All 2 entries tagged Meeting

February '24 Board Meeting Held

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/about/editorialTeam

Periodic meeting of Board and associate editors held to share updates and inputs to Exchanges

As long-time readers and contributors will be aware, Exchanges tries to keep its behind the scenes operations as relatively informal as possible, while maintaining our quality bar and editorial standards. In part, this informality helps generate a better working environment and ethos among the editorial team, and it allows them each to be able to raise any matter of concern or questions with me at any time.

Despite this, periodically, in my role as Chief Editor, I like to draw everyone together for a more formal meeting to talk through the various activities going on across the journal and its activities. The major rationale is because other than myself I suspect most of my Board and associate editors are only partially aware of the scale and scope of Exchanges’ full operations. Hence, in the interests of transparency I like to give them all a chance to periodically get up to speed, to hear about what’s new, what’s coming soon and also to air any general points of discussion.

Those who have attended any of these meetings do know I keep them relatively brief – although from time to time we do have quite extensive discussions when there’s been a recent point of particular interest. Certainly, right now, with our growing editorial family [1], we’re moving through a phase where there’s a lot of activity going on but other than me, no one is involved with it across the board. Or indeed, the Board. Hence, the need for a Board meeting was rather pressing this month I thought.

Now because it’s quite challenging to find a time when everyone can gather, given our numbers and geographic distribution, my approach these days is every six months or so to schedule a couple of Board meeting opportunities in a week. Attendance is never mandated, but encouraged, and the meetings are open to anyone working in an editorial capacity with Exchanges.

This week’s meetings went well – with a stronger attendance than we’ve had for a while, with Board and associate editors both well represented. Topics for discussion included:

• Practical steps towards the April issue of the journal.
• Forthcoming workshops and projects with Exchanges’ involvement.
• Special issues in progress/under discussion.

As always it was great to be able to share what we do across the team, and also to see their faces too. [2] I am looking forward to the next Board meeting in the autumn, but also to the interim meetings I’ll be having with our associate editors working on the special issues too.

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Endnotes

[1] We currently have 39 editors, plus myself, on the team. With another dozen or so waiting in the wings as we move towards launching future special issue projects.

[2] I think we had editors based in 6 different countries in attendance – including one of our wonderful Monash based editors!

Gareth Johnson : 15 Feb 2024 12:13 |  Tags: Board Editorial Meeting Report |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

June 2020 Editorial Board Meeting

Today I hosted the first Exchanges Editorial Board video conference, and it was a success, a slightly qualified one perhaps, but a success nevertheless. Sure, it would have been nice if more of the Board had been free to join, although with the current global disruption I quite understand when many could not. Nevertheless, it was a really helpful exchange (no pun intended) for those who were there, and I certainly found it very useful, especially as I’d not spoken face-to-face with today’s participants before. Such is the nature of having as international an Editorial Board membership as us.

In terms of content, the meeting began with a discussion on current issues for editors, along with clarifications with assigned manuscripts, as well as examining some of the foibles experienced with using OJS (Open Journal Systems). I frequently deal with these kinds of concerns via email with individual editors, but it was far more engaging to be able to talk them through in a small group. It was helpful for me too in terms of exploring our policy approaches and response to various circumstances with reviewers, authors and manuscripts collectively. Hopefully, everyone who participated is a little clearer now on how and why we run things.

We moved on to the second part of the meeting, wherein I outlined some of the current activities with the journal, including our various special issues already in production or scheduled for launch over the next 18 months. I was able to highlight the news that we should have a new issue of the journal out in the next few weeks, something I was very pleased to be able to share, especially as each issue is the result of so much hard work from my editorial team. I also talked a bit about the podcast launch and my plans for future episodes, along with inviting suggestions for themes or topics for future issues.

Finally, we wrapped up the meeting by discussing the next themed call for papers. The Board agreed that a theme was desirable, alongside our open call. From our discussions there was an excellent suggestion, which I’ll augment over the next few days. More about this, once I’ve launched the next issue of Exchanges.

So, an excellent meeting, although I did realise after we closed that I’d failed to do some quick introductions. Learning from the experience it’ll be something I’ll make sure to schedule time for at the next meeting. And yes, there will be a next meeting, booked in for Tue 30^th July. Fingers crossed more of the editors will be free to join us then.

Gareth Johnson : 09 Jun 2020 13:51 |  Tags: Board Editorial Editors Meeting |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem