked, in effect, to subsidize the commercial sector’s use of university-research outputs with no reciprocal financial contribution. …] [T]he new policies may unintentionally contribute to greater consolidation in academic publishing – and encourage commercial publishers to value quantity over quality and platforms over people. Unless the new open-access policies are accompanied by direct investment from funders, governments, and universities in nonprofit publishers and publishing infrastructure, they could pose a threat to smaller scholarly and scientific societies and university presses, and ultimately to trust in published knowledge. (Kember and Brand 2023)

A discussion of some specific journals in SoR (including Religion) will illustrate the range of models.

During the early internet age, digital Open Access publishing seemed like an easy thing to do: use server space provided by your university, build a website, and run the journal as part of your permanent full-time job as a university employee (or as a hobby). This is, basically, how the Marburg Journal of Religion was born in 2000. In the above typology it would count as a Diamond OA journal. The man behind its birth and upkeep is Michael Pye, professor (emeritus) of SoR at Marburg University, who during this time (1995–2000) also served as the president of the IAHR. Incidentally, Pye was part of the group around Smart that had started Religion three decades earlier. His journal seemed to promise a new start, free from the interference of commercial publishing houses. His experience as a (co-)editor of Religion and his wide network as (former) president of the IAHR were invaluable resources. Pye is to be congratulated: the Marburg Journal of Religion continues to exist and has published one issue almost every year (occasionally even two). The length of the issues varies considerably; e.g., volume 24 [2022] has 16 articles, volume 23 [2021] only two. No issue came out in 2023. (MJR is not indexed by Scopus and so does not appear in Table 2.) The journal is atypical also because it has published articles in a variety of languages. It remains to be seen whether it will survive into a new generation, and whether it will be able to benefit from the recent endorsement of Diamond OA publishing by cOAlition S.

Religion, along with most traditional journals owned by large publishers, uses the hybrid model: the majority of publications are not open access, available on-line behind a paywall and in-print by subscription only; some publications are available through gold open access arrangements; and some are temporarily available, as the publisher’s decides, through bronze open access. In the case of Religion, in terms of bronze access, the publisher agreed to make all editorials and thematic (special) issue introductory essays ‘free access’ (not the permanently guaranteed availability of OA but a temporary availability for whatever period the publisher decides).

The majority of Religion’s authors choose not to pay APCs. For Religion the APC for publishing an OA research article varies by authors’ region: EUR2875 for Europe and USD2990 for the rest of the world (with some exceptions, e.g., AUD4165 for Australia and GBP2392 for the UK).¹⁸ Yet, Religion benefits from the above-mentioned transformative arrangements made by Taylor & Francis with (consortia of) libraries, so that individual APCs are waived for authors based at paying member institutions, such as several prestigious universities in the UK, Australia, and India, but also including consortia from Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia. Authors based at institutions in these countries do not have to pay APCs and their work is automatically published as OA. However, this ‘model has been widely criticized for reinforcing inequities in authorship. The deals lock in more of the library’s limited budget, giving the advantage to commercial publishers and large scholarly societies over smaller, more mission-driven publishers’ (Kember and Brand 2023). In addition, such agreements do not apply to independent researchers living in these countries, so that such scholars need to pay APCs, ironically while without a salary.

OA has a direct impact on article views and citation numbers.¹⁹ This is clear in Religion: the most recent issue (54/2 [2024]) has two articles behind the paywall and five OA articles (with several authors benefiting from the ‘transformational agreements’ described above). At the time of writing this paragraph (May 21, 2024), the average number of views for OA articles is 1210 and for non-OA articles 56.5. Obviously, the former are not 21 times better, more important, or more relevant than the latter. For hybrid journals like Religion, funding creates visibility by purchasing gold OA.

Gold OA and the case of Religions

With the internet becoming increasingly commercialized and research funding agencies insisting that research output be published OA, gold OA has become a lucrative model. The most relevant example for SoR is the journal Religions. (The title choice was odd. Many people confuse Religion and Religions: we receive many messages from authors who have submitted to that other journal, along with a few from authors who submitted there in error, believing they had submitted to Religion.) Religions has published a remarkable number of articles, 7020 since 2010 (6366 listed by Scopus); in 2023 it received 2651 submissions.²⁰ This point deserves underlining: these numbers are radically different from SoR journals. In Religion, for example, We dealt with about 200 submissions in 2023, with the vast majority of these being rejected (either as desk reject or through the peer-review process). Religions publishes sometimes more than 100 articles in a single monthly issue. (The current issue (at the time of writing, issue 15/4 [2024]) includes 134 articles.) Yet, authors (with some exceptions) must pay to publish in Religions, where there is no charge for their publishing in Religion.²¹ The scope of Religions is much broader than that of any SoR journal, covering basically all fields pertaining to religion(s), including theology, religious ethics, history, psychology, sociology and philosophy of religion, along with religion and culture, literature, art, linguistics, health etc.²² While Religion is a generalist journal situated firmly with an academic discipline (SoR), Religions is a hyper-generalist umbrella publication, apparently accepting articles with any connection to religious phenomena, broadly speaking, and so with no disciplinary context. In this sense, it is not a SoR journal. Religions started as a quarterly journal in 2010, moving to monthly publication in 2016.²³ The number of submissions cannot be handled by two editors in chief and a large editorial board, requiring a professional editorial office. None of the traditional publishers, even international ones like Taylor & Francis, offer such services.

Our Scopus data set raises an interesting point. Our experience as editors is that we receive an increasing number of submissions from China, but extremely few make it to publication. (China serves as an example, not a unique case.) According to Scopus data, Religion has published a total of two articles from China in its over half a century of existence. In our experience (perhaps generalizable to other journals) there are three key related reasons for why Religion has published few articles by Chinese scholars: a lack of engagement with the published SoR literature; a narrow focus on specific aspects of the local or national religious landscape; and insufficient comparative, methodological, conceptual, or theoretical interest for a generalist journal like Religion.²⁴ Issues of style and writing are also prominent, but these would be remediable if they were the only issue. The limited pool of qualified reviewers, bridging local and disciplinary expertise, is also an issue. Of course, none of these issues are particular to scholarship from China. In sum, we see interesting submissions from Chinese and other scholars from many parts of the world, but less often than we wish do we see work that succeeds in situating itself in appropriate relation to disciplinary standards, literatures, issues, and discourses. The average proportion of published articles by scholars from China across the 49 journals in our data set (excluding Religions) is 0.45% (as a proportion of all countries of author-origin, represented in Scopus data for each journal). None of those journals reached the 1.5% level for publications from China. In Religions, the proportion of published articles by scholars from China is 6.3%, almost 15 times as high as the average across the other 49 journals. China is the third highest national source of articles for Religions, after the USA and UK (Table 4). Taking a different line, among all 50 journals in our data set, Religions published over 81% of all articles from China. If we take into account the number of years for which each journal has data available in Scopus (not always the date of founding of the journal), Religions has published 462 articles from China during a period of over 13 years (about 35 per year); the other 49 journals published 106 articles from China over a cumulative total of over 1375 years (about 0.08 per year). In sum, Religions has published over 438 times as many articles from China per year as the average for other SoR journals in our data set.²⁵ It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that editorial standards at Religions diverge radically from those at other SoR journals.²⁶ Part of the explanation for why so many articles from China are published in Religions is that it is a megajournal, not a disciplinary journal. Megajournals have five key criteria: full open access; funded by APCs; broad subject area; large publishing volume; and peer review in terms of a threshold of soundness, not importance or contribution to relevant debates (which most sharply distinguishes Religions from SoR journals): ‘Mega-journals are …] increasingly dependent for sustained growth on Chinese authors, who now contribute 25% of all articles …]’ (Björk 2018).

This explanation might also be, to some extent, the related one of different balances between two conflicting sets of evaluative criteria: discipline-specific academic excellence and corporate profit. Religions’ publisher, MDPI was – wrongly and temporarily – categorized as a publisher of predatory journals in 2014.²⁷ It is true that MDPI ‘has attracted criticism from researchers and administrators who claim that it pursues operational speed to the expense of editorial rigor’ (Petrou 2022). A number of critical points have been raised about MDPI journals.²⁸ Many of these are criticisms also made of predatory journals: extremely fast review and acceptance rates (‘hundreds of different editorial teams, on dozens of different topics, and one common feature: about 35 days from submission to acceptance, including revisions’); lower average rejection rates; disregard of negative review reports; high self-citation and intra-MDPI citation rates (articles in MDPI journals citing articles in the same and other MDPI journals); journals that mimic the names of established journals, etc. (Crosetto 2021; see Anonymous 2023; Oviedo-García 2021; Petrou 2020). The MDPI business model emphasizes special issues: the number of special issues (in MDPI journals with an impact factor) rose from 388 in 2013 to 39587 in 2021; thirty-two MDPI journals each had an average of more than one open special issue per day in 2021, weekends included (Crosetto 2021). MDPI appears to be aggressive in pressing university administrators to rein in academic critics (Beall 2017). At the same time, it is undeniable that MDPI publishes many good papers, and that its editing and its journal websites are effective and efficient. The quality of its journals varies, and authors and reviewers have a range of experiences.²⁹

While Religions, along with other MDPI journals, does not clearly fit the definition of a predatory publication, it is far from clear that it is committed primarily to quality scholarship, as opposed to profit: MDPI journals have ‘some features of the definition of predatory journals …], as their behaviour indicated that they prioritize self-interest, forsaking the best editorial and publication practices’ (Oviedo-García 2021, 417). There is no sharp line between these two groups, outright predatory and leaning in that direction:

[C]omplicating definitions of predatory publishing, are the existence of what could be called grey journals and publishers, occupying quasi-legitimate niches between whitelists and blacklists. Such journals possess borderline, uncertain, contested and/or ambiguous legitimacy. Frontiers and MDPI are large OA-only publishers that are arguably exemplars of grey publishing. Both publishers have been successful in recent years, as evidenced by rising APCs, founding of new journals and increases in publishing volume. However, both publishers have faced criticism and controversy over business practices, particularly regarding excessively permissive peer review and subordination of academic functions to business interests. (Siler 2020)³⁰

None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that major publishers – like Elsevier, Springer and Taylor & Francis, or even medium-sized publishers like De Gruyter and Brill – are interested in scholarship at the expense of profit. Our point is that, perhaps because of the journal’s history, Religion values and is able to adhere to traditional standards of academic quality to a greater extent than appears to be the case in Religions.

Out of the 134 articles in issue 15/4 (2023) of Religions, only six are not part of special issues nor of ‘thematic sections’. Special issues (which we call thematic issues), also play a large role in Religion: given our standards of quality, we would be unable to run the journal publishing only uninvited open submissions. Religion typically publishes two to three thematic issues per year. On rare occasions, the editors spearhead thematic issues: examples from the past five years are ‘Emic Categories and New Paths: Case Studies in the Scholarly Use of Indigenous Concepts’ (52/1 [2022] and ‘Religion at 50: Pasts and Futures’ (50/1 [2020]). Usually, we are approached by colleagues who propose thematic issues. If their formal proposal is accepted – a process involving the editorial board – guest-editors solicit and manage articles, submitting them as a group for peer review. This is more time-consuming for us as editors than is the case with ordinary articles, with the additional layer of negotiations with the guest-editors.

Religions exemplifies a radically different model. Over the years, its editorial office, run by MDPI, has actively reached out to large segments of the academic community, inviting them to put together thematic issues, often on topics suggested by the editorial office, based on the profile of the respective scholars but often in fields unrelated to their expertise. We know of few colleagues who have not been approached by Religions in this manner, many several times. Religions’ editors are generous in sometimes waiving author processing charges for senior scholars who serve as editors and for some junior scholars. Given the promises of swift turnaround times and speedy OA publication, unexpected positive attention, and the opportunity to involve one’s academic network, it is not surprising that many colleagues have accepted this invitation. Many have, in private communication, expressed appreciation for the publishing process and the assistance provided by the editorial office. Many colleagues have agreed to author articles for such special issues out of solidarity with esteemed guest editors. As a result, the field has been flooded by special-issue articles. Many of the articles are of a good quality and valuable. Religions’ modus operandi has also contributed to actively involving larger segments of the academic community in journal publishing and editing, and it has to some extent leveled the playing field. It remains to be seen to what extent Religions can sustain its growth; once everyone has done their special issue, what is next? Though pressures from funding sources to publish OA are increasing, the number of externally funded projects appears to be static: the cumulative result seems likely to be a slight and limited shift. In the end, perhaps the most charitable conclusion regarding Religions – given the markedly unusual number and distribution of articles that it publishes – is that it is not a SoR journal; it is a megajournal with a nominal emphasis on any aspect of any topic related to ‘religion’ in a broad sense, but with no interest in contributing to disciplinary identity or debates.

Peer review

The unsung heroes of any academic journal are its referees. Peer review is the core mechanism of (most) modern academic journals. The standard model of peer-review is double-blind review of finished articles (neither reviewers or authors know the others’ identity). Triple-blind is sometimes used (with editors also not knowing the identity of authors). Some journals, along with digital platforms, are experimenting with alternative forms of peer review: e.g.,

• Open peer review: identities of the reviewer and author are known to each other;

• Signed peer review: reviewers names are shared with authors;

• Transparent peer review: reviewer reports, author responses, and editorial decision letters are published alongside articles;

• Pre-publication peer review: articles are first published and then continually reviewed and revised in the public domain (prominent in scientific and medical areas);³¹

• Collaborative peer review: multiple reviewers work together to assess a manuscript, often interacting directly with the author(s) to discuss the article and revisions;

• Pre-registration peer review: authors pre-register their study's hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans before conducting research, adding this initial peer-review step to the pre-publication review of a completed article;

• Portable peer review: reviews can be transferred between journals;³²

• Crowdsourced peer review: a public process allowing any community member to contribute to article review, not just selected experts (see Nguyen 2018);

• AI-assisted peer review: AI checks for plagiarism, statistical errors, or data manipulation, supplementing human review.

We are not currently thinking about introducing any such alternative model for Religion. We do not think that the investment pays off, in terms of overall increased quality, and that remains our primary goal. Any such change would need to be implemented consistently, for all articles, and this would dramatically alter relations with reviewers. The role of referees would need to be redefined from the moment they are asked to perform the task. However, not all potential referees would be comfortable with this redefinition of their role and with the potential public visibility of their contributions. More fundamentally, the increase in number of journals is leading to increased demand for referees at a time when Humanities programs are losing faculty members (with some programs cut completely) and junior faculty members and colleagues are operating under precarious conditions, with greater pressure to publish with less time to do under-appreciated volunteer work like peer-review.³³ Now is not the time to ask colleagues to invest more time in order to produce more polished, publishable peer-review reports.

The review system has arrived at a breaking point, given the increased number of incoming articles, the greater number of journals, increased pressures to publish, the tactics of journals like Religions that flood the field with publications, each requiring review-reports, and also by growing attempts by scholars from especially Middle Eastern and Asian countries seeking to publish in European and North American journals (a laudable ambition facilitated by better translation software). We see this affecting our editorial works in several ways. (1) The increase in submissions delays all aspects of the editorial process that is constrained by available time and resources. (In Religion, the number of unsolicited submissions grew by 64 per cent from 2021 to 2023, a trend that has continued for the first months of 2024.) (2) Referees have less time and get more requests to review, which makes the process of getting at least two good review reports per submission much more time consuming, sometimes prohibitively so (with decisions being made later than we wish, sometimes based on a single report in addition to the editors’ assessment). (3) More scholars’ email addresses are blocked by institutional firewalls, which reduces the pool of potential reviewers. (4) The increased number of review requests leads to delays, with reviewers taking longer to submit their reports. (5) Referees more often fall silent (sometimes after repeated promises of swift delivery), so that the process must start all over again. These problems do not suggest that we should abandon the existing peer-review process, but they have made editorial work more challenging. For example, these factors influence our editorial decisions regarding desk rejects (articles deemed weak or inappropriate for the journal, such that they are not sent out for review): we make more desk rejects than we would like. This reflects a tension between our responsibilities to provide useful feedback to authors and to not impose undue burdens on the busy schedules of potential referees.

Conclusion

Religion remains a leading scholarly journal in SoR. Like all publication venues in these changing times, it faces the multifaceted challenge of maintaining its relevance and prestige in a dynamic landscape. We discuss and try to respond proactively to many issues: the growing importance of international scholarship, the practical and ethical need to integrate diverse scholarly voices, new models of peer-review, the multiplication of competing journals, the rise of megajournals, burgeoning digital publication, a variety of open access models, the implications of predatory and gray-area journals, etc. Religion’s basic mandate – presenting scholarship that is firmly rooted in the discipline of SoR and that passes a high threshold of academic rigor – remains unchanged, even as changing business models reshape the face of academic publishing, notably the prominence of a hybrid open-access model.

An important development, among several that we did not have space to discuss, is the potential impact of ‘AI.’ Large-language module tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others, are enhancing research capabilities and altering the dynamics of publication and peer review. These systems, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, offer significant assistance in data analysis, literature reviews, and even in drafting and revising scholarly articles. Their integration into the academic workflow presents both opportunities and challenges, necessitating ongoing discussions about their ethical use, the potential for bias in their outputs, and the implications for academic integrity and originality. (Topic sentence aside, this paragraph was written by ChatGPT 4.)

In sum, this status report on one of our discipline’s most important journals has two messages: business as usual continues apace; but the context and meaning of ‘usual’ is shifting at an accelerating rate.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alessandro Saggioro, editor of the journal Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, and Angela Bernardo for suggesting the value of reflecting on the journal at this time. A separate article of ours will appear in a special issue of SMSR in late 2025, as part of the centennial celebrations for the establishment of the chair of the History of Religions at Sapienza University and its affiliated journal.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Engler

Steven Engler is professor of religious studies at Mount Royal University, Canada.

Michael Stausberg

Michael Stausberg is a professor of religion at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Notes

1 Bibliometric data underline that Religion is the most-cited generalist journal in the discipline, both over its lifetime and during the past five years, with a solid global reach, in terms of the nationalities and regions of its contributors (see Tables 2 and 4 and Engler 2014, 207–208).

2 Stausberg and Engler 2008, 3.

34 For European regions see https://is.gd/8fZKWf.

3 https://is.gd/lAcGtH

4 For our position, see Engler and Stausberg 2011.

5 There are some exceptions to the paywall. Taylor & Francis has several programs supporting researchers in the Global South, like the STAR Program (Special Terms for Authors and Researchers). The latter program ‘supports researchers in the Global South who don’t have access to the resources of a university or research institution, by giving them free access to journal articles. STAR users include independent researchers, retired academics, and professionals working for NGOs’ https://is.gd/AHhp9J. Indonesia and India, for example, are eligible for the STAR Program. Note that this program targets independent scholars only.

35 See Appendix for journal abbreviations. This list is not meant to be complete or formally representative. All data are from Scopus (accessed April 30–May 3, 2024). except the h5 index (Google Scholar, 30-04-24). Scopus data (which are reported to Elsevier by journal publishers) are often partial and tend to undercount the number of articles (S. Engler 2014, 207–11). The table excludes journals not listed in Scopus. e.g. Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni, Horizonte: Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciências da Religião, Journal of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, Journal of Ritual Studies, etc. In other cases, data are too partial to be worth including (e.g., Scopus lists 36 items published in Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft since 1993, with Germany listed as the nationality of only three of those authors). Reflecting Religion’s Aims & Scope statement (https://is.gd/lAcGtH), we exclude journals that focus narrowly on theology, phychology of religion, religion/spirituality and medicine, quantitative sociology and (traditional) philosophy of religion. ‘Mean (top 10)’ is the average citation number of the top ten most-cited articles. ‘h5’ is the number of articles, published in the last five years, that have received that same number of citations (e.g., Religion, over the last half-decade, has published 17 articles that have received at least 17 citations each). ‘Start’ is the starting date for Scopus data (excluding single outlier items), which is only sometimes the founding date of a journal or new series (e.g. RHR and RHE were founded in 1880 and 1900, respectively, with Scopus data from 2008 and 2002). ‘Art’ (articles) is the Scopus categorization, which often excludes things that could be categorized as articles (conference papers. short reports etc.). ‘OS (%)’ is the proportion of all Open Access items relative to the number of articles. ‘Engl%’ refers to the percentage of all items published in English. Regional data were calculated as a proportion of all published items with identified author-nationality (excluding the often significant ‘Undefined’ category). The Russian Federation is classified as part of Europe.

6 Bibliometric data collection and analysis, along with any errors or omissions, are by Engler.

7 Counting the Russian Federation and Turkey as part of Europe.

36 Diversity is measured using Simpson’s diversity index (see n.14). Date ranges refer to data available in Scopus, not necessarily to the founding of a given journal. ‘n’ is the number of items classified as ‘articles’ in Scopus; this category varies in number and type depending on data reported by publishers.

8 This looks at how well distributed the numbers (n) of articles in a given journal from various countries are relative to the total number (N) of articles in that journal. It does not take into account the number of countries from which no articles were published.

9 Apologies if our count, confirmed to the extent possible by web search, fails to respect authors’ identities.

10 Hovland and Halvorson 2024, 168–169; see Chakravartty et al. 2018; Mot and Cockayne 2017.

11 The issues are complex. Here are three examples. A study of psychology journals found that men are the majority of editors of special issues and that women are less likely to be authors and first-authors in these male-edited issues (Formanowicz et al. 2023). Male authors and male-led teams experience more article rejections, reflecting over-confidence in journal choice, but this strategy ‘gives them a greater probability of ending up in a prestigious journal’ (Amirkhanyan, Krawczyk, and Wilamowski 2023, 5921). It appears not to be the case that, as solo authors, men cite themselves more than women (Dion, Mitchell, and Sumner 2020).

12 PowerPoint slides at https://is.gd/EQcVtP ; see Thompson 2019; Imhoff 2019; Heschel 2019.

13 Thanks to Imhoff for sharing the first chapter of their book in progress (Heschel and Imhoff Forthcoming).

14 One way in which we compensate somewhat for this positioning is an informal process of what we call formative review: some submissions from authors beyond the North Atlantic university axis are promising and exciting, despite falling far short of disciplinary standards; in such cases we try to find senior scholars willing to write reviews (collegial, not patronizing) with an eye to helping the authors converge on the particular (not better) academic norms of the discipline. As a general rule, we try to offer such comments ourselves, even in the case of many desk rejects.

15 https://www.coalition-s.org/about/

16 https://www.coalition-s.org/why-plan-s/

17 https://www.coalition-s.org/diamond-open-access/

18 For APCs at Routledge journals, see https://is.gd/PknLAF

19 On the correlation between open access and higher citation rates, see Engler 2014, 200.

20 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/stats

21 ‘An article processing charge (APC) of CHF 1800 (Swiss Francs) applies to papers accepted after peer review.’ https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/apc

22 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/about

23 Religions has achieved remarkable bibliometric success in a relatively short time, with many highly cited articles (Table 2), in part reflecting the fact that it is fully open access. The journal claims an h5 index of 2538, i.e., the number of articles cited at least five times. Google Scholar lists the journal’s h5 index as 38. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/stats; https://is.gd/CeYVWy

24 For Religion’s emphasis on these latter issues, see the journal’s Aims & Scope statement: https://is.gd/lAcGtH

25 This could potentially change: Chinese scholarship is gaining increasing international recognition and publishing success. A key factor is international collaboration (Zhao, Liang, and Li 2024). This suggests that the humanities will lag behind, with their tendency for solo authorship (see Engler 2014), 199). Chinese policy is shifting somewhat, from a distorting emphasis on quantitative metrics, like the journal impact factor, to qualitative assessments and a greater emphasis on domestic journals (Wang, Halffman, and Horbach 2023, 55).

26 Some universities recommend that faculty members be cautious with MDPI journals, assessing editorial standards on a case-by-case basis: e.g., Charles Sturt University in Australia cites ‘concerns expressed about publishing ethics and varying levels of quality’ (https://is.gd/MjcVrn).

27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI

28 Chinese scholars are also ambivalent about MDPI journals: for some, they are ‘perceived to massively publish “trashy” papers rapidly’; for others, ‘not bad, … [with] professional editorial teams and a specialized division of labour’ (Wang, Halffman, and Horbach 2023, 62).

29 For one relatively balanced perspective, see Lantsoght 2023.

30 For further critical assessments, see https://is.gd/k8BJL1, https://is.gd/BCFkG0 and https://is.gd/iVzEqD

31 See for example eLife https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review

32 Axios Review performs peer review for authors and then shops their articles to selected target journals. https://is.gd/QPnsQM The pioneer of the portable model, Peerage of Science, was founded in 2011 but went out of business in 2017. https://is.gd/aPAuNc

33 Sometimes paying scholars for their reviews is presented as a remedy, but we don’t agree with this: payment would still be inadequate (the main scarcity being time); this would privilege economically powerful publishers and be a very heavy burden for independent journals (like the Marburg Journal of Religion discussed above); the production cost of journals would rise, hence also APCs or subscriptions; and it would put editors in the awkward position of having to decide whether referees are worth their fee.

Appendix: Journals included in our bibliometric data set (alphabetical by abbreviation)

ASSR – Archives de sciences sociales des religions (Éditions de l’EHESS, France; ISSN 0335-5985)

Ars – Aries (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 1567-9896)

CB – Contemporary Buddhism (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1463-9947)

CI – Contemporary Islam (Springer, Germany; ISSN 1872-0218)

C&R – Culture and Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1475-5610)

CRR – Critical Research on Religion (SAGE, UK; ISSN 2050-3032)

HR – History of Religions (U Chicago P, USA; ISSN 0018-2710)

IJLAR – International Journal of Latin American Religions (Springer, Germany; ISSN 2509-9965)

IJPR – International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1050-8619)

IJSNR – International Journal for the Study of New Religions (Equinox, UK; ISSN 2041-9511)

IR – Implicit Religion (Equinox, UK; ISSN 1463-9955)

JAR – Journal of Africana Religions (Johns Hopkins UP, USA; ISSN 2165-5413)

JAAR – Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Oxford UP, UK; ISSN 0002-7189)

JASR – Journal for the Academic Study of Religion (Equinox, Australia; ISSN 2047-704X)

JCR – Journal of Contemporary Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1353-7903)

JCSR – Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (Equinox, UK; ISSN 2049-7555)

JFSR – Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Johns Hopkins UP, USA; ISSN 8755-4178)

JHS – Journal of Hindu Studies (Oxford UP. UK; ISSN 1756-4255)

JJRS – Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Japan; 0304-1042)

JLR – Journal of Law and Religion (Oxford UP, UK; ISSN 0748-0814)

JMJS – Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (Routledge. UK; ISSN 1472-5886)

JMR – Journal of Media and Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1534-8415)

JR – Journal of Religion (U Chicago P, USA; ISSN 0022-4189)

JRA – Journal of Religion in Africa (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 0022-4200)

JRAT – Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (Brill, Austria; ISSN 2365-3140)

JRE – Journal of Religious Ethics (Wiley, UK; ISSN 0384-9694)

JREu – Journal of Religion in Europe (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 1874-8910)

JRH – Journal of Religious History (Wiley, UK; ISSN 1467-9809)

JRMDC – Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 2165-9214)

JSRI – Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies (Academic Society for the Research of Religions and Ideologies, Romania; ISSN 1583-0039)

JSRNC – Journal for the Study of Religion,Nature and Culture (Equinox, UK; 1749-4907)

JSSR – Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Wiley, UK; ISSN 0021-8294)

MJ – Modern Judaism (Johns Hopkins UP, USA; ISSN 0276-1114)

MR – Material Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 1743-2200)

MTSR – Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 0943-3058)

Num – Numen (Brill, Netherlands; ISSN 0029-5973)

NR – Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions (University of California Press, USA; ISSN 1092-6690)

PR – Politics and Religion (Cambridge UP, UK; ISSN 1755-0483)

R&S – Religion and Society (Berghan, USA; ISSN 2150-9298)

RBB – Religion, Brain & Behavior (Routledge, UK; ISSN 2153-5981)

Rel – Religion (Routledge, UK; ISSN 0048-721X)

RHE – Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique (Université Catholique de Louvain, France; ISSN 0035-2381)

RHR – Revue de l’histoire des religions (Collège de France, France; ISSN 0035-1423)

Rls – Religions (MDPI, Switzerland; ISSN 2077-1444)

RRR – Review of Religious Research (Springer, Germany; ISSN 2211-4866)

RS – Religious Studies (Cambridge UP, UK; ISSN 0034-4125)

RSS – Religion, State and Society (Routledge, UK; ISSN 0963-7494)

SoCo – Social Compass (SAGE, UK; ISSN 0037-7686)

SocR – Sociology of Religion (Oxford UP, UK; ISSN 1069-4404)

SR – Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses (SAGE, UK; ISSN 0008-4298)

SWC – Studies in World Christianity (Johns Hopkins UP. USA; ISSN 1354-9901)

Tem – Temenos (Finnish Society for the Study of Religion, Finland; ISSN 0497-1817)

Zyg – Zygon (Open Library of Humanities, UK; ISSN 0591-2385)