All entries for June 2019

How do I update my Reviewer Interests on my Profile?

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/login

If you are registered as a potential reviewer with Exchanges, listing your research interests is a vital tool for our editors when they are seeking knowledgeable people to consider the quality, content and clarity of a submitted manuscript. However, a frequently asked question here at Exchanges is ‘How do I update my personal profile to include my research interests correctly?’ While you may have added some keywords when you first registered with us, it is possible to add or edit your previously listed interests at any later point too.

1) Firstly, head over to https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/login, and login if necessary.

2) Move your curser over your Profile ID (e.g. garethjjohnson in the example below, although yours will be your personal ID). You can find the Profile ID on the top right-hand of your screen

3) Click on View Profile and you’ll see a range of menu options allowing you to customise various aspects of your Exchanges experience.

4) Click on Rolesand you’ll see a box half way down the screen called Reviewing Interests. Previously added interests may have already been added by yourself or our editors, as shown in the example below.

5) To add more, click in the Reviewing Interests box, and then enter a keywordor phrase. As you type you'll see suggestions, based on what other reviewers have listed as their interests. You canuse these terms, but it is not expected, as we're aware reviewers' interests and fields can be subtly different or nuanced.

6) Press returnto add the new keyword to the list.

7) You’ll see the new keyword or phrase appears in a small grey box, with a pink Xat the end. You can removethis, or any other previously added reviewing interest keyword by clicking on the X.

8) Finally, click on Save to confirmyour changes. Note, if you click away to another menu within your profile, any additions or amendments to your reviewing interests will notbe saved.

Remember, you can repeat this editing process at any point as your professional interests develop, or should you wish to broaden the range of material you’d be prepared to consider peer-reviewing.

If you're not already signed-up as a reviewer with Exchanges, this earlier post explains the easy steps you can take to register your interest with us. You'll be warmly welcomed!

Gareth Johnson : 25 Jun 2019 09:50 |  Tags: Asked Frequently Guide How Interests Personal Profile Questions Reviewers To |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Early Career Editors Learning Experience from Scholar–Led Publishing Involvement

It won’t have escaped most readers’ attention that Exchanges is an early career focussed, scholar-led journal. Given I write about this on a regular schedule in this blog, you’d be a rare visitor had you missed this aspect. As its Editor-in-chief, I passionately believe academics need to take a greater ownership for their publication processes if we are ever to ween ourselves away from the commercialised commodification of the publishing sector. This shift is far from the only consideration if the academy is to acquire a greater agency over publication, but I believe it’s an important one.

However, what might be less apparent, unless you’ve attended one of my lectures or thoroughly read our online guidance material, is how Exchanges serves an educational and professional development role alongside its publishing mission. The developmental role for those people working on the journal has been an intrinsic part since Exchanges founding in 2013 as output from the IAS’ early-career fellows programme. Since day one all members of the editorial board, and associate editors too, are drawn from the early career researcher community here at Warwick and further afield. This means all of us are still learning and growing as scholars in the post-PhD environment.

A key developmental need of course is to enhance our career prospects, which is where Exchanges provides the opportunity to deepen a practical appreciation of the processes, policies and ideologies which operate within the publishing field. Incidentally, serving on Exchanges’ boards delivers this sort of experience in spades, given members of our Board performs a greater ‘hands-on’ role than the more advisory structure of other journals’ boards.

This developmental mission for Exchanges, is a characteristic of the journal to which I’m devoting some considerable thought at the moment, as I’ve two forthcoming public engagements where I’ll be talking about the benefits to scholars from a closer scholarly publishing involvement. One is the session I’ve previously mentioned at the Utopian Studies conference in Prato at the end of June, while the other is a workshop I’m contributing to at the Vitae Conference in London this Autumn. Naturally, I’ll be sharing my slides and experiences from these events here afterwards.

I find though, as I sit down to write the outline for these talks, I’m left wondering to a degree about what exactly people such as my editors gain practically from their contribution of time and labour.

From a personal perspective, I feel I’ve learned more about the importance of patience and persistence with authors and reviewers alike, alongside deepening my practical knowledge of coordinating a publishing ‘empire’. I’ve also been polishing my relationship management skills, which are an essential adjunct to any manging editors’ toolkit. Alongside this, I’ve found it’s been illuminating to witness the authorial styles and voices deployed in our developing manuscript, especially as many diverge considerably from my own academic prose style.

That’s my perspective, and I must acknowledge it’s been understandably coloured by my managerial and editor-in-chief role. Hence, I’ve been talking to Editorial Board members past and present about what they’ve gained from their experience. Unsurprisingly, beyond developing the practical skills, the benefits from broadening their network of professional contacts are aspects which seem so far to be especially valued. However, it is early days and I’m still looking forward to more of my Board sharing their thoughts, and I expect I may well be surprised by some of the comments.

One thing has become clear from this simple critical reflection which is newly minted scholars do perceive benefits exist from taking up the reins to steer academic publishing endeavours. This must in part help explain why Exchanges has always had a steady stream of willing Board and associate editors. And I, for one, am delighted for their every contribution as well.

Gareth Johnson : 12 Jun 2019 12:23 |  Tags: Benefits Editors Publishing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What are the Best Journal Indexing Services for Scholar–Led Journals?

What are the best indexes and article databases for a relatively small scholar led journal to be in? This is the question I’m currently pondering, following a conversation with a prospective author who was surprised we weren’t appearing in more locations. It’s no secret that Exchanges hasn’t traditionally been indexed in many places, more’s the pity. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote the index article in the latest issue was to try and enhance the visibility, and hence esteem, of articles published with us over the years.

Since we added DOIs to articles last year, I’ve been reasonably happy we’ve been working towards making the journal and its contents more discoverable, not to mention more readily and reliably citable. That said, at the back of my mind I’ve been thinking I really need to bite the bullet at some point and start increasing the locations where our articles are currently indexed. Hence, the author who asked some, I’ll be honest rather pointed, questions about why we weren’t indexed more widely brought the matter up my priority list to tackle. However, it’s not something that’s easy to resolve, as there are various challenges around getting indexed, and there are three which I find are especially vexatious.

The Art of Hegemonic Dominance

The first relates to one of my favourite topics: the domination of the academic publishing field by a limited number of commercial actors [1]. In this ‘market place’ [2], there’s a commercial driver for publishers to ensure that their own hegemonic dominance and profitability continues. One way this can be achieved is by denying non-commercial journals entrance into the organs of esteem metrics, e.g. databases like the Web of Science or Scopus. Coincidentally these particular indexes are owned by Clarivate Analytics [3] and Elsevier [4], who between them are responsible for a not-inconsiderable volume of scholarly publication as well.

Here there’s a bit of a futile cycle, where any new journal needs to gain in significance (what I’d call ‘reputational esteem capital’) which it builds through attracting higher quality/impactful papers. Higher esteem papers themselves are drawn to be published in titles which already have the highest esteem capital possible [5]. To increase this ranking a publisher needs to have their articles more readily discovered, and hence exposed through appearance in the most regularly used indexes. However, entrance to most of these big indexes is restricted to those journals who are already ‘significant’ in terms of their content. Hence, there’s no competitive advantage for the corporate owners of journals and indexes to let small scholar-led titles enter their indexes and grow in esteem; indeed there’s every argument this would essentially act as a counter to their continued dominance. It’s the ‘No Homer’s’ Club effect all over again.

Okay, some indecent, smaller scale journals have made their way past these gatekeepers and entered the ‘hallowed’ indexes, partly because of their longevity or contents. Unlike many short-term scholar-led publications [6], Exchanges has the advantage that we’ve been published for some years now, and have a body of work which slowly but surely is gaining citations. Citations are, for the most part, the sine qua non within publishing, the basic element from which esteem capital is constructed. So, to a degree we’re slowly but surely aggregating esteem every time we publish a new volume. However, given our focus on championing early career publications, strategically this means we’re unlikely to (typically) have 4* world-class research published with us. Why? Well, it’s a tragic fact that the current configuration of academic career esteem structures compels scholars to seek publication for their most ‘impactful’ works in titles already resplendent with high-esteem. Which means even if an ECR scholar might be tempted to consider publishing their finest work with us, for the good of their own career that’s normally an unlikely occurrence.

It doesn’t mean Exchanges isn’t publishing good, quality assured pieces of research literature. However, it’s likely papers within our journal will only become significant over time as they become more commonly cited, although where the author themselves becomes far more recognised as preeminent in their field there’s a notable upswing in interest in their earlier works. Given the thousands of downloads of our most popular papers, I might conclude that many of our authors may already be well on their way to achieving this sort of status within the Academy. It’s to our benefit certainly in terms of getting over that ‘significance’ hurdle to enter some indexes, but it’s one that takes a long, long time to achieve.

Disciplinarily and Suitability

The second big challenge is more prosaic and concerns the disciplinary fit of journals to particular indexes. The author who promoted my thinking asked specifically about one index which was valued within their particular field. I went away to have a look at this and discovered it only indexed around 160 titles, all of which were clearly a close disciplinary fit. I suspect, unlike the major commercial indexes, that these indexes which are often run by learned societies and other smaller sectoral bodies, would be far less concerned with our esteem credentials. However, Given Exchanges is explicitly interdisciplinary in terms of our content my strong suspicion is they’d be less happy to incorporate us because we’re not seen as a core, niche title for any discipline [7]. It tends (although not exclusively) to be the bigger, corporate indexes which are multidisciplinary. Hence, frustratingly our core mission to champion and promote research from all disciplinary traditions counts against us and our inclusion here.

Mechanistic Challenges

The third and final challenge is simply one of practicality and limited time resource. There are a LOT of indexes out there. It would, practically speaking, be a full time job to approach all of these and jump through their various hoops to try and garner entrance. Having glanced at a few of them, even finding a page which explains HOW you can propose your journal for consideration is somewhat obfuscated. I suspect, as discussed in the previous paragraphs, many of these indexes would decline to include us for reasons of esteem or disciplinarity.

Consequently, this could mean a whole lot of work for very little progress or achievement. It might seem like a more minor challenge, but given my role as Editor-in-Chief of Exchanges has a myriad of other responsibilities associated with it, I’m not sure how much time I could devote to this quest. As the only employed member of staff for dedicated to Exchanges, it’s not a task I could easily hand off to another member of the Editorial Board. I suspect they’d not be too keen to take it on either, and they do a whole lot of work for me already without a great deal of recompense.

Carry on Indexing

All of which makes me happy that I took the opportunity this week to discuss indexing Exchanges with our Warwick Library Scholarly Communications team. This team provides our back-office and tech support for Exchanges platform, but I’ve increasingly been hoping we can work more closely together on topics of mutual interest. Not simply those for the library and Exchanges, but also for matters of concern for the other journals variously published within the ‘Warwick Journals Family’ [8].

They’ve agreed to help with the practical approaches (hurray) and myself and the Board have been tasked with coming up with a wish list of indexes for them to target on our behalf. Which is what I’ll be drawing together over the next few weeks. Naturally, given the challenges above I’m not expecting overnight success, but I’m hopeful that with a few more indexes tracking our contents that Exchanges can continue to build on its previous successfully published content and increase our esteem in capital. In this way, maybe just maybe, one day we might even get one of the major indexes to take another look at us.

If any of our readers have thoughts, suggestions or advice to share on the subtle art of getting your journal index, as always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Further Reading

Scholastica, 2017. Scholastica Blog, 21 June. https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/index-types-for-academic-journal/

Endnotes

[1] Cf. my professional publications and thesis, which modesty prevents me linking to here.

[2] Ideologically I reject the idea of academic publishing being configured or perceived as a market. Sadly this commodification based ideal represents the common argot when one starts considering the competitive aspect the academic domain has acquired.

[3] Owner of (among other concerns) Thompson Reuters media empire

[4] One of the ‘Big Four’ academic publishers and owners of a sizable chunk of scholarly publishing and research management real-estate

[5] I’m talking here of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), created by Garfield as a metric of ‘significance’ for a journal. Not all journals are graced with a JIF, as they need to be ‘significant’ enough to appear in the Journal Citation Reports. Once again, the futile cycle and exclusionary practices of the academic publishing field are maintained.

[6] Many scholar-led journals which arise, often from a particular cohort of scholars and PGR students, which publish one or two issues before disappearing into obscurity once the reality of sustainable publication practices arise. Quality contents sure, but they’re not around long enough to start building esteem over time.

[7] Unproven, but anecdotally from past editors, I’ve heard that we’ve had limited to zero success previously with other indexers.

[8] It’s a side topic, but I think the Warwick Journals Family are a group of people locally who could work together and share experience a far more systematic and regular way. One more of those tasks I’ve got on the back burner at the moment, as I’ve yet to establish the best way to configure a meeting.

Gareth Johnson : 06 Jun 2019 14:00 |  Tags: Authors Databases Esteem Indexing Journals Led Prestige Scholar Value Visibility |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Après Nous, Le Déluge

The title of this post, drawn from an expression attributed to Madame de Pompadour, traditionally refers to a tipping point, a moment after which unremitting chaos will rain down. Truth be told, it’s actually nothing as disastrous as that in the world of Exchanges today (thankfully). Rather it’s the delight of opening up the OJS submissions list and discovering a large number of new manuscript submissions awaiting me and my editorial team’s scrutiny. I was rather expecting these, given they’re all manuscripts linked to one of our forthcoming special issues, as we have just passed the submission deadline last week.

Nevertheless, it’s a bit more than our normal weekly ingest of new works. Not to mention I’m aware of at least four more authors for the issue who’ve been in touch to ask for brief extensions. Hence, I’m anticipating a few more works as part of the tail end of the ‘deluge’ still to come.

For a relatively small academic journal like Exchanges, getting a large number of manuscripts submissions in a short period of time represents both a blessing and a challenge; in that our processes don’t normally have to cope with this level of new works. However, I’m more confident that myself and the rest of the team will rise to the occasion splendidly, and really is a genuine pleasure to see all this new scholarship potentially heading for our pages.

I do find myself musing though, that I hope the start of every week from hereon out won’t be like this…as I might need to do some drastic rethinking on how we operate the journal.

Gareth Johnson : 04 Jun 2019 11:12 |  Tags: Cannibalism Ingest Issue Special Submissions |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem