Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Journal Editors in the Sciences and the Social Sciences

GATEKEEPERS OF KNOWLEDGE

GATEKEEPERS OF KNOWLEDGE Journal Editors in the Sciences and the Social Sciences STEPHEN MCGINTY

BERGIN & GARVEY Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGinty, Stephen, 1958– Gatekeepers of knowledge : journal editors in the sciences and the social sciences / Stephen McGinty. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0–89789–664–5 (alk. paper) 1. Authorship. 2. Scholarly publishing. 3. Academic writing. 4. Social science literature—Editing. 5. Scientific literature— Editing. I. Title. PN146.M34 1999 070.5'1—dc21 99–12703 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright  1999 by Stephen McGinty All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–12703 ISBN: 0–89789–664–5 First published in 1999 Bergin & Garvey, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to my parents, Joseph and Margaret McGinty, with gratitude for their support and understanding.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction: Editors, Power, and Higher Education

1

2

Getting There: The Path from Junior Scholar to Editor

13

3

Setting Up Shop

31

4

Making Meaning of the Work

49

5

Electronic Journals and the Internet

67

6

Personal Networks, Connections, and Circles

87

7

The Impact of Scholarly Culture on Editors in the Sciences and the Social Sciences

107

Conclusion: Editors and Gatekeeping Today

127

8

Selected Bibliography

139

Index

141

Acknowledgments Special thanks go to Professor Philip G. Altbach of Boston College for his guidance and his encouragement in this work. I would also like to express gratitude to Professor Ted Youn and Professor Karen Arnold, both from Boston College, for their insightful comments as this project came to fruition. My gratitude also goes to the library staffs at O’Neill Library of Boston College and Gutman Library of Harvard University.

1

Introduction: Editors, Power, and Higher Education With the personification of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘‘threshold guardian’’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions—also up and down—standing for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. —Joseph Campbell (1968)

INTRODUCTION This study examines the professional and personal experiences of scholarly journal editors. My aim is to explore, based on their own perceptions, the careers and the work of journal editors. Interviews that I conducted with thirty-five journal editors from the sciences and the social sciences provided the data for this study. The journal editor acts as a gatekeeper by funneling manuscripts in one direction or another or rejecting material entirely. In this way, the journal editor has an impact on the professional life of every scholar, because the establishment of scholarly credentials is crucial in higher education. This credentialing, a system handed down from the guild tradition of the Middle Ages, carries with it financial and other supporting incentives that allow scholars the freedom to pursue their individual interests. This is the case when funding agencies examine publication records to determine grant awards.

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge

In addition, scholarly journals are under pressure from an entirely different source. The very definition of a publication record is becoming murky. Internet technology now provides access to all kinds of information. Today readers can examine articles through a variety of methods that are free from the paper- and subscription-oriented traditions that have dominated scholarship for centuries. Over and above the new access provided by the Internet to readers, what has perhaps been less explored is the access provided to writers. With this new technology, virtually any scholar can distribute research results to colleagues via the Internet, and thereby bypass the gatekeeping functions of the journal editor and the peer review system. To be sure, experienced Internet surfers have already erected their own, internal filtering systems. Yet this is the very function that editors, as gatekeepers, have been providing for three hundred years. Much of the intellectual commerce of higher education takes the form of published literature. Individual scholarly reputations are built around work that carries the results of study out into an audience of colleagues. In a work entitled, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (Coser, Kadushin, & Powell, 1982), Lewis Coser and his colleagues argued that scholarly networks are closeknit communities, whose core can be quite exclusive. One of the results of my study shows just how these communities coalesce around particular journals. Given the dispersed nature of higher education, especially in the United States, these journals provide the sense of community that sets standards and provides incentive for scholars, regardless of their geographic location. In the face of these tremendous changes, individuals in the field of higher education need to have an understanding of the gatekeeping role of the editor. The rapid momentum of the marketplace is overtaking traditional structures, and this book provides a look at people operating at the center of this whirlwind. Scholars, tenure committees, and foundations have always been able to rely on certain standards by which they judge the academic fitness of a potential candidate, but today, the principles on which those standards rest are changing. An understanding of the role of the journal editor may illuminate future discussions on scholarly communication in higher education. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GATEKEEPERS Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968), serves as an interesting backdrop that illuminates the entire arc of a junior scholar’s career. This professional journey is etched in the model of what Campbell calls ‘‘The Adventure of the Hero.’’ Here he details the three steps that the hero undergoes: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The scholar/hero has a long journey that ends with accommodation and submission to the ruling hierarchy. Many of Campbell’s signposts are duplicated in my study as the typical scholar/hero cultivates a mentor (‘‘Supernatural Aid’’), establishes a reputation (‘‘The Road of Trials’’), and develops personal networks (‘‘Rescue from Without’’). The scholar/hero expends tremendous effort in order to appear worthy to the elders, who represent

Introduction

3

the upper echelons of the hierarchy. This involves submission and the display of allegiance. How does one show allegiance? By mastering the accepted way of doing things and showing that one has traveled the path. This process relates to the idea of apprenticeship and the guild. The scholar/hero appears to have traveled to the dangerous realms and to have fought off the false seductions of the easy path, which leads nowhere. The scholar/hero has adopted the language, learned the lessons, and practiced with the tools in order to wield them effectively. He or she comes before the elders to show his or her proficiency. The process of article submission (note the term) is the point where the scholar/hero displays his or her skills before the elders. It is where the scholar/hero says: ‘‘I have covered the ground. I have been where the mighty walk and I have drawn my own conclusions about where I belong.’’ On the other side, there is the council of elders, learned men (but, usually, few women) who have the knowledge. They know the field. They have traveled the path and know what is good and bad. They have dominion over the group. They are part of a circle—the inner part. They have their own peers. As with many types of peer groups, they grew together under the same mentors. In something as important as the submission process, trust is crucial. Whom does one trust? Why, people one has known for a long time, who have endured the same things, and who learned at the feet of other mentors when all were younger. These are the people with whom one maintains contacts as the generations evolve. When it comes time for each generation to reach the stage of wisdom, these are the people to have around. They know the territory and what to watch out for. The construction of these events involves a constant regeneration of the new from the old, whereby the new duplicates the old. Reward systems are based on the new generation duplicating what the previous generation did. Accomplishments that recognize achievement have been laid down by the profession, and the new scholar has to follow criteria set by the previous generation. The journal article is one of the key signs of accomplishment in this scholarly guild. It shows that much of the mythical path has been traversed and that the subject is now ready to place him- or herself before the elders. This also implies that chaos will result in the absence of these wise elders; that without the sifting mechanism and subsequent conferral of approval that publication represents, floods of material would overwhelm the community. The elders are there to preserve order and confer acceptance on material—and people. The Internet represents the greatest challenge ever mounted against this system. For hundreds of years, distribution systems (paper, printing, publishing, subscriptions, etc.) were too expensive for an individual scholar to publicize a message without going before a board to get its approval. That board served as the gatekeeper. Nothing could be disseminated unless it was approved by the board, which controlled the ‘‘means of production.’’ If one wanted to reach colleagues, one had to go through the board. Now the Internet threatens that entire system. With a computer on nearly

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge

every desktop and the Internet just a few keystrokes away, it is easy to reach colleagues. Posting documents on the World Wide Web has been made simple, thus bypassing the elders on the editorial board. This breaks through the hierarchy. It reduces the need to serve an apprenticeship and to show that one has paid dues and submitted to the elders’ way of doing things. However, this brave new world of communication technologies has not been welcomed. There are legitimate bases to the fears of chaos. Vanity publishing has always been with us, and over the centuries, access to publication became democratized as printing became cheaper. All kinds of material became printable as the availability of the small printing press allowed all kinds of people to print and distribute their views. Alas, more did not always mean better. This situation is duplicated today by the Internet. We cannot necessarily say that scholarship has been greatly enhanced by the new channels for diverse kinds of scholars to get their results out to the world because the hierarchy still exists. Perhaps it needs to exist. Perhaps the sheer amount of material generated by the evergrowing number of Ph.D. recipients requires a hierarchy. Gatekeepers may be needed now more than ever. The specter of chaos constantly lurking over the crest of the unfenced hill is not, of its nature, a reflection of human evil. Given the reward system in scholarship, it is simply a case of a great many people responding to the dictates laid down by the hierarchy to show the elders they are worthy of the title of ‘‘scholar.’’ The older generation has made clear what the milestones are, and the mass of would-be scholars is simply attempting to achieve the benchmarks for recognition. The great numbers on this side of the fence attest to the fact that there are many people seeking the few spots in the hierarchy. The presence of the generally scorned substandard journal suggests that the maintenance of standards has become a burdensome task for the elders. It is burdensome in the sense that they have little time for the activity. They have their own research and teaching to pursue. Therefore, at tenure and promotion time, instead of the impact of a scholar’s writing, the sheer number of articles already published has become the standard measurement of a scholar’s worth. It is a case of choosing form over content. The presence of numerous articles in a curriculum vitae (CV) only represents the fact that a candidate has mastered the form—the content may become secondary. This is where the less-respected journal comes in to fill the vacuum. Once it became clear that promotion and tenure committees and grant organizations emphasized numbers of articles published over content, it sent a clear signal to the entire community that volume, not impact, was what mattered. Hence, there was an explosion of journals of ambiguous reputation. They arose simply to fill a need. The hierarchy dropped its responsibility to keep a close watch on the standards of the guild. Whatever the reason, whether from research pressure from their institutions or distaste for the tedium of maintaining standards, boards shifted their interest from content to form, and the proliferation race was on. This occurred along with the explosion of knowledge after World War II,

Introduction

5

when government infused academia with unprecedented funds for research on all kinds of topics. Not surprisingly, given human nature, people followed the money. Where there is an income stream, people will follow. The explosion of Ph.D.s paralleled the baby boom, and in the decades after the war, the GI Bill created a population explosion on campuses, which led to a need for more scholars. Scholars, in turn, all clamored for inclusion in the hierarchy of elders. They struggled to show their worthiness by following the rules and bowing before the tribe. When the demographic forces simply grew too large for careful, deliberate consideration, the elders were forced to take short cuts, one of which was to judge a scholar on the sheer number of articles instead of the content of the articles themselves. Promotion and tenure committees simply lacked the time or inclination to give a close reading to the articles submitted by junior scholars. There were too many candidates and too many positions to fill, due to the higher education explosion. Established faculty were more interested—understandably so—in pursuing their own trail of grants and other rewards to spend a lot of time on promotion and tenure issues. Consequently, they invented a shorthand criterion. And publishers and junior scholars jumped at the chance that this new benchmark provided. PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the professional lives of journal editors. This work looks at the experiences of journal editors and how they make meaning out of the many roles they are called on to play. Editors deal with scholarly communication on two levels. One level involves the professional literature, whose function is to inform colleagues about research results or to summarize trends through review articles. This is the material we see in print. The production of these articles embodies a culture of rigor and method. I sought to learn how editors function at this level because much is at stake for many individuals in this area of higher education. For junior scholars, journal publication can be crucial in achieving tenure, while for established faculty, keeping track of new trends can be vital. Furthermore, the rise in importance of the Internet has also led many people to rethink the methods of scholarly communication and how results are presented to colleagues. The work in this study examines what kinds of mental patterns the editors develop as they establish criteria for the disposition of the manuscripts submitted to them for publication. The second level on which editors operate is the more informal realm of personal networks. This is the area where expectations and norms are established. Editors are in highly visible positions. Their names are in print on the masthead in every issue. What kinds of relationships do they have with their colleagues? Editors are, by definition, immersed in personal networks because they have to rely on others to do their jobs well in order for the desired collective final product to emerge. With so much at stake, trust is a big issue. Yet higher education is a very decentralized system, involving great geographic distances,

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which makes it difficult to establish trusting relationships. The notion of just who is a colleague stretches, in some disciplines, around the globe. What kind of mechanisms do editors use to structure their personal network, and what is their experience of those networks? This is the nature of the informal communication examined in this book. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS This research was conducted with an eye toward applying the collected data to the established social science models of Kurt Lewin and Lewis Coser. Lewin’s ‘‘gatekeeper’’ model has been in existence for over forty-five years (Lewin, 1951). While the label has often been assigned to editors of many types, little has been done to use this model to examine data collected from journal editors. Coser’s model (Coser et al., 1982) is also underutilized as far as data from journal editors are concerned. His study consisted of interviews and observations of people in the publishing industry. Coser and his colleagues had a sociological perspective. Their main focus was on the multiple textures of the human relations that influence the production and distribution of books. The influence of scientific and scholarly editors is tremendously powerful according to Coser. How an editor experiences his or her place in a social network is a source of rich data in this framework. In this work, the analysis brought to bear on the data originates with these two models. The Lewin Model There are two parts to Lewin’s model of the psychology of the gatekeeper, each of which has subordinate elements (Lewin, 1951). The model is outlined as follows: I. Cognitive Structure: The terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation A. Cultural Availability 1. Will the material that I let in be accessible to my group? B. Constituencies 1. What are the various needs of the different camps within my group? C. Labeling Submitted Material 1. What kinds of manuscripts are coming before me and how should I present them to my group? 2. Do certain manuscripts represent new paradigms? D. The Meaning of the Situation 1. How strong is the group’s cohesion? 2. What are the social norms of the group? 3. How are ideas expressed in this journal?

Introduction

7

II. The Motivation of the Gatekeeper: The system of values that lies behind the gatekeeper’s choices A. Group Values 1. What values does my group hold? 2. What is the relative weight of each value? 3. How are individual manuscripts linked with these values? B. Variety of Ideas 1. Is my group getting enough exposure to all the relevant material currently being written? 2. Have various methodologies and paradigms been sufficiently explored? C. Obstacles to Overcome 1. How is a specific manuscript presented? 2. Are there charts, graphs, or other nontextual material that may present a problem?

The Coser Model Lewis Coser conducted an extensive study of the book-publishing industry in 1982 using a sociological approach that examined, among other topics, the networks, connections, and circles in which individual actors were immersed while doing their jobs. Coser emphasized the importance of connections in this field because publishing is an ‘‘external economy’’ industry (Coser et al., 1982, p. 40). That is to say, the ‘‘raw material’’ (the manuscript) comes from the outside. It is not produced by the editor. Therefore, the strength of his or her connections determines whether an editor can garner the best manuscripts. Accordingly, ‘‘scientific and scholarly circles define for editors what is good and important’’ (p. 87). The Coser model is informed by four factors: (1) the nature of connections in publishing, (2) the degree to which they are important, (3) the basis on which they are formed, and (4) the structure that emerges from these networks. Coser writes: ‘‘the informal ‘invisible colleges’ as well as the formal structures of academic life simultaneously solve the problem for editors of finding new projects and ensuring an audience for the published product’’ (Coser et al., p. 87). The generation of raw material (i.e., manuscripts) and the generation of consumers of that material (i.e., readership) are both accomplished through the development of strong personal networks. The two models are both centered around an individual who is immersed in a group. Interactions within that group occur at many levels in unstructured ways. Authors, editors, referees, publishers, and editorial board members are only some of the people involved in this enterprise. Each position has different needs, which each individual expresses in unique ways. Thus, many tasks compete for the attention of the journal editor. The Lewin and Coser models together provide a foundation on which the present research was developed. The models, in turn, provide a way to analyze how the editors of scholarly journals make meaning out of their experiences.

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge

WHY STUDY EDITORS? There are frequent voices in the literature that attest to the powerful role played by journal editors. A recent study in the field of psychology (Harcum & Rosen, 1993) asserted that ‘‘editors and other evaluators, as gatekeepers of the science, have a major role in the definition of the science as operationally delimited by its literature’’ (p. 2). Other research portrays the entire direction of postwar literature in academic psychology as being influenced by a discrete cadre of professors who shaped the discipline to such a degree that the growth of alternative paradigms was stunted. A former managing editor (Patterson, 1994) of the American Political Science Review wrote of the more practical role editors play: determining career success. Publication in a prestigious journal can dramatically elevate the career of a scholar. Such scholars are referred to as ‘‘the chosen,’’ meaning individuals for whom substantial rewards are reserved. The importance of a journal to a fledgling subdiscipline was underscored by a case study (Fyfe, 1994) of Justice Quarterly. This journal was started by certain scholars in the field of criminal justice who felt that the prevailing literature emphasized theory at the expense of important issues of policy and practice. The scholarly journal plays the most important role in a discipline’s existence, direction, and shape. This, in turn, shapes the careers of individuals within that discipline. The center of this universe is occupied by the journal editor, which makes the position important to study. Whether the task is merely as a clerk, transferring manuscripts between referees and authors, or a more encompassing one, where paradigms are shaped, the editor has a unique guiding role. Editors are, of necessity, bound up with cadre loyalties, paradigm trends, and profound intellectual breakthroughs. Indeed, their involvement is a requirement of the job. Other issues also motivated my research. Having focused on the central role that editors play in scholarship, it is also important to ask how they experience challenges to the influence of a specific journal. Many forces, including four important factors described in the following sections, have the potential to alter the relationship between a journal and its audience. Proliferation Recent years have seen the number of scholarly journals reach some 22,000 (Cummings, Witte, Bowen, Lazarus, & Ekman, 1992; Ulrich’s Plus International, 1995). This degree of proliferation has led to a certain cynicism among scholars concerning the need for so many journals (White, 1990). Promotion and tenure demands, coupled with increased cold war funding of higher education (including library budgets), created conditions that publishers viewed as an ideal market. During one particular period, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ratio of journal start-ups to journal expirations was two to one (Fry & White,

Introduction

9

1976). Disenchantment among scholars with this situation has been expressed for years (Irizarry, 1994; Jencks & Riesman, 1968). User Studies Studies of the usage of journals in libraries have revealed very low numbers. Perhaps the most prominent study (Kent et al., 1979) was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh; the results showed that in some discipline-specific libraries, only 10 percent of the journals were ever pulled off the shelves. Another study (Sauer, 1990), conducted at a small public liberal arts college, reported that for many academic disciplines, more than 60 percent of journals were not used. These kinds of results provoke questions about the role of the scholarly journal. Notions of a journal’s audience, function, and purpose come to the fore when results like these are published. Uncitedness Other serious questions were raised in light of two studies by Hamilton (1990, 1991), who found that 75 percent of articles in social science journals are not used for a single citation within five years of publication. For the sciences, the figure was 55 percent. Another study (Schwartz, 1997) placed the figure for journals in library science at 72 percent. These figures trouble academic librarians as they struggle with reduced budgets and spiraling subscription costs. As they search for a way to balance the needs of their constituencies, the role of the scholarly journal in the library becomes increasingly murky. Electronic Journals The entire landscape of scholarly communication may be about to change through the development of electronic journals. Publishers, scholars, college administrators, and academic librarians are all watching events closely. No one has a clear idea of the impact this new form of communication will have. Cost recovery for publishers is probably the most important factor in determining future developments. Many experiments are being conducted currently to attempt to establish some kind of income stream, yet nothing reliable has been established. The four trends discussed here highlight some of the issues confronting editors. Most of these controversies have emerged only recently, as previous generations of editors were not faced with such momentous changes. Thus, the very nature of the scholarly journal may undergo a radical change in the near future. This book is an attempt, in part, to capture how these editors are experiencing current changes.

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge

Editors of scholarly journals occupy a central gatekeeping role in higher education. The choices they make have an impact that reverberates throughout all levels of scholarship and beyond. Intellectual movements, public policy decisions, medical advances, and economic interventions are just some of the vital fields attended by these editorial gatekeepers. However, despite their crucial role, little qualitative data exists on the direct experiences of these individuals, who occupy such a central position in higher education. The current literature offers scant insight into the social networks in which these editors operate. Nor does it offer much description of the gatekeeping responsibilities they experience. Insights into the practical aspects of editorial work are missing from the literature, and methods of time management and the assignment of tasks also need exploration. By looking at this world through the experiences of the editors and applying qualitative research methods, the situation can be reframed to inform the discussion about scholarly communication in a new way. By placing this whole phenomenon in its social context, we can use qualitative research methods to better understand it. Editors of scholarly journals have achieved prominent positions in a specific culture. That culture has a socialization process that lends itself to the application of qualitative research methods. Author Carl Schwartz (1994) has looked at the whole system of scholarly journals and proclaimed Karl Weick’s (1976) notion of a ‘‘loosely coupled’’ system as the most appropriate model. Weick advanced the idea that there are many social structures that cannot be viewed as rational, interdependent, mutually sympathetic systems. In fact, the components of many social systems are not tightly connected like railroad cars. They are, in fact, only loosely coupled. Scholarly journal publishing could be described as characterized by loosely coupled systems. To be sure, each component (libraries, journal publishers, and scholars) provides sustenance to the other. Yet it is here that Weick and Schwartz caution us: an understanding of how one of these components works may not provide any insight into the rest of the social system because they are only loosely coupled, and do not operate in lockstep with each other. Thus, the utility of studying journal editors is reinforced because they answer to all three constituencies. Schwartz goes on to advise future researchers to look to ‘‘complexity and controversy’’—not ‘‘simplicity and interdependency.’’ The focus of this study on the complexity and controversy experienced by journal editors may provide some new ways to think about understanding the entire social system. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Colleges and universities would do well to understand the experiences undergone by journal editors. According to Julius Getman (1992), a former president of the American Association of University Professors: during periods such as the present when the emphasis shifts away from teaching to research, the production of such [scholarly] writing is important

Introduction

11

to academic institutions and individual faculty members. For most universities, institutional status and the availability of funds is tied to the scholarly reputation of the faculty. For young professors, productivity means promotions, raises, offers to teach elsewhere, and the crucial awards of tenure. For senior faculty, it can lead to appointments to special, named professorships, the chance to enter administration, opportunities to travel, and national recognition in their fields. (p. 44)

The centrality of the editor as gatekeeper fits into Getman’s characterization, for the editor holds sway over all of the rewards he describes. A thorough understanding of how the publication process works can be crucial to the very standing of an individual institution. College administrators must have a thorough understanding of the publication system and its potential institution-wide impact. This book can also be helpful to faculty. In particular, individuals seeking to publish their work can use it as a window into the world of the journal editor. The construction of personal networks and the achievement of membership in that network are important to the career of the scholar. Junior scholars who want to understand how the editorial process works will benefit from this study. Publication is central to many careers in higher education, and the key gatekeeping position is occupied by journal editors. Becoming aware of editors’ experiences and how they make meaning of their work is central to understanding a great deal about the production and distribution of knowledge within higher education. The work done by these editors ultimately benefits their schools because editorial work demands an additional level of scholarship, which in turn has an impact on a scholar’s teaching skills and research. Through their position, editors are exposed to the newest literature—even before it reaches print. This perspective is then brought directly into the classroom as they provide their students with an outlook informed by the pulse of the latest research. In addition, they have deep connections with colleagues that allow them to pursue research interests more globally and to make personnel recommendations for hiring colleagues for their own departments, which can enhance a school’s reputation. Department chairs and deans, who assign course loads and office personnel, may well benefit from this research. Moreover, associate editors and referees could also come to a better understanding of the experiences of scholarly journal editors through reading this study. People in these positions all share common goals with editors. INTERVIEWS Thirty-five people consented to be interviewed, fifteen in the sciences and the remainder in the social sciences. All were white, and only seven of the thirtyfive were women. Gender differences might be expected to play a role in the data I collected, but I found little difference. However, a further study could explore more explicitly the role of gender issues in this context. In addition, the

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age spectrum was rather narrow as only three people were outside the range of forty to sixty. The thirty-five respective journals covered a wide spectrum in the hierarchy of status in scholarly communication. Only twenty-one were listed in the citation indexes published by the Institute for Scientific Information, and publishing sources also varied. Twenty of the journals were published by scholarly societies, eleven were published by commercial publishers, and four were published by institutes located at the school where the editor was employed. I wanted to gain perspectives from journals in all kinds of disciplines. However, the questions that motivated my data gathering were the same for all editors, regardless of staff size or journal visibility. The rest of this book may be outlined as follows: Chapter 2 examines the personal journeys made by editors and looks at how they have experienced the socialization process in scholarly communication. Chapter 3 looks at how these editors view the variety of tasks involved in their work. Editors are often called on to play many roles, and this chapter analyses those experiences. Chapter 4 is concerned with the meaning that editors make of the roles they perform. This data is examined through the application of the Lewin gatekeeping model. Chapter 5 looks at electronic journals and the Internet. Chapter 6 is concerned with the personal networks in which editors find themselves. Their experiences are analyzed through the Coser framework regarding social connections. In Chapter 7, I look at the similarities and the differences between editors in the sciences and the social sciences. Chapter 8 concludes the book with comments on the findings.

2

Getting There: The Path from Junior Scholar to Editor INTRODUCTION For most of the people whom I interviewed in this study, journal editorship has been a kind of accidental profession and they are ambivalent toward their posts. The data presented here shows these scholars engaged in the simple mission of establishing a career, with their attendant immersion into networks with their colleagues. Their accomplishments have led to high visibility within their respective disciplines. This, in turn, resulted in largely unexpected offers of editorship positions. These people engaged in little long-term mental preparation for the post. Therefore, a significant part of this chapter will examine how these editors assessed their individual temperaments as they began to understand the demands of the job. Doctoral programs train the student in how to conduct and present research. However, becoming an editor requires additional training. An editor has to serve at all levels of the scholarly communication hierarchy in order to obtain the necessary depth of experience. The methods by which these editors acquired the necessary editorial attributes constitute another important focus here.

ESTABLISHING A REPUTATION Much of success in scholarly life relies on achieving the approbation of a hierarchy. The people I interviewed kept a vigilant eye out for what is important

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in the scholarly culture. They had found out what gets recognition. The means of establishing a reputation is one of the decisions that editors make early in their careers, some of them subconsciously and others very deliberately. Perhaps the importance of reputation is impressed upon them by their professors. One segment of the appointment is described in the following quotation. The experiences reflect the importance of reputation. In this example, a young psychology editor described her background: I’ve been active in this field of nonverbal communication for many years. I got my degree at [an Ivy League school] and I studied with . . . a big name in nonverbal behavior. So I had [a] reputation in the field.

Two economics editors, interviewed separately, had similar experiences during their early years. Once you get on one editorial board, then your name gets around even more. I’ve been on editorial boards and done thousands of ad hoc reviews, and so I felt like I had the substantive reputation, you know, in the field and the editorial experience to be qualified.

The editors’ own self-awareness is visible here. They appear to experience a conception of their own reputations with great precision and confidence. These quotations came in response to the simple question, ‘‘How did you get this job?’’ Invariably, the editors responded by talking about their own reputations. They reveal a keen appreciation of how one is perceived by one’s colleagues. A young editor with international experience remarked: Within the [particular] field . . . , people know each other. And I also knew [the previous editor] when I was a graduate student, and we’d had continuing contact since then on a variety of scholarly matters. So we’ve had a variety of professional contacts.

A twenty-year veteran scholar in history listed his reputation among his qualifications for the job: Well, too, there’s the academic reputation of my articles being published.

A veteran geography editor underscored the influence of reputation, especially in relation to the personal networks existing within the scholarly community: So [the previous editor] knows me well and I doubt if he’d have asked me if he didn’t think I could do the job. It’s a relatively small community. There’s a lot of knowledge.

Getting There

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There is a confident tone in these expressions. It is a unique thing to be able to say that one has a firm grasp on how one is perceived by others. Where does this confidence originate? How do editors come to know they have achieved a substantive reputation? For the most part, editors experience this type of reputation building as a very concrete process. They know what it takes, and they have made it their business to succeed. One experienced psychology editor who started his career in a foreign country felt he was lacking a reputation and took steps to compensate: And I certainly didn’t have a network of former mentors and fellow graduate students, and so on, that most people can rely on. And so I did a number of things when I first got here to try and get around. I went to all the conferences. I sent people copies of my work and so on. But I also tried to get stuff into the mainstream journals as fast as possible. One of the things that I did when I first came to this country, I realized very quickly from talking to people that—and especially from listening to what they had to say—that you really had to network.

Among scholars, there are discrete milestones. There is a clear set of criteria by which judgments are made. Perhaps this is where the confidence shown in the data originates. These editors saw the hierarchy of objectives laid out before them when they were junior scholars. Among these objectives are publishing, serving on committees, serving as a referee, publishing book reviews, and the like. As each step was taken by these editors-to-be, they developed an awareness of themselves and how to function within a network. Coser’s notion that scholarly communities define what is important for these editors can be seen here. Their experiences of what is important can be seen in how they replied to the question, ‘‘How did you get this job?’’ Their first impulse was to describe their reputation. That description carries a degree of certitude because their career markers have been clear and their achievements have followed those markers precisely. An editor who, many years ago, started a social psychology journal that he continues to edit described how, in the early days, he and his colleagues relied on reputation as they searched for coeditors: I would say, in almost every case, I either knew the person personally, certainly knew their work, had met them, knew something about them, knew that they were people with high standards, would contribute, were personally interested—then we would sit around as associate editors and say, ‘‘Now, we need some more editors. Who do you know? Who do you know?’’ Sometimes you’d get names: ‘‘Well, so and so.’’ ‘‘Well, do you know the person? What do you know of him? What kind of work [has he] done?’’

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A mid-career physics editor described how the organizational skills developed through running conferences led to a heightened visibility within the field: Well, it certainly helped my own visibility, running those conferences. There were three internationally recognized conferences. In fact, I got a couple of offers from those conferences. And they’re small, but it’s, basically, it [assured] the leaders in the field that I work [in]. And so it was one of these small—I don’t want to use the word elite—but one of those small, special ones, only by invitation.

People generally want to work with others who are similar to themselves. In the academic world, where groups and subgroups proliferate and isolate themselves, working relationships take on special characteristics. Scholarly journal publishing is complex, in particular because ideas of great nuance have to be communicated across tremendous distances. In this atmosphere, the establishment of norms can be crucial. Thus, the establishment of a reputation acts as a seal of approval affixed to junior scholars seeking affiliation. This seal allows others to trust the seal bearer. The veteran scholar can assume that the bearer has met a number of stringent criteria established by trusted colleagues. Establishing oneself as a ‘‘known quantity’’ is an important thing for these editors, a fact that the data consistently support. It is only through personal activity, personal contact, and collaboration in group projects like journals that these characteristics come to the fore. These group activities break through the isolation and individualism, and they provide satisfaction and stimulation for editors. Such experiences are highly valued. They are at the very core of the meaning the editors make of their work. It is not surprising that admittance to this circle through reputation is so important. Perhaps it may retard the independent thinker, but the method of work and the core of experiences shared by these people lies at the very heart of the satisfaction they derive from their work. A veteran geography editor described how he became assimilated into his network: These are all people I met professionally within a few years, maybe between three and five years out of graduate school. That’s a sense of these people I met. And I continued to meet them, because I would always go to a lot of conferences, and I would be meeting the same people. So these are people that I got to know. Yeah, I would say between a five- and ten-year period after graduate school I got to [know] more and more—at least seven people.

The data underscore the fact that everyone values their own reputation. It is the currency of the realm. Therefore, one has to be selective about one’s associations. The snowballing recommendations and conference sessions are an effort to discover and maintain a group of ‘‘known quantities’’ with whom one can most effectively work. An economics editor spoke of reputation and networks as follows:

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[A certain professor] wanted to start the then journal, [Journal X] as it was originally called, which was a very close renaming to what the [research center] was called, . . . That was the [Center for X]. And so you can see why they were interested in someone who is associated with that particular organization.

The importance of reputation has practical applications. If people are inefficient, untimely, or discourteous in their professional interactions, these editors know enough to stay away from them. By their very nature, they will impede editorial production. Turnaround time will be slowed and quality will suffer. As a result, the journal may lose prestige. In this practical vein, assessment of colleagues plays a role. Who is a good person with whom to work? Perhaps this quality is as important as an academic reputation. Personal recommendations, like those that abound in the data, carry with them some level of assurance that courtesy, timeliness, and efficiency are part of a candidate’s makeup. The data reveal that groundbreaking scholars do not necessarily make for exemplary colleagues. One young social psychology editor spoke of frustration in dealing with some of the referee appointments: I’ve picked several people who accept and they’re willing and so on and then they just don’t function. I’ve had to actually fire two reviewers this year—that was the first time I’ve had to do that—because they just won’t return a review six months after I sent it to them.

For this particular chemistry editor, finding people to trust had practical effects. In one instance, he was relying on a third referee to ‘‘break the tie’’ in selecting a particular manuscript. However, the referee was of no help: The third [referee] came in late, was doing something very similar to this author, and just panned the paper. Just very, very negative. I decided not to send that report to the author because it was so strange that [the referee] was so negative [and] his objections weren’t well founded. And I think he was—could there have been some jealousy or competition that slipped into his psychology?

These busy editors seek reliable colleagues who will share some of the burden. That is one of the tasks of the referees. Their recommendations were given great credence by editors interviewed in this study—provided there was trust in the relationship. On the other hand, a veteran physics editor recounted his experiences in cases where a referee submitted an uninformative review: What you have to look for and worry about in referee reports is where the guy says: ‘‘This is a great paper. Publish without change.’’ Very often he hasn’t looked at it except perhaps superficially. And then you have to look at it yourself in detail and make sure that this [assessment] is really true.

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For editors, it is important that there be a high level of cooperation among those working on the journal. These editors have expectations about the caliber of results they want to achieve. These expectations are sometimes taken for granted until someone in the network fails to live up to them. GETTING APPOINTED: AN ACCIDENTAL PROFESSION The data show that personal associations play an important role in gaining visibility in the profession. This, in turn, establishes these individuals as potential candidates for editorship. Some of the depictions of the contacts seem random. For example, a postdoctoral position led to an editorial appointment for this historian: So when the then-editor of publications left for another job, I think one of my professors at [College X] informed me that it was open and I did apply although I think somebody here had also told me about it, too.

Some scholars have simply followed their individual interests. Yet their scholarship and the skills they displayed during these seemingly circumscribed relationships have provided the foundation on which their reputation was built. An economics editor described his experience as follows: But I got to know some of the people through a project that I was doing [at that college] in the area of action learning. I was studying three action learning programs. And I guess about a year after the sabbatical, I just got an invitation to join up with this particular journal.

In contrast to the almost surprised tone of the two previous quotations, some of the editors I interviewed seemed to know exactly how and why they were offered an editorial post. For example, a geology professor with four years of editing experience had a clear understanding of how his appointment came about: Well, I think it was definitely a network tie. I mean, with—I worked with maybe a hundred really active people—this one, that one.

A professor of history recounted his network contacts with members of the editorial board on which he came to serve prior to being appointed editor in chief: Then, of course, on the editorial board were a number of people who knew me personally. So that clearly is a factor in it, although the editor, who was really the senior person at that point, didn’t know me personally. We had no contact before that point. But probably I would guess [I was known by]

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at least three or so of the editorial board members, including the previous editor of the position I took.

There seems to be a paradox here. One the one hand, the data show the lengths to which these people have gone to establish a reputation. Colleagues, publishers, unsolicited mailings, conferences, and friendships are all pursued, partly in order to carefully construct a noteworthy reputation. However, when one of the rewards of all the reputation building nears attainment, the data show ambiguity on the part of nearly all the editors. This is the paradox. The following two examples are illustrative of this point. Even though these two economics editors, interviewed separately, tell of doing a lot of service work associated with the journal, there is no hint of aspiration for the editorship post: I did a sabbatical [there] six years ago—I was also putting together a special issue for [them]—I guess [it] followed from the special issue that was used subsequently. So, things worked out. They asked me if I would work initially as coeditor. I graduated from [college and soon thereafter] we started organizing a number of conferences, drawing people from all over—the beginning, in fact, of an international crowd, although it began pretty much among U.S. groups. And [the editorial board] came around and asked me if I would be on [the potential editor list], which I first refused to do because I had so many other duties. I then thought about it and thought, well, that was exactly the field I wanted to be influencing. So, I called the chap up later that afternoon and said, ‘‘Yeah.’’

The following excerpt from a young economics editor is worth quoting at length because it illustrates two important points. First, the importance of personal connections is reiterated, and second, this scholar shows no sign of pursuing the top position: [The connection] might be kind of incestuous because my coeditor was my Ph.D. advisor—ever since [I was] a student I was being asked to frequently referee papers to the journal, given that the editor was my advisor—he hits on his tech students to do a lot of refereeing—it’s quite natural. And then after a while, he just simply said, ‘‘Well, you’ve been doing a lot of refereeing, why don’t I make you an associate editor and make a formal arrangement?’’ And then after a couple of years, last summer, he just said, ‘‘Well, I’d like you now to join as coeditor, given your experience.’’ So I’ve been doing a lot of refereeing for the journal. So the editor had . . . me appointed for my editorial judgment, if you will.

This pattern of following the accepted path and then hesitating or not pursuing the editor role recurs throughout the data. The paradox may be resolved elsewhere in the data, however. The language

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shows a strong ‘‘them’’ versus ‘‘us’’ sensibility. The statements of eight editors quoted here all demonstrate this occurrence: They probably thought I was doing a good job. What they wanted me to do when they asked me to be editor . . . They came after me to get me to do it. They wanted to talk about me being editor. They don’t want a junior person to do this. They could have turned me down. They came around and asked me if I would be on [the board]. They were interested in someone who is associated with that particular organization.

Perhaps this language is subtle evidence of the presence of a strong network made up of the influential editorial board members, who are the ubiquitous ‘‘they’’ in the data. The junior scholar is often very distant from this network. Even though connections with the network are crucial in these editors’ careers, the network was experienced as ‘‘they,’’ and never as ‘‘us,’’ among those whom I interviewed. The issues here concern relationships, which have to be built up over time. Often they emerge in a halting way as the junior person is initially assigned less important tasks. If he or she performs well at these assignments, they will be followed with greater responsibility, and if performance continues to be strong, the junior person will be assigned still greater tasks. This progression may proceed as promotion from referee to associate editor and then to editor, whereby one day he or she is asked to take over the whole operation. This is a winnowing-out process that happens quite slowly, over a period of years. Most editors seemed to experience these events simply as a series of unrelated tasks. They seem oblivious to the cumulative impact these accomplishments have on their careers. It is as if they accomplished a diverse group of tasks that somehow led to the position they have today. No one spoke of embarking on journal work with the goal of becoming chief editor. MENTORS Finding, cultivating, and impressing mentors is another theme that appears in the data. Mentors are powerful people, who may have personal connections all over the globe. The experience of a young sociology editor bears out the importance of these kinds of connections: It helps to have your angel become the head of the division of the company, at your publisher. She spoke with [Jane Doe] in about 1987, and at that point I had known [Doe] and the other people in Britain, who are British sociologists and historians, for ten years and had lived in Britain and had

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worked with them. And so when they look for people in the United States to join initially a very small editorial group—I mean, there were about six of us on three continents—they thought of me.

When it comes time to fill editorial positions, people who do the hiring look beyond a curriculum vitae. Perhaps this is the most salient point in the primacy of the reputation. With so much intricate work to be done, the people who make the hiring decision look for a comfort level. One of the ways in which the desire for comfort finds expression is in the appointment of colleagues with likeminded sensibilities. If a journal has a job opening, the editorial board members cast about for people they know. The role those colleagues can play was fully appreciated by a psychology editor who throughout his career had spent a lot of time courting mentors: So you’re dealing with a very different scale of things. People know each other. And so one of the things I did was to make—very often—make lots of copies. So I would say an article helped—copies given out to people, two copies apiece. And then the people—some of whom I knew and some I had cited or [where I] was interested in what they’d done. And [I] would ask them for comment, or would simply say, ‘‘I’m sending you two copies.’’

Getting appointed into editorial positions is helped by having those who are already well established pave the way. Editors need people with reliable work habits. Those junior faculty occupying reviewer or assistant editorship positions serve a kind of apprenticeship through the good word of more well-known scholars. The data are replete with stories of scholars seeking out people with whom they can work. This speaks to the sheer volume of work that editors must do. Editors are busy, so they have to be selective in choosing colleagues. One shortcut for editors is to consider only those junior faculty who come highly recommended. This is the role a mentor can play in bringing a junior scholar to the attention of the established leaders. The Coser model can illuminate some factors here. What is the basis on which these relationships are formed? The young authors seek advancement. The decentralized nature of many subdisciplines leaves young scholars with few opportunities at their local schools to obtain a foothold in their fields. These junior faculty have to assimilate the methods of communication that prevail in their disciplines. Mentors provide that service. ASSESSING ONE’S OWN TEMPERAMENT Editors have to learn how compatible their personality is with the work. For example, a mid-career physicist discovered that organizational skills are just as important as language skills:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge [The officers at the scholarly society] went around and asked people who would make a good editor. So they asked me to do that. I had edited a number of books before. I had run some conferences at Los Alamos and mostly did some editing there. Sometimes I’m probably the world’s worst editor, since I can’t spell, I don’t understand grammar. I can see [a passage] and . . . know there’s something wrong with it, but I can’t fix it myself.

This same person went on to describe what makes a good editor. He valued communication and networking, and he defined the job through his relationship with other people as he described what makes a good editor: The first thing is patience. Patience with the people who are supposed to be writing for you. Patience with the people helping you to put it together. Working along with them, and not just giving . . . all the work [to] somebody else to do. You do some of the work yourself. That was the thing, I was able to get together a group of people, each time I did it, that really wanted to help. They really put some time and effort into it, and I had good skills with people, maybe, that I could get them excited about the project and willing to put in the overtime.

In sharp contrast, some editors feel the traits demanded by the job are much different. This may be because they experience the bureaucratic aspect of the job much more keenly. As a young history of science editor noted: I’d say that the most regular work is sort of little administrative tasks that come up every couple of days—about whether we need a new referee in a certain area, or how publicity is going to work, or whether we’ll be represented at a certain conference, or whether, [say,] the publisher may have questions of who should be on the editorial board. Should we change some people at the end of the year? Bring in new people? Let some of the other people go?

These sentiments were echoed by other editors. An experienced scholar and editor of a geography journal described his experiences: There’s a lot of detail work in editorship, an incredible amount. I’m sure every other editor has told you the same thing. Looking through, responding to, letters; people are always calling on the phone; e-mailing—‘‘I sent this article, why don’t you respond, blah, blah.’’ It goes on and on and on. It’s just a lot of paper processing and computer work, really, and doing that kind of stuff to keep the thing moving along.

Both these editors reveal similar patterns by describing the mundane tasks that comprise the bulk of their experiences. It is ironic that what causes their distress are the very things that others enjoy. Editors in the latter group used language

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like ‘‘patience,’’ ‘‘working along with them,’’ ‘‘I had good skills with people,’’ ‘‘I could get them excited about the project.’’ A sharp contrast is apparent in this portion of the data. The experiences of editors differ markedly in the way they view the kinds of talents that editorship demands. To be sure, they all experience similar routines on the job. Yet some viewed the tasks as petty and process oriented, while others saw them as an opportunity to interact with interesting people. As these editors grew into their current positions, they had to learn what traits would serve them. A veteran physics editor spoke of the practical application of making personal connections. In trying to put out a good journal, he needed good people with whom to work: You do need to know who you’re dealing with, and you need to have some sense of who the people are and what their specializations are, and whether they’re good or not—because you don’t want to solicit something from somebody who’s not going to turn some of the things back, that’s going to be readable and interesting, and sufficiently rigorous that you’re interested in publishing it. So you need to keep in mind that kind of thing as well.

An economics editor with over twenty-five years of scholarship identified the same practical aspect to the job. He knew what the editorial board wanted, and he knew he could deliver it: They want people that are going to track papers, they want people that are going to be able to deal with particular topics.

For a physics editor with eight years in the professoriate, the duties all flowed together into one seamless piece. There are personal networks to maintain, along with the detail work of manuscript management: I make the decision as to which associate editor, including myself, will deal with the manuscripts, and we distribute them—I have to look at them and decide whose area of expertise is represented there, and after that I deal with the manuscripts that I’m handling, which involves sending them out to referees, getting them back from the referees, looking the manuscripts over in detail, weighing the referee comments, and then making the editorial decision.

The dual experience described here reveal the kinds of attitudes of many editors. Of course, individual attitudes can shade the nature of experience for different people. Some editors saw the work in terms of detail and production; others saw it as having more to do with human relationships. What was ‘‘detail work’’ for one editor might be experienced as network building by another. This is not to say that one kind of experience reveals better work habits than another. This is not an attempt to make a value judgment on the experiences of these

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editors. However, it is noteworthy that the variety of experiences has implications when analyzed according to the Coser model of networks. Placing this analysis against the backdrop of the Coser model illustrates the ‘‘level of immersion’’ at which these editors are located. Perhaps an editor’s level of immersion is a function of individual personality, or perhaps it depends on the structure of the academic discipline in which he or she works. For Coser, the fact that academic publishing is an ‘‘external commodity industry,’’ where publishers and editors rely on raw material (manuscripts) produced outside their purview, encourages the development of personal networks. Therefore, the personal careers of these successful editors must include an understanding of the importance of connections. Those reaching the respected position of journal editor in their discipline clearly have an inherent understanding of the degree of immersion demanded of them. DEVELOPING SCHOLARLY DISPASSION A life in scholarship is undertaken, in part, because an individual is passionate about something. This passion can be powerful. It may command a lifetime of research activity from those in its grip. The research, the writing, and the teaching are all done with fervor. This benefits scholarship as a whole, but passion has to be harnessed to interact with colleagues. Scholars have to submit their work to the judgment of others. Rejection is a constant threat. Scholars are not immune to the emotional reactions that arise when a lifetime’s passionate expression has to undergo scrutiny. Developing scholarly dispassion is an important skill for any scholar. Scholarship demands that new work undergo scrutiny from one’s peers, and it is important that the scholar learn to be dispassionate about the judgments that others bring to bear. A psychology editor, originally from England, had some help in developing this attitude: I also got an extraordinarily generous response [from Professor X], whose article—a very famous article— [I had reviewed]. And she wrote back and basically said, ‘‘I think that you could do a better job of clobbering my article, and here’s how I would do it.’’ That’s what I call true scholarship. So there were a lot of people giving me tremendous examples of generous scholarship and of how not to have too much ego invested in the production of an article.

The language here underscores the dispassion. The industrial metaphor ‘‘production’’ is used, thus moving the scholarly process from the human to the industrial scale. An article is not written, nurtured, or developed—it is ‘‘produced.’’ This editor went on to say that he also felt a need to pass these lessons on to his graduate students. He hoped that they might make significant contributions

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while remaining dispassionate, as ego involvement can retard both personal career development and the advancement of the discipline as a whole. We do a seminar sometimes for students, a session on publishing your first article. It’s very important for graduate students to realize that [when] submitting an article, as long as it isn’t shockingly bad, [there] is really [no] problem, even if the article doesn’t get accepted, and that rejection is not the end of the world. Rejection is not the end of one’s academic career. Rejection may indeed be—as it was in my case—may take the form of letting you know that the work is interesting but more has to be done to make it accessible. So I simply say to them that it’s like a brick wall. You throw as much as you can and hope some of it sticks, and the rest you pick up and throw again. (And watch, first of all, what the editors are telling you about how to throw it.) And it’s important to get ideas out there.

Once again, impersonal metaphors are present here, in the ‘‘brick wall’’ and the description of the scholarly article as something messy and divisible. What is at issue here is the relationship between the author and the manuscript. The author has to change from viewing the manuscript in very personal terms to seeing it as simply a piece of work. It is important to develop this sense of detachment. However, it seems that some scholars have difficulty doing this. There is a tremendous amount of personal investment in this kind of work, more so than in many other professions. Authors spend long, solitary hours conducting research, developing ideas, and writing up the results. What emerges is a piece of work that carries with it the scholar’s perspectives and method of expression. These are individual and personal things. For this work to be rejected by others can be difficult. A veteran scholar and editor of a physics journal commented on how difficult it can be: And we take it all too personally. That’s the problem, ’cause these are our babies, and every time you send a paper it’s like that. You work hard on it—‘‘Brilliant idea, at least I thought so, and this guy doesn’t think it’s as smart as I thought it was.’’

Junior scholars have to develop a relationship to their work that will allow them to pursue their interests without getting sidetracked by personal issues. How do they do this? It seems there are two ways. They learn the skill either from a mentor or on their own, through submitting articles and and having them rejected. Many editors felt it important to pass on this experience to younger scholars. The general advice was to trust the marketplace of ideas and believe that high-quality scholarship will garner recognition. Through dissemination and discussion, scholarship can methodically pave the paths for future research. However, personal attachment to a manuscript can obscure the responsibilities

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of the scholar. Such a loss of objectivity skews debate in the marketplace of ideas (represented here by the scholarly journal). Intramural squabbles can result if personal feelings are not harnessed. This is a key point in the interview data that show editors talking about the role of reviewers. For example, three different social science editors, interviewed separately, commented on the unfortunate direction in which things can go when personal feelings prevail: There is a pleasant arrogance, I guess, to a lot of these groups—that they know what’s right, other people don’t. Well, everyone makes some snide comment like ‘‘How’d that paper get in there?’’ They look at the top journal and . . . pick it up—some competitor’s piece—‘‘How’d that get in there? They rejected my paper.’’ That’s a little bit of a snide comment, I think, sometimes, that people will do. Some people—I know a few people whose papers I turned down who say— ‘‘That son of a bitch regards [the journal] as his own personal property.’’

Coser’s model of social networks comes into play here. The very nature of the peer review system is a social network whose function is to bring an element of objectivity about what material is admitted to the marketplace. For one geography editor, passionate advocacy by an author can have detrimental consequences: So you get these terrible fights over [the manuscript], usually because the wrong reviewer was assigned. On occasion, I’ll slap wrists [to discipline people] if the conversation gets too personal and too emotional. I try to strip those sorts of things out of the conversation for . . . fairness.

The referees, the editors, and the authors all have strict roles to play in this social system. Objective scrutiny of manuscripts is a crucial premise. Editors have a responsibility to their readership. Readers have to be confident about the veracity of what appears in a journal. For their part, authors have to believe that a journal is worthy of their manuscript—and that their work will be evaluated fairly. The need to develop a thick skin is a frequent part of the data. For example, a young social psychology editor remarked on some of the difficulties: Trying to publish is a very punishing process. You have to develop thick skin and you become kind of adversarial. The editor is a gatekeeper and there’s a lot of power—and it’s easy to abuse power.

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The following exchange occurred with a veteran history editor, whose experience allowed him to keep his personal feelings separate from his vision of what was good for the journal: Q: I’ve talked to some editors about how sometimes they’re uncomfortable at some points with things like tenure and promotion. If this article gets published, this could be crucial in this person’s career. A: Not my job. Q: It doesn’t enter into it? A: It’s not my job. No. That is not part of my job. It doesn’t happen to me. I don’t see it.

These editors have strong feelings about where their responsibilities lie as there is a great deal of autonomy in this line of work. A veteran psychology editor explained his point of view when it comes to keeping personal feelings out of any manuscript evaluation: Well, either the paper has a decent idea to it or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, either you make it publishable or you want a different paper.

This geography editor, a scholar for some twenty years, spoke of the implications of his decisions about the fate of manuscripts: In some cases, I might go out of my way to try to help somebody get something published. [But] it’s not always possible. If it’s awful work, then you shouldn’t be tenured.

Perhaps this issue is best summed up by a mid-career economics editor whose experience reveals exactly where his most keen interest lies. He sees his role as that of a gatekeeper: But you know, [being a gatekeeper is] a very important control . . . and validation function within the disciplines. And I certainly feel good about my role in it.

These editors are a step removed from those who produce material for them, namely, the authors. Editors can reject work without then being forced to inhabit the world of the person who produced the rejected research. In contrast, many relationships in other professions involve people in power positions working alongside their subordinates in a shared enterprise. Supervisors work with subordinates to improve company performance. However, that sense of shared enterprise is not present in my interview data. The goals of the editor and those of the author are not shared. The editors want to maintain ‘‘control’’ and ‘‘val-

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idation,’’ whereas the authors want to break into the inner circle. A veteran physics editor recalled his early days as a junior scholar: I remember, when somebody would reject my paper, I would get into this combative mode and I’d call everybody idiots, including the editor, a good friend. And I never could get the paper published after that. But since I stopped calling them all idiots, [there] hasn’t been one [paper] that I sent into [that journal] that was rejected. Maybe the science has improved as well, or the topics that I’m doing, I’m not sure exactly, but my approach to it has been to actually take the refereeing in a positive light.

However, later in the same interview, he recounted how he was able to gain a different perspective as his life experience shifted his thinking: Of all the terrible things you have to do, [one] is you have to turn people down for jobs. So [rejecting manuscripts] is . . . a piece of cake compared to having to tell all these people that we’re not going to hire them.

Some would-be authors never develop a completely dispassionate attitude about their research. For this thirty-year scholar, founder, and editor of a social psychology journal, his experience with these people has been personal: I think what happens over a period of years—I know it’s happened to me or to us [all]—you lose friends. They just figure you’re not supportive enough because they’ll find somebody else that is. Other editors [may] work differently: ‘‘Oh, send it. Oh, we’d love to have your paper, sure.’’

Two distinct positions are spelled out in these excerpts. The first is represented by the editor who recalled, with strong language, his days as a junior scholar. He made a great personal investment in his work. The production of scholarship and the scrutiny of that scholarship are at issue. The second position is exemplified by the editors who felt a responsibility for the ‘‘control’’ and ‘‘validation’’ of scholarly work. Often, these two experiences are antagonistic. Editors are virtually immune to the emotional impact of rejection, while junior scholars tend to express the difficulties of rejection, as recounted by the previous quotation. However, the editors experience themselves as carrying out a role in academia that requires them to stay focused on the tasks of ‘‘control’’ and ‘‘evaluation.’’ The personal journeys undertaken by these editors have involved some kind of assessment of their own characteristics. Editors have to arrive at a sense of what the academic community expects of them and how their own personalities measure up against those cultural expectations. For some individuals in this study, knowing one’s own prejudices goes a long way toward becoming comfortable in the role of editor. The following comment by a young psychology editor illustrates the role that bias can play:

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Occasionally, I’m faced with a manuscript that makes me say, ‘‘Uh-oh, what am I going to do with this one?’’ I know that there’s certain kinds of work that I like to see and there’s certain kinds of work that I don’t like to see, and I’m sure that I have unconscious prejudices.

Later in the interview he spoke further on this topic: But I know that when I see a paper come in from [a particular discipline], I probably have an unconscious expectation that it’s not going to be up to snuff. And, you know, I don’t deliberately do that. But it has been the case often enough that they’re, in fact, not very good manuscripts that I have this expectation. You know, I think that’s something editors have to really not fall victim to too much— . . . their biases about what they want to see or who’s work it is. But [bias probably does] creep in [which is unfortunate because] you can really shape where the field is going by what you accept or what you decide to have [as the topic of] a special issue.

A different view was expressed by this economics editor, who saw the peer review process as providing a system of checks and balances that allowed the influence of the editor to be tempered by the views of others. [Say,] for example, I’ve been sent one paper to handle which is in a different camp of how to go about evaluating techniques. And that makes it more difficult for me to evaluate [the] merit of that paper, because I’m less familiar with the approach. [So] I try to find referees who are in that method or that camp.

However, he went on to express confidence in cases where the subject matter was familiar to him: It’s not so much from an ideological but just from a methodological [viewpoint] that science should have certain ways of reaching conclusions. So if a person says, ‘‘Well, here’s a particular econometric technique and I propose that we use this for an analysis of this kind of data,’’ you want them to be able to justify it and persuade the reader that this is a wise approach. And if they’re not persuasive, then I’m not interested.

A young biology editor spoke comfortably about his ability to bring judgment to bear on manuscripts. Soul-searching about personal bias was not part of his thinking: So my judgment’s pretty clear-cut that they have to be able to persuade me that what they’re doing is a contribution. It should be justified—there has to be a rigorous reasoning. And it’s very well accepted what those reasoning practices are.

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However, bias on the part of editors is something about which junior scholars worry, as shown in the previous excerpts. These young people submit their material and hope they receive fair treatment. In the case of editors, this research suggests that there is a wide variety of experiences in the extent to which they struggle with this question. The power relationship in the data in this research is uneven. The power position, in the post of the editor, is not necessarily a stakeholder in the success of the author. Quite often, an editor is inundated with manuscripts. As a result of this supply-and-demand situation, the editor sitting on an abundant supply of manuscripts can adopt a position of disinterest in the fate of the would-be author and say ‘‘it’s not by job,’’ or ‘‘it’s good scholarship or it isn’t.’’ Perhaps it is the development of this impersonal idea that allows gatekeepers to keep their focus on relevant material for their constituency. Perhaps it is a necessary trait that gatekeepers must develop. Scholarship has some acutely personal components intertwined with the development of ideas and their presentation to others. These are personal issues, but the development of a detached outlook will most likely help as part of the acculturation process in cases where the advancement of knowledge demands precision. Focusing on precision reduces the role of the personal.

3

Setting Up Shop INTRODUCTION In analyzing the data on how the editors in my sample did the job at hand, the concept of time emerged again and again. Editors struggle under time pressures from many sources. Few of the editors whom I interviewed could give precise responses about how much time they devoted to editorial work. Some gave estimates. Others had general experiences of the time devoted to the various tasks, yet few reported specifics. Despite this lack of precise information, all reported that they experienced time pressures, particularly during certain periods. TIME ON TASK A veteran history editor explained the difficulty of ascribing specific time periods to the work: I can’t tell you how much time I devote to the various components of editing. It’s very difficult, because it’s not as if I spend Tuesdays doing this or Thursdays. It’s part and parcel of every day.

For one experienced anthropology editor, the job was more a matter of lifestyle rather than simply of totaling up the hours spent:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge It’s very hard to estimate. I think when you do a job like this, you also spend a lot of your moments in reflection, thinking about the journal. And I wouldn’t want to put a figure on that.

For these editors, the nature of the work blends into their lifestyle, making it hard to separate the two. They are scholars. They do scholarly work, which has a wide impact on the life of each individual. Perhaps this is confirmation of the idea that so much of scholarship is seamless, whereby research, service, and teaching all come together to enhance the whole. The seasonal publication schedule dictated a lot of what happened for an economics editor with many years of experience. She let the work ebb and flow during the year: It’s hard to know, it varies, how many, in the summertime there is a real lull, how many papers we may get, and when you have a large mailing— it’s hard to say.

A young physics editor echoed the same theme: It’s hard to say because it varies with the quantity of work there is to do on the journal, and it also varies over the course of the year, because there’s obviously a period of more intense work when [an assistant] would come in and we’re preparing an issue, and then once the issue has gone out to the publisher, things kind of die down a little bit and it gets less intense.

This history editor had a relatively big staff, including two full-time equivalent (FTE) professionals and two support staff, one FTE and one half-time. As a result, he was somewhat removed from the day-to-day activities and unable to be precise about times and tasks: I can’t say exactly what it is—I’m still ultimately the responsible person to whom the people report.

Another history editor acknowledged that he didn’t really know how much time he spent on the work, but he did express some worry about how his schedule compared with those of his colleagues: I don’t know what percentage of the time, but enough to make it interesting. I spend a fair amount of time, more than an editor probably should.

This also speaks to the intellectual nature of the work. These people experience the tasks as something continuous. The work they do and the scholarship they pursue go on more or less throughout the day. All the reading, research, and contemplation occur in the absence of any kind of clock. Passion is at the foundation of this attitude. That passion compels these people to construct their

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lives, consciously or unconsciously, in such a way that discrete segments of time are blurred. This perspective can lead to problems. Unfortunately, while these passionate people work in a seamless way, much of the rest of the world demands quantifiable information and production deadlines. This includes publishers and would-be authors, both of whom have a great deal at stake in the editor’s work pattern. In an ironic way, the editors who experience the passion for work that transcends watching the clock can become victims of the crunch of time. For some, the energy devoted to their varied scholarly interests can be excessive, and they will be left facing emergencies as deadlines appear. Stress can result from periodic overwork when the calendar demands that the editors catch up. (I describe another side of this problem in the ‘‘Triage’’ section of this chapter.) The push and pull of significantly uneven work flow throughout the year can affect how well the work is done. In sharp contrast, some editors report the opposite experience: they see the work occurring in specific parcels of time. These parcels make their own kinds of demands. Such editors operate in a different way than those who lose track of the time spent on editorial work. An economics editor with eleven years as a professor explained that his work flow occurred in cycles: How much time do I spend? It tends to, obviously, come in clusters. You know, for example, I’ve just come back from an editorial board meeting so, during that particular time, I probably spent several days for the last couple of weeks. But then I might go several weeks without doing anything.

Another veteran economics editor echoed a similar theme about the stop-andgo nature of the work flow: It’s sporadic. It’ll be two hours, two whole days, and then it’ll be two, three months and nothing happens.

This new psychology editor experienced editorial time in a wide range, with no specific, regularized flow: I probably process, on average—I do it in batches, you know, so I have to average it out in my mind. I see a bunch of manuscripts. So, it’s really about three hours per manuscript. There’s a big range—some are shorter, some are a lot longer.

Perhaps personality, rather than work flow, is the key factor here. These people address the work in batches. For some, the work arrives that way. For others, they choose to organize it in this manner. This speaks to the relative freedom these editors have in their job. It is experienced in two ways. First is the freedom to work on manuscripts at a time of the editors’ choosing. To be sure, they have

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numerous other obligations, but compared to the relatively tightly controlled schedules in the for-profit sector, the freedom experienced by these editors is unusual. Second, there is freedom from the work for long periods of time. These editors can step away from these responsibilities with the knowledge that there are large periods of time when little or no attention is demanded. One experienced history editor was able to establish some kind of regular routine for her work. She knew what would be arriving and what she would do with that material, and she had a general idea of how long it would take: Fifty percent of it I send back within a day of reading it. But the other fifty percent I farm out, so there’s a big coordinating task. But there’s sort of the continuous flow of things. And that is, maybe, one day a week, in fact, in the office.

Regularizing the work schedule seemed to work for one established oceanography editor who had, out of necessity, carved out some parcels of time each week for editorial work: So I’m able to spend a day a week to kind of do this job, although it can be a stretch at times given everything else I have to do.

This may be an important factor in determining how and why scholars undertake editorial work. Scholarship is a small-scale, frequently individual, pursuit. People take on only the work they can bear. Each scholar makes that choice, and the data described here echo that sentiment. The additional tasks that editors undertake are added to their already existing burdens. Perhaps one of the attractions of editorial work is its flexibility. That is to say, the editor can devote more or less time to the work as he or she deems realistic. This relates to the idea of triage (discussed in a subsequent section). The flexible nature of editorial work allows the editor a certain freedom to decide how much time to devote to the job in any given time period. If the editor is facing too many tasks, the time devoted to an individual manuscript can be reduced. On the other hand, if the editor has some extra time, he or she will be able to spend more on working with new authors. STAFF Staff support varied greatly among the thirty-five people I interviewed. The following is a brief picture of the prevalence of each type of staff: Part-time professionals

12 journals

Full-time professionals

9 journals

Students

9 journals

None

5 journals

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A social psychology editor described how the duties were divided in her office: I have an editorial assistant, who’s a graduate student here, who works a couple of hours a week. And she Xeroxes and mails and all this stuff. I type the letters myself, because I write my own correspondence.

The complexities of electronic production dogged this history editor until she was able to establish a consistent relationship with those with whom she worked: And I have the great privilege of having met our typesetter, who gets my disks, and learned exactly what I had to flag, what I can assume, what gets lost in the machine, etc., which is great. But there’s a lot to do at the end. And there’s always one article that comes in late or needs more work.

A brief account of the importance of clerical help came from this veteran psychology editor: I have a secretary who acts as managing editor. So she takes . . . care of the bureaucratic stuff. That’s critical. You need [someone] to do the paperwork.

Another physics editor, who had retired from teaching, described how indispensable was his staff. This was another case where substantial financial support allowed the editor to be freed from the details: Most of the effort is carried out by the support staff in the other office. [Mr. X] is kind of our hero of the shop in there. What is the shop in there? The shop in there is a group of work-study students very carefully selected. It’s kind of an evolutionary process. Students . . . work for him. He runs at the point of . . . all the activities that involve logging in new manuscripts. They have a certain mechanical procedure that, you know, leads to this desk.

These editors are talking about removing themselves from the final polishing of the manuscript. This is their view of the role of the editor. The Lewin model of the psychology of the gatekeeper can be instructive here (Lewin, 1951). Lewin looked at the ‘‘motivation of the gatekeeper,’’ which he defined as the system of values that lies behind the gatekeeper’s choices. One of the elements of that motivation is Lewin’s idea of ‘‘Obstacles to Overcome.’’ Here the gatekeeper examines material that comes before him or her and looks at how each manuscript is presented. Charts, graphs, and other nontextual material are also considered. The editor is looking for any obstacles that the material might present that could preclude its publication. Those editors with sufficient budgets and staff have a luxury in this regard: they can pass on this task to their staff. Some staff members take a more active role in the actual shaping of manuscripts, as a political science editor with eight years of experience explained:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge Once the content or conclusion in the direction of the article is not in question, . . . on the kind of hard editing there is a little consultation, and when it goes to copyediting, our copy editor—professional copy editor— will . . . [read] things through a different lens and will have lots of questions. She is in fairly lengthy contact with each author; there are about 15, 20, 30, [even] 40 queries on any given article—‘‘Elaborate—the reader won’t understand, this is incomprehensible, what do you mean?’’ Down to ‘‘You need something else here, you need this, you need that,’’ that whole thing.

The degree to which the support staff have responsibility may depend on the personality of the editor and the experience of the staff. One experienced history editor described how his operation worked: I’m still ultimately the responsible person to whom the people report, and I now have an assistant editor who really, these days, does most of the dayto-day editorial work on the journal, as well as the other aspects of the publishing program, because we also publish books. So I’m not just the journal, there are a couple of newsletters, as well.

Some of the veteran editors whom I interviewed had assembled an experienced staff to take care of many of the duties with minimal supervision. One history editor explained: There’s a staff here that follows on the lines I started, when I started the journal, so that a lot of things that have to do with production and technical decisions—I can feel perfectly happy not ever thinking about them. Because they will be done on time, it’s all standardized. Good people doing it.

An interesting trend apparent from the data is that many editors enjoy giving responsibility to their staff. These data do not conform to the Lewin gatekeeping model, given that the gatekeepers enthusiastically gave over significant elements of their function to their staffs. Is the tendency to delegate due to a lack of ego? Maybe these editors are comfortable enough with themselves and their place in the profession that they can walk away from the small decisions. Many of the editors I interviewed spoke of leaving the details to their staff. These editors employed a division of labor. Regardless of whether they constructed or inherited it, that system is what now exists. This is an implicit step toward efficiency, which they did not spell out in the interviews. In this picture, each person at the journal brings special skills to the production process. Those with the more unique skills, like the editor, need not spend a lot of time doing tasks that others on the staff can do. Such lower-level tasks include proofreading, copyediting, scheduling production, and the like. The editor places him- or herself at the pinnacle of a hierarchy in the process. In a sense, he or she is saying, ‘‘Don’t waste the editor’s time

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with tasks that don’t require special expertise.’’ Other people on the staff can— and should—do the second-level tasks. These tasks fulfill production roles that are virtually interchangeable with those of any other journal. All journals need copy editors, proofreaders, and other production people. But only the editor has the unique skills needed for high-level decision making, and thus he or she should be reserved for this function. Funding plays a large role in the nature and use of staff. An anthropology editor at a large organization gave a detailed explanation of how his staff worked: When we get the final text, a variety of things happen. First of all, the associate editor puts one of her staffers on to checking all references and first appearances of—basically evaluate our house style, which is modeled on the Chicago Manual. Then either she or I will do a first edit of the text, and I’d say that again for that you would probably have to—it takes me about a couple of hours per article, perhaps a bit more. It could take up to four hours. It depends on how much is needed. Then the other one does it. Then it goes to the production editor, who may do a little bit of additional mechanical editing. We don’t let production editing do anything but substandard [material]. For example, we may have missed something, a blatant error or stupid mistake or something. It’s good to have another eye. Now, he tends to do things more at the level of the proofing stage, though. [Then] we get the galleys. We proof the galleys. Again, we both proof them. And so does [the production editor]. And so they’re seen by at least four people, including the author, because the author gets proofs as well.

Those editors whose journals are published by well-financed scholarly societies have many of the details taken care of by a central office. For example, one physics editor, a professor emeritus, described how he dealt with some of the limitations of using remote staff who may not be well-versed in his field: When a manuscript goes off for composition, we have a lot of foreign authors. There’s a copyediting staff at the place where it’s composed, where they have some technical knowledge, but I don’t like to send something off where I think that I have some experience at the level of their knowledge, and if I understand what the author is trying to say scientifically but I don’t think my copy editors do, I’ll do some work on that. I try not to spend a lot of time doing comma corrections and so on, although when I’m reading a manuscript for content the last time, it’s easy and sort of irresistible.

The Lewin model calls on the gatekeeper to address a variety of issues. On one level, the gatekeeper has to arrive at high-level decisions about new and old paradigms involving the nature of the discipline and how ideas are expressed in that culture. However, another level demands that the gatekeeper make some rather ordinary judgments about the physical presentation of material. It is these

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ordinary tasks from which the editors in the data here were stepping away. Perhaps that is because they were more concerned with ideas rather than presentation. This is the stage where scholarly soundness is not an issue. What is at issue is the grammatical structure of the manuscript, and decisions about grammar can be assigned to someone else on the staff.

TRIAGE Another device that editors have employed involves time and triage. Triage comes from the French trier, meaning to sort or to sift. The English definition revolves around emergency medical treatment. Triage is ‘‘the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors’’ (Webster’s, 1976). As the manuscripts come in, the overburdened editors have to make quick judgments about the potential of each piece. One important part of that judgment involves the amount of effort a manuscript will require in order to make it publishable. For one history editor with over twenty-five years in scholarship, this issue has always been a problem: Then, occasionally, you get an essay whose conception is excellent but whose execution is awful. . . . That’s the most difficult decision for me to make—[it’s] to read an essay and say, you know: ‘‘This person has gone into the archives. This person has found information that’s important. The problem is, this person can’t write.’’ Now, what do you do? Depending upon the work load, you might say, ‘‘OK, we’ll accept it.’’ But when you accept an essay like that, it means a lot of work, because now you’re going to have to work with that author, and work extensively. Now, you hope that the work, that the final product, is worth it.

This editor experienced this conflict in a personal way. He edited a small journal and his management style was very personal. By contrast, some editors have larger operations and can rely on the referee comments as guidance for the potential author and avoid engaging in the revision process. This veteran geography editor simply points out to the author what has been said about the manuscript: There’s always been at least one of the referee comments for an article that I’ve rejected, for, like a new scholar—we’re talking about the new scholars—that I’ve rejected, and the referee comments, they were superb. And I said: ‘‘Look at those [comments]. You ought to take a look at those. ’Cause it’s going to tell you a good idea of what to do next.’’ I didn’t spend more time myself, ’cause I haven’t got time.

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This physics editor created a compromise position for herself. She was able to come to terms with making quick repairs to manuscripts without investing a lot of time: If it’s a major rewriting job—if I have time I help them. If I don’t have time, I send it back. But over the years I’ve gotten very expert at putting in words between the lines, just writing between the lines, fixing up with a minimum of fuss so there’s really no major rewriting.

Again in the data we can see that these editors seem to feel they are struggling for control of the workload. They have come up with a sifting device as a way of coping with their multiple responsibilities. Editors must decide what manuscripts are salvageable and what are not. The difficulty for authors is that they may submit interesting but unfocused material during a particularly busy time for the editor, causing their manuscript to be rejected. However, if that same manuscript had been submitted at another time during the year, when the editor was less busy, it might have been published. Many editors feel that they are in a leadership position where their creativity is valued. Working with junior scholars can be the most rewarding part of the job. However, these sentiments were expressed primarily by editors from smaller operations, who have the time and the access to handle individual manuscripts. In contrast, editors from larger operations with multiple coeditors and referees reported fewer experiences in this vein. For many editors, the period of triage is their time to flourish. After all, these people are educators. That’s why they chose the field of scholarship. A social psychology editor often looked at manuscripts in this way: Because our flow is slower, I can spend more time cultivating a paper which might get rejected at a busier journal but it has promise. Sometimes, it’s a younger investigator or somebody from another country and the manuscript needs—the person needs—a lot of education.

However, when a journal does not give enough attention to manuscripts that are submitted, there can be problems. This psychology editor compared her experience as a prospective author and as an editor: One of the journals I publish a lot in is a very busy journal, so the editors have a lot to do and they’re very busy people. They never send anything but a four-page form letter that either says: ‘‘it’s rejected,’’ or ‘‘We’ll reluctantly look at a revision. If you want to force it on us, we’ll look at a revision,’’ you know. This editor does nothing personal vis-a`-vis the author. And it’s just awful. I mean, that’s not the way to run a journal.

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Rather than simply reject a manuscript with little comment, this mid-career sociology editor went on to note how the rejection itself would trigger detailed communication to the author: This is all very time-consuming, as you can imagine. And especially as when I reject, I usually write a letter of between two and six pages in length. And then, that again is something that, perhaps, it would take a couple of hours to do properly.

It goes along with the editors’ teaching responsibilities and is linked to the idea of creativity to hone a piece of material and to work with an author on expressing ideas in a precise and aesthetic manner. This is not just a matter of conducting research. It also involves the presentation of research. The material has to be interesting—it has to hold a reader’s attention. This is a craft, even an art. It is an area where this young history of science editor found an outlet for creativity: It’s intellectual work. And I consider doing it well to be something that’s creative. I mean, it’s not something that I would want to do full time. But when there’s a certain kind of a piece where intervention can make a great difference—it’s not, perhaps, the absolute best pieces, which were in pristine form from the moment they [arrived], and it’s not the absolute worst pieces, which are not salvageable. But somewhere in the middle there are people with important ideas for whom refocusing the question and bringing the article out so that it’s clear represents, I think, a quite satisfying intervention. I consider it part of my duty in the field to do this. It’s also a sense of—it’s part of the job, part of my responsibility to the field.

For many editors, the experience of this craft is a rewarding one. Perhaps it is even the most rewarding aspect of editorial work. Indeed, simple aesthetics seemed to dominate the view of this experienced political science editor: I appreciate their problems, and that’s another reason why I’m willing to take the time to take [the articles] and knock them into shape, because I’d like the readers to have something that flows and is well organized and to the point.

However, some poorly conceived manuscripts generated scorn from the editors with whom I talked. These were manuscripts that needed a great deal of improvement. What is at issue here is how these editors related to the tasks they performed. They formed judgments about the tasks and frequently expressed their opinions about them. Perhaps some thought that a lot of the work was clerical, and thus ‘‘beneath’’ them. Clearly, this kind of work was viewed as a nuisance by some. This can be seen in the data where editors commented about the sad state of the manuscripts that they received. This veteran geography editor

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apparently was still not resigned to the low level of quality that he saw on a regular basis: One of the disappointments of this is how illiterate most academics are. The level of—even in the manuscripts submitted—the spelling mistakes, grammatical errors.

For this history editor, the thought processes behind the submission of poor material were puzzling: Then, at the other end, of course, there’s the stuff that’s just plain schlock. Just forget it. This is hopeless. This is an undergraduate term paper that the professor said, ‘‘Gee, this ought to be published,’’ and the student took him seriously. And that takes care of a fair number [of manuscripts], by the way.

A certain level of disdain is evident in both the descriptions of the copyediting work and the analysis of the state of the manuscripts. Perhaps there was a feeling that editors have to put up with a certain level of incompetence in order to produce their journals. The actual provenance of a particular piece was glossed over by this physics editor, who did, however, lament the poor presentation: That’s very common, because very often the professor has his graduate student write the paper. And he’s too busy to really check and proof it. And sometimes I’m appalled by the sloppiness of manuscripts and the poor grammar, from American authors.

There are many sloppy manuscripts, and there is much corrective work that needs to be done in order to produce a journal. This is a necessary evil of the job, but that fact is little comfort, as a veteran economics editor noted, for those who have to look for quality: I’ve done so much refereeing, and I’m sure the others have. I was refereeing for so many years, hundreds of articles. And I’m always shocked at how bad most of them are.

Perhaps the notion of survival of the fittest can be applied here. From the many mediocre manuscripts come the few gems that are publishable. At the top level are those few that are accepted without revision. At the next level are those submissions that express an interesting idea but need improvements in presentation. These are the manuscripts that teeter on the edge of acceptance. Finally, there are those manuscripts that either do not present a new outlook or are poorly presented. The burden of time pressures, the crushing numbers of submissions, and the schedules of the individual editors all come together to depict a struggle for recognition on the part of each submittor. The material with the best chance

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for publication is that which requires the least amount of intervention on the part of the editor. MANUSCRIPT REVIEW AND DECISIONS An economics editor with over ten years of experience talked about how he made decisions on the disposition of manuscripts: There are certain standards or guidelines that we’re looking for in a paper. We have a checklist or a rating scale, but we also have just, . . . essentially, a white page where the reviewers have a free text space.

Strict guidelines for manuscript review were described by a veteran physics editor as an important part of how he did his job: The main job of refereeing is to read it through and see, could they make it sound a little bit better here, and was there a reference that maybe they should have included? Any of these odds and ends, but it’s enough to decide whether it should be accepted or rejected.

Simplification of the process was paramount to this experienced mathematics editor, who relied exclusively on the referees: I guess I see us as intermediaries to a great extent. I mean, it’s obviously necessary to have somebody who makes the decisions and who can absorb the information and then transmit it without identifying where the information came from. But in some ways we’re not actually judging the quality of the work. I mean, the referees are doing that.

The role of the gatekeeper is on display in sharp outline in these data. Some of the editors have chosen to absent themselves from the extensive role outlined in the Lewin model. For these editors, the ‘‘cognitive structure’’ and the ‘‘motivation’’ of the typical gatekeeper are contrary to their experience. Their role is strictly as a coordinator, and their job is to get the right manuscript in front of the right referee. Once the referee reports come in, the decision to publish is simply a matter of tallying them. If the majority say publish, then the editor goes with that decision, with no questions asked and no personal intervention. This is the editor as switchboard operator. Given the enormous time constraints on many of these scholars, this approach is perhaps an adaptation to circumstances. Taking on the more expanded role of final aesthetic and academic arbiter may be too demanding for some. The data also suggest that the narrower, switchboard role was adopted, not only by those seeking to relieve themselves of time burdens, but as an ideological position that some actively take. These individuals seem to feel that the profession

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is best served by an editor who undertakes to serve the community by being a coordinator rather than an arbiter. There is a defense for the role of switchboard operator. These editors say that their role is best seen in a simple light. The job of the editor is to do two things: to bring new material in front of experienced scholars (i.e., the reviewers), and if that new material passes muster, to bring it to the attention of the rest of the profession, as it deserves, by printing it in the journal. Other complicating factors (e.g., the direction of the discipline or the various constituencies within the readership) are thus de-emphasized. The decentralized nature of scholarship makes scholarly communication difficult. This working theory holds that, to compensate, the editor should simplify things as much as possible. However, there is a problem. This theory assumes the neutrality of reviewer selection, yet ideological camps abound in all disciplines. The data are filled with remarks about the perils of ignoring their influence. Simply sending off a manuscript to three reviewers with the understanding that the majority will prevail ignores the fact that editorial discretion allows this gatekeeper to select reviewers who are known to feel strongly about one ideology or another. Thus, an editor can get any kind of response he or she wants. This is where the development of personal networks plays a role. (This notion is further developed in Chapter 6.) In the interview data, the role of reviewer comments appears central to these editors. For example, one history editor learned the hard way about the perils of ignoring referee comments: Well, a paper comes in, and it goes to me, and I have a file and contacts, and so one determines, in our case, three evaluators. We try and find three who agree, and if eventually we do, we send the paper out to them. That can take greatly varying amounts of time. But when it returns, then I look at the things and decide whether we publish or not. The field is too large and complex for any editor to read the paper and decide himself. I discovered that early on in my career by publishing a couple of papers I thought were great, and basically everyone said [they] were not great. So . . . one has to rely on the experts, if, hopefully, you can get them to do this, because it’s all, of course, gratis. But there are always people who do it.

On the other hand, the data revealed some sharp contrasts in how editors conducted their decision making. Some made individual decisions, while others employed a team approach. The degree to which reviewers played a crucial role seemed to be entirely up to the particular editor. A psychology editor explained the review procedure: And occasionally I will get two, and I’ll keep trying for two, but sometimes I’ll review a manuscript on the basis of one other review because I spend so long on it myself [that] it’s really three reviewers (because I do such a [thorough] job). I read it and prepare my notes without looking at the re-

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge views, so I’m not prejudiced. Then I read the reviews, then I write my letter, so I kind of integrate it and I can allude to things that reviewers have said. But mostly, I fill my letters with the things that I’ve seen, which are sometimes dramatically different from what the reviewers have seen. So it really helps to have more than one person looking at a manuscript. But most of the time, I can make a judgment, and I do that.

A young economics editor recounted a similar pattern at his journal: We send a paper [to the referees] and at that point I’m pretty much in control. So I then send the paper to three referees which I select and hopefully get responses from them in a timely fashion. And then read the paper myself and make a judgment based on alternate opinion. And then if I believe the paper is a good paper, I’ll write back to the author and ask him for revisions.

This veteran physics editor also had the same outlook on the role of referee reports: The referees’ reports are advisory only. I make the final, or the other associate editors make the final, decisions. Now, we rely very heavily on referees. And we also have an advisory board that we consult fairly frequently.

The influence of the reviewers’ comments can be significant. An oceanography editor explained how an ideal editor should go about their business, taking care not to be influenced by the reviews before reading a manuscript: Somebody with high standards who does a thorough job of handling the review process, reads the paper themselves carefully, and then reads the reviews after . . . [reading] the paper. . . . I think that’s an important thing to do. Otherwise, your review is colored by what you’ve already read, [by what] somebody else said.

This is the heart of the decision-making process. These editors reserved the right to make the final decision on the disposition of manuscripts. This approach embraces the Lewin position of the ‘‘psychology of the gatekeeper,’’ where the ultimate responsibility for what gets allowed through the gate is in the gatekeeper’s hands. The data show that these editors take on this responsibility with enthusiasm. Their name is on the journal. Thus, their reputation is at stake and they experience the responsibilities of the job in a personal way. Numerous scenarios that can arise as a result of reviewer reports were outlined by an experienced geography editor, who also provided some insight into his decisions:

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I really do rely on the referees heavily. So that if I get somebody who’s done what I think is a thorough job of refereeing and it’s very negative, I take that very seriously. If somebody does a real slipshod job, half-page, less than half-page, very general—and I can spot those, they’re very easy to spot. Anybody can spot them. Then I give that . . . very little weight in the process. When [the paper] comes back [from the referees], then you make the decision based on what you’ve got for the material, and I have a little form that [the reviewers] fill out, but then they also send in their own, separate comments. Then you make the decision. Is this an outright reject— and so far I’ve been [using] a simple way of doing it—outright reject or a revise and resubmit, which comes in different [degrees]. Say, [there are] two categories that are straightforward. The easiest to deal with [is] where it might be a series of [corrections:] do this, do that. But still [it’s] revise and resubmit.

For this mid-career psychology editor, sidestepping reviewers’ comments was sometimes necessary: I certainly won’t take the manuscript unless I can get my reviewers to agree to a publishable paper. But one of the ways I can be more autonomous is, if there is a paper that I think is on an important topic or something, I can allow them to go through several [revisions,] as opposed to one, [which is] the standard. I can also, and will on occasion, write my own reviews. I probably feel a little more discretion [than most editors] to choose [the] reviewers—and the papers—I mean, I think probably the way to think about the nature of my autonomy is [that] I certainly reserve for myself a lot of discretion.

The barely perceptible role of discretion is apparent here. Note the desire for autonomy. The editor merely as someone who passes manuscripts around the country doesn’t describe the entire picture. If this editor wants something to get through the system, he will find a way. What about the efficacy of the system? Editors do find ways to get a favored manuscript into print. Yet the idea of peer review still holds strong. All research must be submitted to colleagues to be judged. But sometimes success seems to depend on which ‘‘peer’’ will do the ‘‘review.’’ A physics editor expressed a similar perspective concerning individual decisions: Well, one of the criteria is that it’s interesting, and what that comes down to being, I guess, when push comes to shove, is it interesting to me. It’s a little scary, but certainly what gets published in my journal—and a lot of people read it—is a lot dependent on what I find interesting and on my taste.

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A veteran history editor felt that forms and checklists were not the best way to handle reviewer comments: No checklist [is used]. My editors, if I ever suggested to these men and women that they should use a checklist or a form, that would be the end of our relationship. I’m not going to say to a person that’s won two Pulitzer prizes, ‘‘Please fill out this form.’’ No. No. No. I don’t like forms, anyway. I rebel against them. No, I don’t like that idea.

Perhaps there are two elements that motivate the editors who experience the work in this way. The first relates back to the importance of academic reputation for the scholarly community. Reputation is the stock-in-trade of scholarship. In this light, editing a journal is a highly visible position, through which powerful reputations, good or bad, can be established. Therefore, it is crucial for some editors to keep a tight hold on the gate so that they can experience some degree of control over what ultimately gets published under their masthead. That experience of control allows for a feeling that one’s reputation rests under one’s own control. Simply letting a majority of the referee reports decide what gets published does not provide the degree of control sought by those who want to establish their personal mark on a journal. A second motivating force driving these editors may involve the quality of journals and the importance of methodology. My data contain many instances where editors describe reading substandard published work. For these editors, having the arbiter position allows them to strike a blow for the kind of methodological rigor that can serve as a standard for their discipline. Many editors with whom I talked expressed interest in serving the profession. That service can manifest itself in the methods by which an editor goes about his or her job. Rigorous scholarship practiced by editors with high-quality reputations can serve as a model for others in the discipline. For these editors, this is most likely to happen when they are extensively involved with each manuscript and can feel free to view referee reports as advisory only. There is tremendous scrutiny and pressure surrounding a high-quality journal. There is also great loyalty to models and paradigms. Every issue has to be honed and polished to a sharp degree because it carries an image. This is important because the scrutiny involves some sniping from the sidelines. There are those who do not participate yet feel free to criticize. This pressure is felt by the editors. If they slip up even a little, they will hear about it. A veteran political science editor described the readership of his journal and the kinds of topics they sought: People know the sorts of things we publish, they know that we are interested in good analysis of both contemporary and historical issues. They know that the journal is read in the United States by political scientists, sociologists,

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and a smaller group of historians. So I think they know the kind of audience that’s going to be reading their work.

For these editors, getting stuck in an ideological hole where both the authors and the readership come from the same camp can lead to trouble. In extreme cases, the journal gets read only by those in its own camp, and not by those of any other persuasion. Almost immediately, those who were excluded no longer turn to the journal to learn about interesting research, and the journal then becomes known as merely a type of ‘‘in-house’’ publication, where prospective authors have to tailor their material to meet the de facto requirements represented in the previous issues. This is where the scrutiny again enters the picture. For example, a geography editor remarked that any identification of his journal with a rigid ideological bent tended to occur very rapidly among the readership: So we figured, the worst thing that could happen to you is to be known as a journal of either low quality or that you had to be connected in some way to get—not [that] you had to be in order to get published—but that if you were connected, you could very easily get published.

This is one way in which the various ideological camps are identified. Scholars face a mountain of journals, and many of them are looking for a shorthand way of sifting through all this material. One way is to look at the editorial board and the names in the table of contents and on the masthead. Here they can come to some quick conclusions about the nature of the journal and the people behind it. This then becomes the journal’s public identity. A young history editor experienced the establishment of his journal’s public identity as something crucial to gaining readership. If you get known as just an in-group like that, or in only one area that is received as being positive in terms of articles coming in, yeah, that’s the way to wreck a journal fast. People who try that may think that they’re trying to—I think it’s more [often] done inadvertently. But that’s a terrible mistake to make. If you do that, you’re killing the journal. Journals should be good because of the quality of the research articles, and if you narrow it down to one area, you’re verbally blowing your own feet off of the journal sort of thing.

Editors have to work hard to get an outside observer’s perspective regarding the kind of material they publish. An editor’s own individual proclivities can be compensated for by the presence of reliable referees and board members who do not let the journal become merely the organ of one particular ideological camp. Constant self-scrutiny is in order here. This is also one of the practical responsibilities of the editor. This doubles the scrutiny under which editors operate. On the one hand, the readership will rapidly let them know about any shortcomings in the journal. On the other hand, the editor’s self-scrutiny, in

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conjunction with keeping a critical eye on the staff of the journal, also must be there. Beyond the day-to-day, on-the-job activities experienced by these editors, there is another level, which involves the meaning they make of the work they do. This is the focus of the next chapter.

4

Making Meaning of the Work INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at journal editors as they explain the meaning that they make of their work. Meaning making invites people to reflect on their experiences and to put them into some kind of order. Through such explanations, some insight can be gained concerning what animates these journal editors. The relative importance of various factors emerges when such data are analyzed. The life of ideas is an experience that takes place internally, as scholars dedicate their professional lives to their intellectual pursuits. Ideas, points of view, and new research techniques all develop from within. Those scholars who have a passion for the work, including the editors interviewed for this book, have an opportunity to share that special internal process in an external way with other individuals. It is that special sharing of the unique passion for a specific subject or technique that particularly animates the experiences of these editors. Using the inward passion for scholarship to form a bridge that facilitates contacts with other people who share the same passion was depicted by those in this study as a powerful experience. METAPHOR In order to gain an understanding of the full complexities of the experiences of these editors, I posed a metaphorical question to them by asking them to complete this sentence: ‘‘A journal editor is like a . . .’’

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The responses from the editors generally involved relationships. They typically experienced many kinds of relationships, some of which involved referees, authors, the editorial board, the publisher, the manuscript itself, and the nature of debate in the profession. Some of those whom I interviewed perceived themselves to be in the midst of a process that was often beyond their control. They had so many conflicting demands on their time that they struggled to get things done. This was the case for one experienced political science editor: A journal editor is like, oh yeah, I think a circus ringmaster would be more like it. Because you are . . . trying to manage—well, journals have different parts, obviously. There are substantive articles, there are review articles, there are reviews, book reviews, the occasional film review, that [this journal] has published. [The other journal on which I work] even has other departments, departments that deal with public history, departments that deal with teaching. So, . . . obviously, you’re in a position of trying to juggle many things at once, and manage things, and keep a certain cohesion to the issue. So I think, perhaps, a circus ringmaster is a good analogy.

A young economics editor spoke of how he enjoyed working with the submitted manuscripts. Indeed, his professional satisfaction came from this kind of work: There’s also the [sculptor’s] art to it, of taking the material and trying to refine it and come up with something . . . with a nice, artistic shape. And, in fact, that’s probably what I enjoy doing the most.

In sharp contrast, an editor of an earth sciences journal with over fifteen years experience in teaching described his role in an entirely different way. He relied on simplicity in his work: I was going to say, intermediary. Really just match the authorship with the review community in a very structured interaction. Preserving the anonymity of the review community is essential. So it’s mainly a facilitator. I think I feel comfortable doing it because I really do try to reduce the complexity to very simple kinds of bottom lines—I guess that’s the way to say that. Just the way I conduct my personal life and my research life and my professional life. I look for the simplicity, and so I try to do that in the review process. I mean, very obviously, I get [unfocused] page-long reviews and things like that. So in that way, I think I can help the process by focusing in on a particular kind of review or comment [on which] authors can focus. I may help expedite the process that way.

A similar theme was sounded by a physics editor with over thirty years of teaching experience:

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An editor is like a teacher in several important senses. A teacher who’s teaching well is trying to facilitate students’ learning of old physics and contributing to new physics. And the teacher who does his or her job well is perhaps not remembered by students particularly. An ideal of a teacher is not that I’m a showman in class or something, but [rather that] here is some wonderful subject matter, Maxwell’s electromagnetism [for example]; here are some students; I’d like to get them together and stand back and let them interact. They may not remember who their physics teacher was the same way people may get a lot [from my journal], but if I’m doing my job right, they don’t necessarily—they don’t care who’s editing it. It comes [in the mail and they say:] ‘‘Oh, I thought it was being edited in St. Louis. I guess that was twenty years ago.’’

What can be seen here is the relationship that these people have with the content of each manuscript and the impact they feel it will have on their discipline. For some, the relationship with the content is very close. They want to prune and sculpt and shape it well enough that it will be acceptable to their community. In sharp contrast, some of the editors have virtually no relationship to the content of the manuscript. Instead, they talk of their experiences as comprising the role of a facilitator. They are not there to push a particular agenda, but rather to present interesting work to their colleagues. This view speaks to the nature of learning itself. An applicable theory of learning, constructivism, says that people come to the learning environment with their own construction of the world already internalized. They have their own preferences and styles of processing new material. In this model, the teacher is a facilitator. This role is altogether different from the traditional model of the teacher who sees the learner as an empty vessel, into which the knowledge of the world is to be poured. In the same way, the experiences of these editors can be examined. The editor as facilitator feels that his or her role is virtually anonymous. It is merely to bring interesting material together with a motivated learning community and let them interact. There is no attempt to impose an ideology or to place oneself in a prominent position in the field. This earth science editor put it plainly: Being an editor is easiest when I think of myself as a bureaucrat. That what I’m doing is, well, I get something in, I figure out which departments or which reviewers it’s supposed to go to, send it to them, . . . look at the papers that come back, and . . . make a bureaucratic decision, saying, ‘‘Well, what do the majority of these people say?’’ and what not, and that’s the way it’s easiest. It’s hardest if I think of it as, you know, I’m trying to impose my own direction on things, because then I think, ‘‘Gee, people are not going to like this; am I doing the right thing?’’ It’s more defensible to say you’re doing the right thing when, say, you’re doing it with the majority of the reviewers rather than going against the majority and going with one reviewer who says this is really important.

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If we place this data in the context of the Lewin model (1951), the ‘‘cognitive structure’’ of the editor is the focus here, and specifically, the editor’s experience of ‘‘the meaning of the situation.’’ These data show the editors asking themselves, What is the overall culture of the group? For those editors who experience their role as facilitator, they see the group as eminently capable of reaching its own conclusions about the quality of recent research and its ultimate place in the discipline. Another part of the Lewin model also emerges here. The ‘‘motivation’’ of the gatekeeper looks at the system of values that lies behind the gatekeeper’s choices. The editors who were facilitators tried to identify the values held by their discipline. The editors who spoke of their roles as facilitators valued a nonhierarchical setting where the presentation of a variety of ideas was paramount. It was not up to the editor to push the discipline in one direction or another. However, those editors who involved themselves with the content of a manuscript had another view of how their group operated. It was up to these editors to sift the valuable manuscripts from the ordinary and present them to their busy colleagues in an interesting way. This sifting process assured these busy wouldbe readers that some kind of evaluation was done before the publication reached them. This is the function of the type of editor who experiences direct responsibility for the content of the manuscript. Two physics editors experienced their roles in completely opposite ways. The first editor had over thirty years of academic experience. His metaphoric description was as follows: I think ‘‘traffic cop’’ is a good [term]. You keep things flowing, and also, you can put up your hand and say no.

This statement was in sharp contrast to the following description from another physics editor, who had six years of experience: I don’t think that, to the extent that I see it as a traffic cop, it doesn’t bring me much satisfaction. I don’t have . . . that much interest in stopping bad things as my primary goal. That is to say, some people like lowering and opening the [drawbridge] and letting people pass or not pass. [But] that in itself isn’t what brings [me] satisfaction. I mean, I’m more interested in the things that are good than in blocking—encouraging the things that are good [rather] than in blocking the things that are bad. But that’s, perhaps, temperamental. I don’t feel like I have to purify the field or crush people who are not doing good scholarship. Rather, I’d like to see the field helped by aiding as much as I can those people whose work seems to me, potentially or actually, . . . pretty good. I’m not somebody who thinks that our culture or scholarship [are] on the edge of the abyss, and that if one doesn’t stop the Visigoths at the door—and the bad scholars at the door—the field will be ruined. My feeling is rather that the field is set by its best instances, not by its worst. So I think of what I’m doing as opening up new areas; en-

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couraging people to do interesting work; finding the people who are doing interesting work and seeing that it’s disseminated.

Here we see one editor embracing the gatekeeper model and another rejecting it. This issue involves how each person views the literature, what kinds of material are coming before them, and the question of who should do the evaluation, the reader or the editor. One person sees the body of literature as containing unacceptable elements, from which his constituency must be protected. There simply are some kinds of manuscripts that must not be allowed to pass through. This view says that the responsibility to the constituents is to save them time and energy by culling out the chaff before new research gets into print. He is comfortable in deciding what gets through. When displayed against the Lewin model, we can see that this experience is outlined in the cognitive structure section of the model, where Lewin discusses constituencies. The elder physics editor described previously focused on the various needs of the different groups within the discipline. For this editor, the experience of editorship was to meet the time needs of his constituents by acting as a traffic cop and stopping some of the traffic. His experience was in halting unacceptable material. Carrying the idea further, the police role can be seen as a bulwark against anarchy. Without someone there to direct and halt traffic when the need arises, chaos can result. On the other side, the experience of the other physics editor, who rejected the traffic cop model, is quite different. He had a different view of his relationship to the discipline. It was not his role to police the goings-on in the field. Indeed, he felt that the police role was an adversarial one where the power resides in the single person who controls the traffic. For the second editor, however, the burgeoning ideas embedded in the chaos produced by anarchy can produce welcome research. Perhaps it was his idea to create an atmosphere where worthwhile research could flourish. Under an atmosphere ruled by those in the police role, unconventional ideas might be repressed. However, by developing what is good instead of shutting the gate on what is bad, he felt that a more interesting body of literature could emerge. For this editor, the field was not his to patrol. His relationship to the field was not bounded by a jurisdiction role whereby he had responsibility for what was printed. We can see through the interview data that editors implicitly ask questions of themselves such as, Am I responsible for the content of the material that gets into print, or am I only responsible for the way production unfolds through the reviewing and scrutiny process, with no real concern for the nature of the material? Some see editorial work as a completely collaborative effort, whereby if all the parts work correctly, sound material gets into print. Subject specialists (the referees) do the acceptance or rejection; the editors pick the subject specialists, and the copy editors refine the manuscript. It all flows well. In this model, the responsibility of the editor is to assemble all the necessary people and make sure the manuscript gets a fair hearing. If it does, and if a

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majority of the referees approve it, the manuscript will be published. If they don’t approve, it will be rejected. Here the editor’s job is focused on the assemblage of talent to make the whole process work. BRICK BY BRICK For some editors, the meaning they make of the work involves contributing to the literature in small, but significant, ways. They experience the work as helping their scholarly colleagues, not by encouraging major breakthroughs, but by the lower-profile process of building knowledge through small steps. A midcareer economics editor expressed his meaning making in this way: The hope is onward and upward, and whether it’s science or social science or literature, whatever it is, there’s some sort of presumption that knowledge is a benefit intrinsically, in and of itself. It has other utilitarian benefits, but it also has a benefit just for the sake of doing it. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it well. And doing it well means, does it add to the structure? You could just add one brick. It doesn’t have to add a whole wing or a new palace. Every article doesn’t have to be written by a Nobel prize winner. It doesn’t have to be at that level, but it has to at least close off a line. . . . That’s knowledge. Knowing that something [published] is wrong, sort of negative knowledge [identifying fruitless paths], but that’s okay.

A veteran history editor revealed similar sentiments about the meaning that she made of her work: There’s a role that I can play in getting lots of very different kinds of work done and out there for people—that is really why I do this. I mean, it’s sort of like, there’s this larger, collective enterprise that we’re all doing, which is feminist history and sociology. Because there’s a set of questions that you answer or something we’re all talking about, and I just . . . play a role in having that dialogue keep going. Which is much broader than my role as a scholar.

These people felt they were playing a role in the communication of scholarly research to their colleagues. They felt they were part of a broad effort to advance knowledge. The idea of continuing the dialogue resonates in the experiences of this veteran history editor with over thirty-five years spent as a professor: It’s been so long that I just do it. You start with the assumption that you do have to have scholarly journals to keep the movement in the field going on, and someone has to do it, and when I pushed to get it started here, it was because in a certain sphere it wasn’t being done.

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A young mathematics editor expressed a similar viewpoint about the meaning that he made of his editorial work: I think more of it’s a sense of feeling that this is a job that needs doing, and I don’t feel bad about helping out.

These editors related their experiences about how knowledge is built to the role of the editor in that large construction project. For these people, knowledge is built slowly, piece by piece. The editor can play a useful role by examining, publishing, and distributing sound research. There seems to be embodied here a quiet confidence in ‘‘the invisible hand’’ of the scholarship marketplace. The invisible hand is an idea borrowed from Adam Smith in his explanation of how a commercial marketplace regulates itself. Smith (Rev. ed., 1976) asserted that no one was in control of the commercial market, but that an ‘‘invisible hand,’’ as evidenced by the rise and fall of the desirability of particular goods, was the ultimate judge of sustainability. In the same way, the events here are structured along these lines. These editors experience their jobs as part of a ‘‘larger, collective enterprise that we’re all doing.’’ This enterprise brings new research to the marketplace of ideas. If the research bears up under scrutiny, then it will survive. However, if the research does not bear up, the marketplace will devalue the material and little will be heard from in that area for some time to come. At some level, there is a leap of faith going on here. The experiences of these editors involve trust. They trust that the marketplace will provide an appropriate hearing to the ideas they advance through their journals. They trust that their colleagues will examine, value, and remember the research that comes into the marketplace in their individual subdisciplines and will look at new research without applying paradigmatic prejudices and biases. The brick-by-brick analogy assumes that everyone involved can arrive at a consensus about what it is they are all building—which bricks should be placed where in the structure; which bricks are useful and which are not. PERSONAL NEEDS The meaning some whom I interviewed made of their work stems from their individual personalities and the needs that the work satisfied within them. Editorial work was a kind of work that they enjoyed for a variety of reasons; the reasons had to do with how they saw themselves and how they felt they could best serve their professions within the confines of their personalities. One psychology editor described the personal impact her appointment had for her: It means I’ve achieved a very high level of prominence nationally, which makes it . . . wonderful. Academics are extremely insecure, that’s what makes them work so hard—big secret of academia: you compare yourself.

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge There are so many smart people around and you feel inadequate, so you work ever harder. So you need all those little proofs that you’re OK. . . . That’s one thing, the self-validation. I’m . . . a hermit kind of person. So editorial activities are a perfect venue for me, because I can do what I’m good at in relative privacy. I can control stress. I can control the timing. . . . It suits my nature while giving me the kind of rewards I need. So I feel good that I’m doing good, and I feel good that it makes me feel smart.

For this physics editor with over thirty years of experience, personal traits were woven into the meaning of the work. It was important to him to witness his own impact, both on the field and on the careers of the people whose work he published: When I see the first article that I commissioned in there—’cause one’s in the works right now, I have it out for review, and the other one will come in January—when I see it in print, I’ll just look and say, ‘‘I was the one that started that new part.’’

These people express themselves in personal terms about what the work provides them. They have a level of enthusiasm that comes from within. Something about the work connects with something inside them. In fact, it fulfills a need that they feel is very important. Further on in the interview, the physics editor explained: It might be that there is some prestige factor to it, but probably I’ve always had such a big head to begin with that I kind of—it just adds on to it. It just makes it bigger or something. I think it’s I just take it all in stride. It’s what I should be doing at this point in my career. I’m happy that they [the editorial board] came and asked me. I felt great when they said, ‘‘Would you be an editor for us?’’ ’Cause it’s what I’ve been building up to.

Another veteran physics editor described the meaning he made of his work through words that clearly show the work’s impact on his life: I love it. And it’s very—I mean, I don’t love every minute of it. It’s a little bit like describing—I run the marathon sometimes. It’s a little bit like running a marathon. You don’t love—the whole experience, you love, but you don’t love every step kind of thing. Not everybody feels this way, but I find it—it’s a thrill every month. I get my copy in the mail. But I find it exciting to get the issue. And just yesterday I got an extra copy of the mailing labels for the December issue—sort of exciting to [look] through this computer printout, and, my God, it’s going all over the world. People are reading what we put out, and it never occurred to me that I would be doing something that important. But yeah, I find it enormously satisfying. . . . I guess, the sum total of all the teaching I’ve done—I’d say it was important, but I certainly never had done anything nearly this important.

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Other editors took a slightly different approach. They made meaning of their work by seeing the journal as a vehicle for the kind of academic impact they wanted to have. They felt that they wanted to express something in particular in their fields, which the journal helped them to do. A young physics editor explained: I find I get a broad sense of satisfaction from seeing the mixture of history and philosophy that I support and try to capture in my own writing [being] advanced as a branch of the field. So I see the journal as serving . . . an institutional representation of an intellectual mold. And . . . I think it’s important to do that.

A veteran psychology editor related a similar theme: For me it’s a mechanism for pursuing this particular agenda and trying to broaden the scope of the methodology. I see the journal as one of the institutional tools I have that are part of—[use] part of—this agenda and [try] to strengthen the part of the larger discipline.

This editor had an agenda, and he saw the work as a tool to advance it. The language here focuses on having an impact. These editors talked about the thrill of seeing something in print almost like children noticing their footprints in the sand for the first time. They related to the material in a dual way. They obviously had worked closely with the manuscripts as they arrived. These editors sought out referees and made decisions about the worthiness of each piece. Yet when the final product came through the mail, they experienced a new perspective on the process. The material took on a new light. This is the form in which the material will be seen by the world. Their name is in print, and their handiwork is responsible for the issue that lands on people’s desks. The importance of that kind of impact seems never to have left these editors, regardless of their years of experience. MEANING IN THE MATERIAL For the other editors whom I interviewed, the meaning arose from their work with the manuscripts and the ideas they contain. The intellectual stimulation that comes from reading and learning about new ideas is paramount. A young history editor spoke of the meaning she made of editorial work: I like being able to conceptualize an issue and talk to people about how they might contribute and what they might do, and kind of brainstorm with them. It’s a question of intellectual stimulation, of conversation, that makes you think about things you haven’t thought about before, that may open some new doors, intellectually. I think that’s what I like the best.

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The intellectual stimulation surrounding the ideas that are discussed and written about was of great importance to this anthropology editor, who spoke at length: I also think—and you’ve got to remember that people who edit academic journals are themselves scholars, and therefore they want to be intellectually engaged. They want to have the justification that there’s some intellectual excitement in what they do, for taking on all the bureaucratic stuff as well. And I think that may be another part of what you’re seeing, to be quite frank. . . . To me, writing is something that’s part of my life, like speaking, hearing, breathing. And it’s the bringing to consciousness of that [part of my life] that produces, then, the pleasure of a special kind of writing. You are aware of doing, just as when you, say, eat a meal that is beautifully cooked. So reading a piece that’s well written, you’re pleasurably aware, without having it rammed down your throat, so to speak, that this is something that’s really attractively written. I find [the intellectual stimulation to be,] in many ways, the most rewarding part. That is, one is in communication with people about ideas. . . . The involvement in complex and interesting and exciting conversation; the sense that this is something really enjoyable and really worthwhile.

For many of these editors, the meaning they made of this work involved a return to the type of intellectual stimulation that had attracted them to scholarly life in the first place. They believed that ideas matter and that the presentation of ideas can stimulate others. Despite the communal nature of the editorial work, these editors used individualistic terms. They made meaning of the editorial work in a strictly personal way. They saw the work as being interesting, exciting, or intriguing in terms of how it enhanced their own experience. For this physics editor of a review journal, the exposure to a variety of material that he normally would not get a chance to see forced him to adopt a broader outlook: [I’m affected by] the exposure to different areas, in that I read a lot of abstracts and introductions to papers in areas that I’d not otherwise come across at all. It’s just interesting to see what people . . . out there are doing.

A marine science editor with eight years of experience described how pressed he was for time and yet how seductive the work could be for him once he sat down to do it: I enjoy the process. Because I am so pressed by time, I can’t savor it as much as I’d like, but I do know every time I do sit down and spend [a] chunk of time doing it, I enjoy it because you definitely get a view of the field in which you’re involved directly that you just wouldn’t get anywhere else. And it’s intriguing. I do what I do because of the intrigue.

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When put in terms of the Lewin model explaining the motivation of the gatekeeper, something unique emerges. The experiences of these editors involve motivation that began with their own stimulation. There is little place for this phenomenon in the Lewin model. Rather than experiencing the gatekeeper’s job as being constantly concerned with the needs and desires of the readership, these editors’ central meaning making involved their own needs. This is an interesting anomaly. The kind of career these editors have crafted and the body of work they have accumulated have led them to this position. They were hired on the basis of that previous record and for the skills they have displayed. A part of these skills involves the enthusiasm for the work they do. This enthusiasm has served them well in their careers. The fact that they do not tightly align themselves with the constituency of the readership allows these editors the freedom to keep an eye outward, toward other literature. For them, the ideal editor will be on the lookout into other areas and needs the stimulation from the consequent exchange of ideas. These people need stimulating conversations, and they bring that need into the pages of the journal. The very motivation that drives them into reading and seeking stimulation makes them good editors. They feel a need to scour the interesting research, and this exposure to new ideas animates the work they do for the journal. In this way, the readership may benefit in a roundabout way through the fact that there is little chance that the material in the journal will be out-of-date. That is unlikely because it is being piloted by an editor who is constantly seeking out a stimulating exchange of ideas. One element of the Lewin model does have application here: the notion of variety. Is the readership getting enough exposure to all the relevant material being written? In a curious way, the experiences of these editors underscore this point in the Lewin model. Although the exposure of the readership to a variety of ideas was not the most valued experience of these editors, nevertheless, the readership was indeed so served as the editors sought out instances of intellectual stimulation to bring back to the journal. THE COLLEGIAL COMMUNITY The meaning making done by other editors whom I interviewed involves their relationship with their colleagues. The work demands that they be in contact with people all over the world who share their interests, and this contact with people underlies the meaning these editors made of their work. A veteran geography editor recounted what was for him the most important part of the work: I’ve gotten into contact with a vast array of people I [had] never contacted before, ’cause I’ve chosen them as referees. And it’s been [satisfying] to get to know a lot of them, at least through the e-mail and mail and all that. People’s names I knew, never had contact with before, or others I didn’t

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge know at all. . . . I got to know [them] a little bit, but just, again, through only that kind of framework. And then [I] might meet them at conferences later. In fact, that’s happened, too. So that’s satisfying, in some sense, although I have many contacts over a lot of disciplines. What I’ve done is just multiply them . . . even more—in some ways, it gets almost mindboggling. But it’s fun. That part of it, I think, is satisfying.

A political science editor, who was not born in the United States, had something similar to say: The work with the special issues has a lot of meaning because of my interaction with the people involved, with the authors. And . . . finding a way to turn an issue of a journal into something more—into something larger, more embracing of people at those different levels. I got a great deal of— a lot more pleasure and joy and satisfaction than just slugging out an issue that goes God knows where.

A longtime physics editor recounted what for him lay at the center of meaning making: I think the personal relationships are certainly important. I’m on a firstname basis, I think, with more people elsewhere than anybody else [in my department]. And just seeing the science reports published, seeing how the field is going, seeing what’s new and exciting early in the game—that’s fun. You’re peeking behind the curtains before the play starts. That’s a lot of fun.

Perhaps different kinds of personalities react to different kinds of rewards. It seems that this group of people reacted very positively to the interactions with their colleagues. One veteran geophysics editor, also from overseas, recalled how she was greeted at national meetings and the satisfaction she got from these interactions: I am always at these meetings. And . . . the majority of people in geophysics are at these meetings, too. It’s called [the] American Geophysical Union meeting, but it’s very highly international, and so at these meetings I’m extremely happy if different people [greet] me [by name] and say: ‘‘Oh, this [recent] topical issue . . . is just fantastic. I am using it, I am giving this to my students,’’ etc. So, you know, if I hear such things, I am happy.

This collegiality issue involves the simple human tendency to seek out others with like-minded interests. The data show how powerful this tendency can be. These scholars have, by definition, a tremendously strong interest in their discipline. In more general terms, they have an avid interest in the life of ideas. The decentralized nature of higher education has reached such a degree that truly stimulating contact with others can be rare. It is just such contact that holds

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meaning for many of these editors. After a lifetime of work in a particular discipline, they find reward in sharing their ideas with others who have worked in the same areas. Sharing interests and ideas carries with it its own level of excitement. A political science editor with some twelve years in teaching put things quite simply: I enjoy the contact with the authors, tremendously. I think it’s rare also that a lot of us get sufficient intellectual sustenance from our own [departmental] colleagues. I hate to say it, but I think it often doesn’t happen quite the way we wished it had, or would, and so we tend to turn our gaze outside [our departments].

Some editors experienced a very strong need to give something back to the community in which they served. For these people, doing something extra was part of being an active scholar. One veteran psychology editor noted how many rewards he had received in his career: I was very quickly overwhelmed by the feeling that, after all, I had got so much out of this that I really had a good sense of [the career benefits it could provide] to people. And again, it does sound a bit corny to say that one does owe a debt of gratitude.

Perhaps the fact that these individuals continued at some level to be educators compelled them to continually impart to others the many things they had learned through their careers. A young physics editor explained it this way: So it’s part of trying to give something back to the physics community, where what you’ve learned, your expertise, what you’ve learned, with all the other things you’ve done—bringing it back and giving it to the physics community. I think that that’s like serving on committees for other departments or other places. All those things are, give something back to this, something I’ve had, I would say, a great career in physics. So again, it’s giving back something for what I had received, which was just having a career where I could do the things I wanted to do.

The idea of service experienced by these editors speaks to the unstructured methods of scholarship. There is no full-time hierarchy that overlooks communication and scholarship in any of the disciplines represented by the editors whom I interviewed. There simply is no inclination, nor are there resources for establishing this kind of structure. Therefore, the vibrancy of each discipline depends on the extra efforts undertaken by the members themselves. The scholars interviewed here experienced a sense of obligation to keep scholarly communication alive and rigorous. It is through this service that advances are made

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and the peer review system can most effectively operate. In this way, the scholars push, cajole, and help one another to accomplish sound research. The idea of unpaid service speaks to the notion of Lewin’s gatekeeper. The service ideal also extends to watching over what happens in scholarly communication. The importance of evaluative norms is significant here. One element of service to the profession is the maintenance of standards. In the absence of a nominative hierarchy to oversee each discipline, there is a need for some to come forward to serve on a voluntary basis. The meaning made by those who spoke of serving the profession carries with it the idea of scrutinizing the manuscripts. There seems to be two things at work: the benevolent service to colleagues and the watchful scrutiny of the content of the communication. The reasons for engaging in editorial work are not always entirely serviceoriented. One longtime computer science editor related the meaning of the editorial work for him: I do it for two reasons, one altruistic and one selfish. Well, the altruistic reason is obvious. I think it is a service appeal that we cull the manuscripts appropriately and we are helping other researchers. The selfish reason is that it’s a way of me keeping up with the field, because I see vast numbers of manuscripts. Now, I can’t obviously read them all. But at least I know what subjects are being treated. And I get an idea of who’s doing good work, and that’s been a great help to me in my own career.

The meaning of the work involves making connections. These connections can affirm what each scholar is doing, or they can provide scholars with new ideas. Scholarship can be an isolating line of work. Quite often, the research and writing are carried out alone. Long hours pouring over data or spent in musty archives can give a scholar the impression of working in a vacuum, with few benchmarks by which progress can be measured. However, the experiences of these editors reveal the primacy of the contacts in their meaning making and indicate that they have found similarly inspired colleagues. MEANING AND COMMERCIAL CONSIDERATIONS Coser’s notion of immersion has applications here. Some editors made meaning of their work through their understanding of the forces that drive their particular communities. The editors whose remarks were described in the preceding section ascribed meaning to different levels than those profiled in this section. Here, the experiences are concerned with how their community reacts to two fundamental forces in scholarship. One is the role that the growth of knowledge plays in shaping a discipline. These editors had a keen eye toward the shape and form of their disciplines and opinions on how new ideas are added to the existing structure. The second force that influences scholarly circles for these editors involves tenure and promotion. These editors found particular meaning

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through their immersion in their scholarly circles and their focus on these dual forces. The meaning making of some editors involved the relationship between their journal and the marketplace. Many editors were aware of the position of their journal, both in the discipline and in the marketplace. Finding meaning in the journal’s commercial viability may be a way of providing service to the profession. These editors felt a need to encourage scholarly communication and believed that one of the best ways to do so was to look after the financial health of the journal. A number of interesting comments were made by the editors I interviewed. One history editor spoke of the particular geographical spread of her subscription base: We have major subscriptions in Scandinavia, Holland, most of Northwestern Europe, some in Central [Europe], U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India. And so yeah, major research libraries will have it. I mean, we have an institutional subscription on the shelf in 120 [countries], which, for an English-speaking journal that’s as narrow as we are thematically, is not bad. So people who are doing research will find it.

Feedback from the market came to these editors in a variety of ways. Readership response coupled with changes within his discipline compelled one experienced computer science editor to make some changes. For him, meaning making involved responding to the readership. It was a simple case of providing the people with what they want, lest they be lost to another journal: It used to be that there were only maybe half a dozen subareas in the field, so that a given long paper was relevant to a much larger percentage of the people. [However], as the field fragmented, a given long paper was relevant to maybe only 2 percent of the people at most, instead of 20 percent. So the long papers weren’t as efficacious, and people were complaining, and also, as is generally the case, there was a smaller percentage of really excellent papers among these long papers—competent but not particularly exciting papers. Now in [my journal], we’re moving quite a bit, track one is scholarly and track two is [a] magazine style, and we’re moving to track two, magazine-style publications. So more of the new publications are magazine style, and if the membership has more nonscholars, you want to have more things that they can read.

When asked about the meaning of editorial work for him, this veteran economics editor responded with keen observations of the market and his journal’s place in it. The editorial board had given him an assignment, and he intended to carry it out: We don’t necessarily penetrate the American [market], which is a much larger market, as well as we should. And, of course, there’s the rest of the

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge globe, too. So, this is where they’re counting on me to help them. But, again, I don’t have, other than personal time, resources to expand. But if I make suggestions, for example, at the editorial board meeting [concerning] something like six, seven, eight different association meetings . . . going on in this country, where there is at least some minor—well, in some cases, fairly substantial—exhibit of publishers, suggesting that this might be a place for them to at least present the journal. You know, it could well be that without that contribution, they may not have known which of the associations to really go to. Well, but it wasn’t very hard for me to do. It was just a question of taking some of [the] solicitations that I get (laughter) and making them available. . . . And, of course, in conjunction with the promotional marketing. So that if we have a good product, at least people know about it. I don’t think we’ve been out there that long to have quite that explicit identity just yet. But I think we’re beginning to. I really thought that we had carved out a niche to begin with, and we still have a niche. It’s not something that would be incremental or have a debt to something that’s already available or [is about] to be made available to an audience.

The editors were talking about the relationship between the journal and its readers. They had a sharp understanding of where the journal subscriptions go. They knew the value of a subscription and how the journal generates income. They knew how a journal increases its subscriber base, and also how that subscriber base has come to be threatened in recent years. For these editors, a strong business sense was a necessity among the variety of skills they were called on to use. Journals have a commercial relationship with academic libraries that has historically relied on two principles. One is that faculty demand will drive libraries to subscribe to specific journals, and the second is that demand has been relatively inflexible over the years, despite large price increases. The experiences of these editors in marketing and pricing these journals bears this out. Taking a proactive stance regarding the marketplace was the task of this psychology editor when his journal was just starting out some thirty years ago: So the libraries are—I don’t know what. A person in the field (library science, etc., I mean), you’re in the position, a make-or-break position for journals. If you don’t subscribe to them, [they may fail.] We thought, for example, [for] every member of the board, we ask, get your library to subscribe. So they write a letter to the library. We have had, in the past few years, some of their own libraries canceling their subscription. Why? Not enough people reading it. Or, we sent the list of candidates [journals] sent to you by the library. Do you read these? And—they check them off, and they cancel [accordingly].

A history editor with over thirty-five years as a professor explained how the marketplace has expanded over the years:

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When Professor So and So walks through the door, and walks up and says, ‘‘Can I have the XYZ Journal?’’ and the librarian says, ‘‘We don’t subscribe to the XYZ Journal,’’ you can be damned certain that tomorrow you’re going to open a subscription to the XYZ Journal, right? Now, it so happens that’s the only time he’ll read the journal in twenty years. But now you’re stuck with a subscription to that journal for x number of years, until you discover that no one reads it. But it’s going to take you three to five years, if even then, to discover that, God, no one’s reading this journal. Why do we ever get it? Well, we got it because—by the way, by that time, Professor X has gone on to another university or he’s died. Now, it’s never quite that easy, and that’s a little bit simplistic. But it happens all the time.

This editor went on to speak in very certain terms of how the different forces would react: The cost of journal production is very high, unless you have a reasonable subscription base to distribute those costs over. That means you have to— and so there has been the tendency, there is clearly the tendency over the past few years—to sock it to libraries. And that, by the way, that’s been a conscious decision. That’s a very conscious decision among our journals, scholarly journals. Sock it to libraries. Because we know you’re always going to take the journal, or at least that always was the case before. No matter what I did, you [the library] weren’t going to cancel that subscription. They’re still going to send you the journal. And I can charge you $20, or I can charge you $50. You’re still going to get the journal. And so you saw the differentiation between individual prices, individual subscribers, with their own appeal, and you see—and now we’re paying the price for that, because you see mass journal cancellations. And if this continues, and it’s likely to continue, probably you’ll see some journals go out of business.

There are multiple layers that many editors have to take into consideration when they look at the market for their journals. The journal can promote an author who has something published, and in turn, the author can promote the journal. In addition, readers and subscribers can be garnered by the presence of high-profile authors. A history editor spoke of the visibility of her journal: Yeah, it is passed around hand to hand. I mean, where we get a lot of authors, we have a lot of subscribers. And authors are our best promoters. As I said, we have major ties in [Scandinavia, and are successful there] also because Scandinavians are really good at international conferences, because they know they’re little, and they all speak English and they . . . work in [a] comparative way.

The experience of some editors is really quite removed from that of the readership. As a longtime psychology editor noted:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge They’ve got a printout on every single library. And I mean—I don’t know if you know this, you must know this—but he farms out the collecting of money. Subscription agents bill the libraries, usually for a three-year subscription. So he gets three years of paid-in-advance money, which is great. If anybody fails to renew a subscription, you’ve got to give back money, or what does this mean? . . . So our publisher doesn’t give a damn about individual subscriptions. They’re too costly. You can’t keep up. We will [keep up], so we worked out a deal. We said, ‘‘Look, give us a low rate for members of our society.’’ ‘‘Fine,’’ he says, ‘‘if you do the billing, you collect all the money. Send us one check. Thanks a lot.’’ So anyway, we started it, but we’re not getting that many [subscribers], because the rate is now $40. People subscribe for one year, then they drop. It’s a pain. We should bill them for three years. Give us your [credit card] number.

These editors were at the controls of an economic enterprise. This role may or may not have been the primary motivation for their work. Nonetheless, many of those interviewed had come to understand the need for commercial health in order to get their scholarly project into the hands of their colleagues. One of the key elements in the equation is the academic library. These editors experienced relations with the academic library as unilateral, with faculty demand paramount. The library is a service organization. It exists to serve the needs of the faculty, students, and staff of the school. It is staffed with people who know how to acquire, organize, and present intellectual material. What is missing from this picture is its evaluative role. This is a difficult role for the library because, in the vast majority of the cases, there is no one on the staff whose expertise matches that of the faculty member making the request to purchase. As the data shows, a great deal of weight is put behind a faculty member’s recommendation, and the editors knew this. They knew enough to push particular titles, because, until recently, the library had the money (and the inclination) to simply order anything that was requested. However, budget cuts, the advent of electronic resources, and user studies showing limited journal use have all contributed to a change in the academic library. As a result, many editors have found that, in a time of uncertainty, keeping a watch on finances is a big part of personal meaning making. For many of these editors, the perspectives they share may be undergoing radical change. The electronic revolution has brought profound changes in the way research—and the very texts themselves—are presented to colleagues. These experiences will be explored in the next chapter.

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Electronic Journals and the Internet INTRODUCTION The rise of the Internet has called into question many of the gatekeeping functions that have been traditionally performed by editors. The position of the journal and the role of the editor as a clearinghouse for manuscripts are threatened by the Internet as well. Anyone with access to a computer and a telephone line can post anything on the World Wide Web. Technology today allows a scholar to distribute his or her research outside the scrutiny of a gatekeeping editor. The paper-based editing and production procedures of the past were taken for granted by the editors I interviewed. Things were done in a certain way, and there was little to contemplate about paper and text. However, that paradigm has shifted. This chapter examines how those old relationships have changed and the ways through which editors have experienced those changes.

LIBERATION FROM PRINT Nearly all the editors in this study had already experienced change in the way their journals were produced and distributed as a result of the electronic revolution. A young economics editor provided a concrete, representative description of how electronic formats may alter the way in which results are presented:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge For example, a lot of what we do is—editors put a high premium on length of papers. Often [we] are asked to shorten the papers. And the work that we do [involves] a lot of proofs. And so people say: ‘‘Well, just proof blah, blah, blah. It’s straightforward—no need to include [more].’’ Yet graduate students will complain that this makes things almost—that they almost find it impossible to follow, sometimes. So then, people will write that the technical appendix is available on request. Well, you can imagine electronic formats, and then it could be in the background somewhere. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe having all [those] appendices logged in the back will just be—it means that the authors don’t have to be very concise. I think a lot of the cost concerns regarding paper—it’s good. It forces you to be concise and focused. That’s a good thing to have. It’s not just publication cost.

A chemistry editor also described how the new medium was having an effect on the presentation of research. The paper costs of the hard-copy version of the journal had been enforcing an aesthetic discipline of conciseness in the articles: Well, right now, while we’re still publishing hard-copy journals, the tendency is to make the articles as short as possible, as concise as possible, in terms of the message. Because in chemistry, at any rate, the articles were getting longer and longer. But now I think we’re getting on top of that.

We can see how the medium has an impact on how research is presented. The physical and economic limitations of paper carry with them restrictions regarding article length. These editors experienced this as an aid to communication. They saw these limitations as a good thing. Here we can see the editor as gatekeeper acting under the rubric of Lewin’s idea of ‘‘cultural availability’’ (1951). The editor has to be concerned with the accessibility of manuscripts to the readership. Lengthy articles full of digressions and data sets are not likely to have an impact. The discipline of the editorial and peer review processes forces potential authors to hone their material to the point of accessibility. An editor of a psychology journal had experienced the potential of altering how research was presented to colleagues. He saw both a positive and a negative side to these developments. There were quite a few comments along these lines in the data: I was just talking to a guy at the journal, because he had an excellent journal that requires authors of every paper they publish to put the data set down to be analyzed on the [World Wide] Web. So they can download it. So you are really capable of, in a short amount of time—certainly less than an hour or less than a half hour—downloading a data set [and] replicating some of these results in an article. And then deciding how you thought it should be analyzed. The data process means putting the whole research process [through] much more peer review—digging up the hard way—and you

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have an ability to . . . respond to . . . somebody—[this was] not imaginable five or ten years ago. I think you could go off lots of different ways.

Another point is worth mentioning here. We can see the electronic revolution as a liberating force, as some of these editors experienced it. The presentation of complete research data can be a tremendous boon to scholarly communication. The idea of ‘‘the text’’ thus takes on another facet. Readers of research now have access to more than merely the results as written up by the particular scholar in question, and the Internet allows them to take a step beyond that. When a scholar presents his or her complete data set, this allows readers to examine more closely the methods by which the research was done, and alternative scenarios may occur to them. This has the potential to broaden the way in which scholarship is conducted. When scholars are free to include as much data as they want in the presentation of their results, the potential exists to launch more cooperative projects as colleagues from all over the world can now approach research problems with the same set of data. This is a case where the medium can actually change how things are done. Peer review and editorial control occupied the concerns of this veteran geography editor, who explained how the glut of information that already exists on the Internet may only get worse: I think probably the credibility of it probably will rest on the selection process, as it always has. And if that gets slipshod, if . . . these journals move . . . to [accepting] almost anything, . . . it’s because there’s unlimited space on the Internet. It would seem to me inevitable—because we don’t have time to go checking everything—I would expect to see a hierarchy of what the World Wide Web is going to be, which will be journals that are seriously refereed by top people—edited by top editors, and then refereed in a rigorous way—and you’re going to have that, and then you’re going to have the anything goes ones—so I think the sorting process is going to come in there big. And it doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be a lot of junky journals out there on the Web. I would think there’s going to be a lot.

The glut of unfiltered information had also been experienced by a history editor who had positions at two journals. She saw the double-sided potential of the electronic journal—and nearly half the editors in this study expressed a similar ambivalence: And at the same time I feel kind of divided, . . . because on the one hand, the Net provides an opportunity for people to really get stuff out fast and for those maverick types to break down the canons and publish . . . ‘‘whatever they want.’’ But that’s also a problem because I imagine there’s a lot of schlock out there. I haven’t looked, but that’s my guess. [Publishing on

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge the Net is] easy, it’s quick, it’s cheap, and anybody [can put] whatever on the screen.

There is an interesting notion here that if material is not on paper, with a masthead and a scholarly imprimatur, chaos will reign and there will be no control. Paper publications are finite in length. The editor decides what manuscripts he or she will commit to paper and how they will be presented. Paper is a tangible item that can be physically possessed by someone. Just as important, access to publication in paper can be withheld. This is one of the central elements of the peer review system and the editor’s gatekeeping function. There are only a limited number of articles that can be put onto a very limited number of paper pages inside a given issue of a journal. This physical finitude informs all the actions surrounding the review process. It forces editors to be selective, and it forces potential authors to present their works to a narrow group of influential editors, because only these individuals have control over the finite paper that makes the leap from unsolicited manuscript to handsome journal article. However, with the current expansion of the Internet, the exclusive control of the pipeline to colleagues has withered. The anxiety expressed in the interview data is the result of that loss of control. The glut of material and the gatekeeping function were features in the experience of a physics editor who was retired from teaching and edited a national journal. His experience with the Internet had left him disappointed: Well, there’s an awful lot of unregulated garbage out there, . . . and what little [searching] I’ve done [proved] very interesting. Just for fun, last night at home, I got an issue of PC magazine, which rated the best search engines [computerized indexes] on the Internet, so I brought up one that I’ve heard of before and asked it to search for American Journal of Physics. After a while I got 25,000 responses. Well, how in God’s name the search thought that any of them had anything to do with the American Journal of Physics, I have no idea.

When asked about the impact of the electronic revolution on scholarship, an experienced economics editor’s response about the lack of gatekeeping functions reflected the views of many of his colleagues: There has to be some sort of limitation, because then pretty much anyone, given the cheapness of it, can have [their] own Web page, and then you can have your journal and set your mother up as the editor and she’ll accept all your stuff, and what does it mean? It’s sort of like a self-published book. I don’t think it would capture the prestige. That’s my expectation. It’s hard to know the contours of something; it’s hard to predict these things.

This is not to say that this technological liberation will usher in unorthodox ideas that have hitherto been shut out of the mainstream. The data clearly in-

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dicate that each scholar developed his or her own screening methods. These screening methods act, although to a lesser extent, as a substitute for the methods that they previously had relied on editors to employ. This means more work for the scholar. A great deal more material is available as result of the Internet. One way for scholars to cope is to adopt a narrower focus. Browsing and finding relevant material through serendipity thus occur less frequently. In this way scholarship may become narrower and narrower. Interdisciplinary studies may be retarded as scholars, bombarded with material of variable quality, retreat back into something about which they are experts, namely, their own subdiscipline. The rapid dissemination of research can have both benefits and drawbacks. One mid-career physics editor made this clear in his remarks. (One may wonder if physics is unique in the sciences due to the high value it places on both old and new research.) [On the Internet], you can send out anything you want. And it gets put on the bulletin board. Personally, I think it’s a bad thing rather than a good thing, because there is no referee. These things appear. Again, for the junior person, he has no way of knowing if it makes any sense or not. I think it clutters up the information source. But . . . some people . . . are very happy to go there, particularly those in very fast developing fields. Here you get something more or less instantaneously, whereas in the journal, even if you submit it to [the] letters or [a] rapid communications [section], it takes two to three months. So if you’re working on some sort of boundary that is undelivered knowledge of the moment, it’s useful to get that information [out] quickly. But it better be right. Otherwise it’s a hindrance, it’s not a help. I don’t think it’s quite a change in scholarship, because like I say, what happens is, there’s more than enough material out there at the moment. Adding more, either by length of articles or numbers of articles, may well increase the noise and not the signal.

For this geophysics editor, the positives outweighed the negatives. He found that the kinds of things being done with the aid of the Internet had changed scholarship for the better and that the potential glut of information posed no new problems. (This point of view was clearly in the minority in the interview data.) The technology is a huge advantage. There aren’t too many disadvantages to it. But, as it turns out, because of all this evolution, you have to do many more things in order to do what you like to do. The technology helps you manage those many things better. It’s still a rat race—but it’s a very exciting rat race. I think that’s fair to say. There’s lots of really interesting stuff— . . . interesting, high-quality stuff coming out. And so I’d say on balance, it’s very exciting. I hope I don’t [retire] too early to enjoy it. I use the Web, but it’s a different kind of information. The [filtering] that the information that I see here goes through is different than what goes through the journal.

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge And anyone who’s in this business . . . developed these filters long ago or [else] they’re not in the business long because they get misled.

A retired physics professor who continued to edit a journal expressed concerns about how scholars were coming to see the review process. The very bedrock of scientific advancement is embodied by the peer review process, and he wondered if people were taking the time to contemplate the effects of the Internet on how science is conducted: They’re talking about publishing everything without review on the Web or [the] Internet or wherever they do that. In fact, the Physics Society does that now, anyway. They just put it on the Web and let anybody read it and criticize it or comment on it before it’s even published, essentially eliminating the review process. [But] the review process is extremely important, in my experience. It can completely change a manuscript around, as far as the conclusions and the contents. The review process, I think, is really critical for getting the best-quality publication. A great reviewer can markedly—can easily save an embarrassment for the author or can markedly improve a manuscript, make it much more effective. And quite often, reviewers will make suggestions on future work, too, which can be very helpful to us. It would be a shame to eliminate the review process.

The expressions of uneasiness apparent in the interview data can be explained by looking at the Lewin gatekeeping model, which deals with what is called ‘‘cognitive structure.’’ These are the terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation (see Chapter 1). The electronic revolution presents a very strong challenge to the entire cognitive structure on which these editors had relied throughout their careers. The first element of Lewin’s cognitive structure focuses on ‘‘cultural availability.’’ Here the editor asks, Is the material I accept going to be accessible to my group? The data indicate two areas of concern. One is that the widespread access to the Web allows virtually anyone to disseminate research. This includes those who wish to bypass the peer review process. There is no gatekeeper there to evaluate material. Indeed, the gatekeeper no longer exists. Second, the issue of accessibility loses some salience when potential authors are not compelled to hone their writing through the editorial process. Without that process, there is no one in a position of control charged with the task of ensuring that the manuscript is presented in such a way as to be informative and coherent. Another element from the Lewin model deals with ‘‘constituencies.’’ The gatekeeper is concerned here with the various needs of the different camps within his or her discipline. Again, the Internet does violence to the model. The interview data indicate that there certainly are various factions within a discipline whose needs may not be met by the new technology. As discussed in Chapter 4, many of the editors interviewed took on the role of educator. They feel it is important to teach junior scholars how to present research in a way that can

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contribute to the discipline. It is these service-oriented editors who may feel less effective in their role because in the new atmosphere created by the Internet, a manuscript does not have to go through a rigorous revision process before it is presented to others. The third element for Lewin involves culling through submitted material and posing the question, What kinds of material are coming before me and how should I present them to my group? Many editors also feel a responsibility to others in their camp, who rely on them to separate the wheat from the chaff. Lewin would require that the editor ask, Where does this article fit in relation to others on this topic? What kind of research is reported in this article? Is this research method appropriate to the phenomenon under investigation? Do the results represent a new paradigm? These are the kinds of services rendered by an editor and, by extension, by a journal. This is why the editors asserted the necessity of imposing a hierarchy on the burgeoning material on the Internet. Scholars will demand that something act as signpost for them to identify what research is being done and what kinds of topics should command their limited time. The fourth element in the Lewin model is called ‘‘the meaning of the situation.’’ This is the focus when the editor examines the feeling of group belongingness and overall culture of his or her discipline. One of the major questions to be addressed is, How are ideas expressed in this journal? The feeling of how their group behaves may be slipping away from the people in this study. A journal can galvanize a group of scholars around an institution or an idea. However, these editors expressed worries as they spoke of the fragmentation that may result if individual scholars are able to disseminate their research outside the auspices of a journal. The very glut of ideas (and substandard material) on the Internet may accelerate scholarly fragmentation. This may be another in the long history of unintended consequences of technology. To be sure, academic fragmentation has a life of its own and existed long before the computer arrived. However, the weight of the glut that these editors were experiencing may very well change the sense of ‘‘group belongingness,’’ whose maintenance, Lewin feels, is part of the gatekeeper’s charge. FRAGMENTATION The impact that the electronic revolution may have on the nature of scholarship is of concern to those interviewed in this study. The presentation and dissemination of results, the nature of peer review, the gatekeeping function, and the possibility of a glut of material all play a role in how editors experience their work. Increased fragmentation was on the minds of many in this study. A midcareer history editor’s experiences were representative. She explained her fears that scholarship that crosses boundaries may not get its due recognition as the emergence of the electronic journal has accelerated specialization:

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge I think that what’s going to happen is that more stuff is going to be available, and that instead of everyone reading the six articles that are in the Journal of American History, what people read is going to be much more diverse. And ideally, what it will allow is for people who don’t have colleagues where they are [located] to have collegial relationships with their counterparts no matter where those people are. . . . But on the other hand, everyone will have even less in common with whoever is where they are, because you’re not reading any of the same stuff. And I think the journal is going to get unpackaged, unless the journal that just says that it’s about a field. I mean, I think journals that are actually thematic and have a scholarly agenda will survive, because they’ll be sustained by the people who share that agenda. But . . . there’s no general record anymore. It doesn’t exist. And there isn’t going to be. And I think that in fact, then, the scholarly dialogue is going to get more and more specialized and more and more fractured and fragmented. I mean, certainly that’s good, because people who have been isolated will be less so. But in other ways, any kind of common dialogue is going to get—I think the convention is also going to disappear— the general disciplinary, organizational convention.

There were also editors in this study who felt that the electronic revolution would alter scholarship in a deeper way. A young mathematics editor observed: The downside is that part of what science depends upon is critical reflection on the significance of things. And if you have fields where everything is being driven by the fads of the moment, you get a lot of froth and lot of things which, if people had thought a little bit more, . . . they would have decided this just isn’t worth all the effort. But now in mathematics, the culture is that a lot of people are now asking—they want instantaneous access. They want to know what the career frontier is, and there’s a lot to be said for that, as long as you have the judgment to decide and are not misled by the crowd. But it can easily lead to stampedes to do stuff that, if communication was slower, if it [took] two years for something to be learned about, then by the time a lot of people [heard] about it, the [news could] also be circulated by word of mouth: ‘‘Oh yeah, that was a fad, and we were all excited, but then it just went nowhere.’’ And maybe some other people will get excited about the journal articles, and they’ll go and do a little bit more, but you won’t have the phenomenon that everybody in the area feeling like they have to do this week, otherwise they’d be out of it. So it probably would increase the herd instinct of science and many fields, to some extent—but those are the trade-offs.

The idea of community and the role that the scholarly journal plays in that community are under discussion here. These data show the importance of a journal to a discipline. Indeed, it serves to unify the many scholars who inhabit the discipline. To be sure, there is research that goes on that is of a multidisciplinary nature. Yet the core journals in the disciplines have maintained a sense of community for these editors.

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There is a certain inevitability to the comments presented here. These people have a strong sense of where they think things are going. This speaks to the level of acceptance that the Internet and electronic publications have already received from academia. People follow a reward structure, and scholars are no different than others in this regard. Right now, electronic publications have been incorporated into the reward structure of scholarly communication. This is why the voices raised in the data have the tone of certainty. The editors know that people will pursue those things that garner rewards. Electronic publications will certainly do just that. A young history-of-science editor expressed concern for the sense of community among his peers as the Internet continues to gain greater influence. He feared that interdisciplinary scholarship might suffer: I’d be more concerned about fragmentation and the fact that there are people who are simply no longer browsing through journals. None [of the material on the Internet] will come to my mailbox. I subscribe to four or five journals, and I’ll look at what’s there. Now, there’s no reason you couldn’t do that over the Net. I just don’t know whether people simply start relying on their narrow reprint list that they’re establishing. But I don’t know. I mean, these things could possibly be combined I don’t know how.

Placing this idea in context with the Coser model of personal networks (Coser, Kadushin, & Powell, 1982), we can see that the concerns expressed in the data fit with what Coser proposed for the way in which standards are built. Coser wrote that it is the scholarly circles themselves that define what is good and important. The ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the scholarly circle has no formal structure. Absent that formal structure, trends can come and go without those in the network taking time to stop and examine where things are headed. This is the concern echoed in the data. The primary motivations when the scholarly circle looks at the Internet are speed and dissemination. The data show a general acceptance of these priorities. However, the experiences described here also speak to the need for the journal to perform the task of providing a sense of community to its academic discipline. The data also indicate a strong passion for finding like-minded individuals. Scholarship can be an isolating pursuit. It is necessary to provide a forum for people in disparate areas to share what they know and how they came to know it. The Internet can ease some of those barriers by placing more people in contact with each other in a rapid and compelling forum. This can enhance the ‘‘level of immersion’’ within a discipline (described by Coser) by allowing scholars to keep track of the latest research. Thus, the Internet enhances the excitement and sense of vicarious participation in a particular discipline. However, the cautionary notes voiced in the data highlight the importance of maintaining communication with scholars outside one’s own, narrow discipline. The attraction of rapid and individualized immersion into a community that shares a passion for a topic is of great value to these people, but there is a catch.

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A given scholar’s immersion may be of such depth that he or she may disregard some of the broader goals of scholarship. ECONOMICS OF THE INTERNET The great majority of the editors with whom I spoke expressed uncertainty about how electronic journals will generate revenue. A veteran economics editor put his experience with the financial aspect of the electronic journal very simply: That’s the hard part— . . . how the journal is going to make a go of it without a more traditional form of subscription and payment becomes difficult. But they’re [journal publishers] working on it.

This psychology editor had specific experience with his publisher involving different economic models being considered for the electronic journal: Well, I went out to California to our publishing house, and . . . their president came out and talked about [the electronic journal]. My sense is that they are still up in the air as to how that’s all going to come out. Because this is a technical journal, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to put on the Web. . . . There are real issues about compatibility—what word processor you use and things like that—different capabilities. It’s hard enough as it is. What we’ve got now is jumbled and disastrous. I think at some point we’re going to see a revolution. Some of these forums provide you with article stuff. And then doing it in a way, but trying to keep the costs down— it’s about $10 for an article, that’s a little bit on the high side.

A mid-career social psychology editor explained his thinking about distributing research in the new formats. His experience encompassed publishers and libraries: Now, you can see the problem there for us, or the publisher, is, well, if your library buys one CD and you have interlibrary loan, why should any one of the other libraries buy it? They’re going to ask you to transmit it. Now you’ve got to put a subscription on that or you’ve got to copy, or whatever. Before you know it, you’re no longer publishing a paper. You become a different kind of publisher. I think something is going to happen along that line, but I just can’t see how it’s going to work. I mean, one possibility is, at the end of the volume year, you send out a CD to each of your subscribers, which has everything of that year on it. Now, that means that library could destroy its—if it doesn’t have the space, [throws] out all the previous [hard copy] issues. They still have it in a form. It can be played into a hard copy. And I can see where that would work. [If] after twenty years, all of the first ten years were out of print, the publisher could [go] to the original, produce a CD that has those [articles, and] sell that. Then the library has that as part of its catalog, part of its holding. But I can

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guarantee you, the cost is going to be high. The publisher is going to say: Hey, I’m sending you four volume years. I’m now charging $250 per volume year—[or] four times that.’’ Will the library buy it? I mean, sure, it depends on how they do it. They may or they may not.

These editors were talking about the distribution of research. There is currently a relationship between the distribution of research and the income stream. That is the method by which scholarly journals achieve their financial support. The present method of distribution is to print research results on paper and sell them to libraries and scholars. If institutions do not pay, they do not see the presentations. However, under the electronic revolution, that picture becomes cloudy. Indeed, distribution is occurring without paper or the transfer of money. The previous model of holding back the paper distribution until payment was received has, in some cases, been superseded. Most of the data reflected the sheer uncertainty of the whole picture. A social psychology editor, near retirement, had experienced the economics of the Internet as a bewildering series of ideas about a future that cannot be predicted with any certainty. (Approximately half the editors in this study expresses similar notions.) I don’t know what impact it will have. We keep getting things that we should sign on and our papers will be put on this on-line thing, and our response is ‘‘What’s it going to get us?’’ And that’s hard to figure out, sometimes. If you do this, are you cutting your subscription? If you’re doing that, then you’ll go out of business. And it’s very hard to know on that line, so most of [the requests] I throw away. No one around me can think up a reason why we should do it. But I really don’t know where it’ll go if people want to read articles that way and print them up themselves. Once the new technology got established, you couldn’t have a referee approach to doing it that way. The technology really is the material. I hadn’t thought about it much, but I’m just thinking now that in paying for it, to have someone to do it—I mean, editors work for [next to] nothing, all the rest of that would still be there. But physically, someone has to be, in whatever form, putting the thing on a disk or on a piece of paper or whatever, and that’s where it might get complicated.

One mathematics editor had experienced the economics of the electronic revolution with a fair degree of certainty. Unlike many of his colleagues, he displayed little ambiguity about future trends: One of the areas of the research that I do is libraries, one [topic] that we’re talking about is the impact on electronic commerce in digital libraries. Oh yeah, it will change the social structure quite strongly. The infrastructure of society will change very strongly, and libraries, just like journals, are going to struggle to have a new financial structure. They’re not going to be able to—borrowing is going to be entirely different. And there’s not going to be

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge as much need for physical branch libraries as there was, ’cause you’ll be able to get [material from] a central location in the Net.

The technology changes with such speed that some editors looked at the future with disquiet. The uncertainty was underscored for a physics editor with twenty years in the academy as he explained the publisher’s views: The [governing society], which publishes [my journal], which has a lot of subscriptions, and that’s where most of their income comes from. They’re very nervous about the Web—and almost everybody else is very nervous about it. Not only what does the future hold in terms of the gatekeeper function and quality control, but finances. Probably because everybody thinks that if it’s on Internet, it’s free. Or if it’s not free, it should be free.

However, some editors in this study were more sanguine. A veteran mathematics editor’s experiences with the financial side of the Internet displayed a degree of certainty about the direction things were taking: The big changes coming is that there are significant reasons to think that commercial journals are not going to exist for very long, because the medium of publishing is changing to the World Wide Web at a fairly rapid rate. One of the journals—in fact, the one that I’ve actually spent the most time on as an editor—is the [Journal for XYZ], [whose] main distribution is on the World Wide Web. [This journal] is publishing material available immediately upon final submission, and for free. And you can also buy . . . volumes that appear every half-year or so, and—those are not very expensive compared to most journals, but [for] the researchers who are getting reviewed, you see the papers right away on the Web.

The data contain numerous expressions of concern about the lack of a dependable income stream for publishers, amounting to a strong focus on the relationship between scholarly communication and money. The electronic revolution has forced editors to examine the ways in which money supports the whole publishing enterprise. Holding back research from the scholarly community runs counter, for some editors, to their belief in the collegial sharing of ideas. Socialization and training have encouraged them to share their results, and peer review and comments from colleagues are vital to the advancement of knowledge. Much of higher education has been founded on this idea. It is ironic that the new technology of the electronic revolution has brought forward such an uncomfortable question. The Internet has been touted as a great democratizer and the premier distributor of all kinds of information. Yet the editors whom I interviewed expressed confusion and anxiety about such unfettered distribution. Another veteran physics editor had also experienced the uncertainties of this

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new area and witnessed the old models of making money for the publisher disappearing: One of the big problems with that is, how do you charge? If it’s an object like the Journal, that’s something that’s easy. And personally, I’m not [directly] involved. . . . But the powers that be are very concerned about how [they can] charge. Now, it’s very important because a good deal of the money that [my discipline’s society] makes is from the journals. Without that money, they couldn’t function. So you can’t give up your source of funds that comes from the journal, and somehow one has to find a suitable [money-making] technique.

The track record for the new media is spotty, and this has fed the uncertainty of the market. A veteran physics editor explained: Right, that’s the big question. What is the subscription when [the material is] on the Web? They do have it now on compact disc. The [CD-ROM compact discs]—not this one but some other journals are distributed in the form of compact discs, but they have not been very successful. The acceptance has not been all that great.

The responsibilities of the editor may be structured so that long-term revenue is not of great concern. This may account for some of the experiences recounted here. There is a general tone of uncertainty, but very little urgency. Perhaps this is because the ultimate financial responsibility lies, not with the editor, but with the publisher or scholarly society. Some editors can afford to keep themselves one step removed from those concerns. A young oceanography editor explained: Those are decisions that are long outside the editor’s responsibility. It’s [that of my professional society], and they have now started an electronic journal jointly with [another professional society]. But there are concerns on all of this. All of these societies depend heavily on journal subscriptions for their income stream, and if you make it electronic, it’s harder to keep control of that. And they’re very worried about that, and how to keep the income coming in and yet change with the changing times. I know [the society] has spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I’ve not been involved in that process.

The uncertainties have led many editors to experience delays with implementing new formats. Nearly all the people I talked to had adopted a wait-andsee attitude. A biology editor recounted: As far as going to real electronic publishing, that hasn’t happened, and it’s been sort of a wait-and-see and not just wait, but keep on looking. It really hasn’t happened, and I don’t see it happening for a journal of our size that is run by a society. Where it is happening is [with] the journals that are

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Gatekeepers of Knowledge being run by commercial publishers like Academic Press or someone who has [many] more facilities and [by] a couple societies who have much larger resources, and they have ten journals and we’re considering joining up with them. I had had, at one point, the idea of getting together a consortium of journals of our size that are society run and have one dedicated . . . headquarters. It’s something I spent a lot of time thinking about, and there’s a couple of people on the council, very computer involved, and one of them is on the library committee at [College X], so he’s . . . talking to their library about how things are going. I think we need to start getting more aggressive now.

Editors are worried about how their enterprises can survive if the results of all their hard work are made available for free. To be sure, many editors would be content to freely distribute the fruits of their labor in the spirit of scholarly collegiality and service to the profession. However, they recognize that a lot of the financial support for the clerical and production costs that go into producing a journal might be diminished in this new era. Financial backers of journals, be they scholarly societies or commercial publishers, may be reluctant to rush into the electronic revolution without a reliable source of revenue. Without their presence, the possibility of a more anarchic picture looms. The information glut may be exacerbated by the lack of a financially based hierarchy of journals. Money may not continue to be the trigger for the distribution of research results, as it has been in the past. As the cost of making material available on the Internet continues to drop, start-up funds may be affordable for anyone. That being the case, commercial publishers may abandon scholarly communication because they cannot make enough money. This would leave the field open to vanity publishing and other self-publishing efforts. Looking at the Lewin model, we can see that his notion of ‘‘group values’’ is undermined by the trends in the electronic revolution. This facet of the Lewin framework asks the gatekeeper to look at three things: what values does his or her group hold, what is the relative weight of each value, and how are individual manuscripts linked with these values? The editors described a kind of scholarly anarchy whereby individual scholars are free to put anything on the Web. Lack of peer review, the increasing glut of information, and the uncertainty of revenue sources all conspire to produce an uncertain picture. It is the very question of unlimited access on the part of authors and readers that goes against the maintenance of group values. If any author can present material to the gatekeeper’s group and any member of that group can access all manner of research results from their desktop computer, then both sides will bypass the gatekeeper altogether. Thus, the discernment and filtering functions of the gatekeeper come under threat. Following this line of action even further, the group values will diminish because there is no longer a group per se. The particular discipline may become so fragmented that a discernible set of values and a concurrent manuscript style may be difficult to identify.

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However, this change may, in the long run, provide an opportunity for the gatekeeper. The anarchy of the electronic revolution may, in fact, serve to increase the need for someone to play the roles of sorter and filterer. The data indicate a skepticism about the intellectual worthiness of much of the material being posted on the Web. Thus, the gatekeeper may be needed more than ever in these times. Scholars need a reliable source where they can go for accurate, timely, peer-reviewed research. The gatekeeper has traditionally performed this role in the paper-based world, and there is ample evidence to suggest a need for that role in the future. TACTILE VALUES There was tremendous response from the people I interviewed about the way they relate to the printed word. This relationship has been confounded by the intervention of electronic text. An economics editor with fifteen years of teaching experience related the contradictions he felt: I’ve been using a computer as long as anybody my age has, I suspect, and I’ve learned to work on the computer extremely well and easily, but when it comes around to studying, I still prefer to sit down with hard copy. It makes a difference to me.

Another economics editor underscored the importance of the medium for times when he read lengthy material: People still have to print out the paper to read it. Reading things off the screen is pretty tedious.

Mention of the computer screen comes up repeatedly in the data. Here a physics editor and professor emeritus used the same word ‘‘tedious,’’ to describe the problem: I mean, you can’t get the whole journal’s hard copy from the World Wide Web. That’s rather impractical. And reading a full paper on the screen is rather tedious on the eyes. So I think the hard copy will be with us for a while.

It seems that the medium itself detracts from the experience. Scholars, by definition, have a certain level of excitement for their fields. It is the resulting interest and motivation that drive them to hard work and dedicated research over many years. Therefore, it is interesting to learn that many editors experienced tedium while interacting with literature accessed via the computer screen. Something about the medium drained their enthusiasm.

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A veteran physics editor of many journals, whose first language was not English, underscored the experiences described by many others I interviewed: I do not see that [the electronic journal] would be [a] drastic improvement, if I would have—instead of that paper copy, if I would have access to the electronic version. I do not like—I think I am unhappy looking at something on this screen. I want to look at the pictures in the right places. I’m just much more comfortable. Maybe I’m traditional; maybe young people prefer to glance at the computer. I feel I am more happy with my paper version. And I do not feel I need that much paper. So I do not see what is wrong with the paper version. I don’t know if I could stare at [the screen]—unless it would go blank all of a sudden. [Then] I could go here, I could go there much [more easily]. I don’t know—I’m just much more happy [with the hard copy]. Maybe the young generation would be more happy with looking at things on the computer. I still prefer working with paper.

For many of the editors I interviewed, the experience of reading took on a physical dimension as they spoke of strain and inconvenience. A veteran history editor explained his view of his work and his readers’ sensibilities: In my business, we spend a lot of time editing, because I think people like to read. At least I think my readers like to read. So they’ll read an essay. In other disciplines, the process of reading is not nearly as important as the obtaining of data. Now, if it’s just data you want, then I think electronic devices are wonderful—[for example, using a] database to extract and retrieve data. That’s fine. [But] if you want to read, I don’t recommend it. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone ‘‘cuddle up’’ to a computer screen to read for pleasure.

A similar experience was described by a political science editor. She expressed her ambivalence by describing her use of the new technology to make her job easier while professing a preference for more traditional ways of relating to the printed page: I personally—I can’t sit in front of the screen long enough to read anything [lengthy]. I consider myself lucky if I do my e-mail. Of course, I work on and write my own articles and books and [other] things on the computer, but I, quite frankly, like to be able to sit and turn pages and feel a book in my hand and be able to make a note in a margin. [The computer] will never replace paper, the printed page, for me. Never. I feel very strongly about that—there are different kinds of paper, and you’re aware of that. It’s very important, I think.

We can get a glimpse of just how deep these feelings can run by looking at data from a mid-career oceanography editor who explained how important the printed page was to him:

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But, you know, people—we just like paper. We really like paper. Screens are fine, but—I’m not going to change that much. I’m going to take advantage of the technology, but not to the extent—I’m not going to necessarily push it to the extent that it will be pushed by people that have less affection for paper—paper, you know, written. So that’s where it starts to get into the philosophical realm. The idea of curling up in a comfortable chair and reading—I think there’s something fundamental there. You definitely get into it because of fundamentals. I knew I wanted to do this when I was in tenth grade. Not necessarily in this field, but I knew this was what I wanted to do for a livelihood. So I never envisioned being an editor, but always envisioned being an author.

These editors liked to locate themselves in a particular space vis-a`-vis the text. They wanted to control the location of the text. When the text appears on the screen, there is only one view. It is flat, illuminated, hard, and cold, and it gives off a humming noise. In contrast, paper has none of these characteristics, but rather is flexible, warm, and portable. Text that is provided on the screen is presented in the manner most convenient to its provider. It generally appears in small paragraphs, in a format in which browsing, serendipity, and footnote checking are all limited. The reader thus has less control over how he or she is going to examine the scholarly article to be read. Control is given over to those who provide the material on screen. This is something that did not sit well with the editors in this study. This theme arose repeatedly in the data. Indeed, very similar terms were used by nearly all the people I interviewed. They experienced a scholarly work as something that was to be touched and held. One veteran physics editor described his experiences with some self-deprecating humor: I’m sufficiently old so that I will never completely adapt to the electronic age. And I love to see things. I love to hold it. Having an article on the computer screen can surely be printed out, but it’s much nicer to have it between your fingers. Well, look, [my attitude is] not completely correlated with age, but to a large extent it is. I think younger people are brought up on the computer, so they’re far more comfortable with it than an old fogy. I think no one yet thinks the print journals will disappear completely. I sincerely hope not. . . . They might, but not for over a decade or so. But I can say I’ve never read a paper on a computer. Nor have I downloaded and copied—I’ve always made Xerox copies from journals.

By the very nature of their work, editors perceive text and paper as something that can be felt in one’s hands and scribbled on when making corrective notes. Editors see hundreds of manuscripts and articles year after year. They read these articles in their offices, on subways, in airplanes, at home, and in countless other places. There is no hardware intermediary between them and the text. They can carry it, read it anytime, mark it up, and make any notes that they want right

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on the page. This is the very heart of the academic discourse that occurs as scholars hone their work. Would-be authors write manuscripts and submit them to journal editors. In turn, the editor and staff suggest revisions, which the wise scholar then incorporates. The tangible nature of the paper, the corrective notes, and the portability of the documents all appeal to editors. Their work is not tied down by needing proximity to a computer in order to read something. We can see the value in this by the frequent references in the data to the problems involved in breaking the link between reading and location. This includes phrases like, ‘‘sit and turn pages,’’ ‘‘feel a book in my hand,’’ and ‘‘curling up in a comfortable chair.’’ This physics editor also echoed the theme of the physical piece. He experienced research efforts as something tactile, which he could hold in his hands. (The great majority of editors I interviewed expressed similar feelings.) But I don’t think that that medium is yet at the point where it’s going to replace the printed page. And I’m sure you get this from various scholars. The accessibility is stuck on the Internet or anyplace else. Yes, it’s accessible. But you can’t—you just can’t sit there and read stuff. You’re going to download it, bring it back to [print] it or you’re going to download it into your own hard drive and then, later on, you’re [presumably] going to read it. . . . But it has—the electronic stuff is working very well in terms of demographic searches, topical area searches—[we should] put all the abstracts on it. [If] the abstracts [are] on there, . . . you can do a hell of a lot of work very quickly. But that isn’t the same as getting hold of the article. Now how are you going to get hold of the article?

In addition to the physical portability and tactile nature of paper, there are other considerations, as explained by a history editor who had worked at his journal for over ten years: There certainly are questions, too—and here is where we may differ from a lot of others. I think there still is something to be said for the way in which typography itself helps to convey understanding, helps to convey meaning, insofar as a lot of the things we do are bibliographical. And often, bibliographies are complex in their organization of headings, of transcriptions of titles, of transcriptions of publishing information, of pagination information, of notes, copies of specific notes, general notes, . . . crossreferences and so on. And insofar as it still is pretty difficult to represent typographical niceties of size, of spacing, of indentation, of font, and so on, on the Internet or otherwise electronically—I think that’s going to be a problem. I’m convinced that the typography, the typographical solutions, the design, the format [are themselves] a way [in which] information and meaning and understanding [are] imparted. That if it were just about an undifferentiated amount of ASCII [computer] characters, you would lose that.

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For all the wonderful features that computerization has brought to scholarship, it is important to remember what has been expressed in these interview data. Perhaps this is a reflection on the differences between the scholarly life and the pursuits of the commercial environment. The methods by which people in these two areas relate to data are different. In the commercial world, material that people call up on a computer screen generally involves finite, factual data that fits into a narrow context of a problem requiring a short-term solution within a time frame of accepted business hours. This may involve general things like interest rates, sales figures, customer profiles, and the like. The electronic revolution has been a boon in this area because the demands of commercial enterprises put a premium on retrieving precise, brief passages of information for short-term use. However, scholarship has a different nature: its pursuits have to do with the generation and examination of ideas. This is a much more complex undertaking, which does not lend itself to the brief display of factual information on a computer screen. The scholarly life has a human dimension and so has to allow for creativity to explore ideas at any hour of the day or night, regardless of the scholar’s proximity to a machine. In this context, work is done under all kinds of conditions, not the least of which is while ‘‘curled up’’ somewhere, enjoying the ‘‘feeling of a book in my hands.’’ Thus, the computer can be seen as tying down a scholar to work in a certain way, at a certain time, and in a certain place. For most of the editors in this study, scholarship would have difficulty flourishing under these conditions. The fragmentation and anarchy spoken of in this chapter may underscore the need for strong social circles in scholarship. These could act as a counterweight to the splintered world created by the Internet. The next chapter looks at editors’ experiences of these social networks.

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Personal Networks, Connections, and Circles INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at how editors experience personal scholarly networks. A central theme is Coser’s idea about how the community defines for itself what is important. The ambivalence inherent in this notion is explored as editors explain how they seek to find ways of establishing trust among their circles in an atmosphere where the participants themselves set the standards. SELECTING REVIEWERS One of the tangible ways of learning how a network functions is to examine how personal connections are made. It is interesting to review the journal editors’ descriptions of how they selected reviewers for manuscripts. A psychology editor with four years of editorial experience felt it important to have a mixture of scholarly experience in the people doing reviews: I have a mixture of people at different career stages, so I always have a couple of people who are really big names. And then I have to select how I decide which manuscripts to send to different people, and I think there’s unconsciously a tendency to send a manuscript which I think is not a major manuscript, not to the biggest-name people. There’s a little bit of routing of manuscripts. But mainly, I try to pick a reviewer on the basis of whether they know the topic.

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This notion of variety was underscored by an economics editor with only a few years of experience: I’ve tried to ask a few people what they do in picking referees. And I tried to follow their advice a little bit, although I found I just couldn’t. [They try] to get one young person [and] one more senior person just to have some balance, because sometimes the younger person will have more time to go through it more in detail, will be more nit-picking—less reserved. Then I think of getting kind of broad judgment [from] some more senior person who won’t nit-pick on the details but kind of go on what the main thrust is.

These editors felt they knew their circles well enough to select reviewers based on how advanced they were in their careers. It is noteworthy that this was an important factor for these editors. There is some predictability here on which the editors relied. If they sent a manuscript to someone at a certain stage of his or her career, a certain response would be likely. Conversely, if an editor sent a manuscript to another scholar at a different career stage, another kind of response would be likely. A young economics editor described how he used his network connections in selecting reviewers: I found this to be tough. I’ve only been doing this since September, and I’ve had fifteen papers I’ve had to send out to reviewers. I found it to be a bit of a challenge because I’m still pretty young in this field, so I’m not . . . widely connected. . . . But the sources that come from the circle—some are my own ex-students, [but] not very many. I figure I can hit on them pretty safely. The others are actually . . . ex-students of my advisors who I know, because some of them I went to graduate school with [them]. Frankly, over the time since I’ve gained my Ph.D., I’ve done a lot of traveling and [gone] to a lot of different universities to give seminars [at] conferences. So I pretty much know almost everybody in the field—most of the young people, I know a large percentage and I know what kind of work they do.

A veteran anthropology editor turned to his immediate network for help when he sought reviewers in an area that was unfamiliar to him: Yes, in the early stages, I—especially for resubmissions, I would offer them to [the reviewer] who had been used by the previous editor. This also increased my range of people. Obviously, to a very large extent, I will rely on people I know, or at least work I know. But there are areas in which I’m not at all specialized or competent, and [in] those areas I sometimes seek advice. That’s one thing that—sometimes you ask members and associates or the board of associate editors. Or I may ask colleagues in the department. Basically, we have two very useful reference books. One is the

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guide to departments of anthropology—association, and the other is the similar guide published by the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

A variety of methods were explained by one established psychology editor as he outlined how he worked: They’re basically people I know, and I’m always trying to find new people who will take the task seriously. And partly we learn through experience because [it’s] a very technical journal, and often you look for reviewers who have the technical knowledge. It’s also common to just take the paper, . . . turn to the bibliography, and you go down the bibliography and see who it is you know that you think would be right for the job. I rely, obviously, on academic reputation.

Here we can see one of the ways in which editors and their colleagues may be unique. They keep their focus on their professional relationships to a degree that may exceed their focus on their individual colleges and universities. They rely on their knowledge of the direction in which the profession is going and the people who are leading it to help them decide who should do the reviews. The interview data show that to be one of the first instincts of these editors. Their personal networks are the first resource to be tapped. An immediate second resource is the network surrounding their colleagues. Editors have to have a cosmopolitan outlook on their discipline. They cannot pay attention merely to the activities of a very narrow subdiscipline. Nor can they simply be active only in professional organizations that are only regional or local. They have to have a national, and even international, outlook. The editors in this study selected reviewers mainly through two different methods. One group tended to go about this task in a systematic fashion, keeping careful records of reviewer performance and timeliness. The other group relied on more intuitive methods that emphasized a personal understanding of their scholarly circles. An examination of both methods follows. One veteran physics editor spoke of how he turned manuscript authors into potential reviewers by using a systematic approach: We get some new referees from authors—[we’ve] accepted [their] papers and they owe us something. And we do that in two ways. Every time we accept a paper, if the author is not already in our database with information about what their refereeing expertise is, we send them a sheet with a request for this information, [along] with a list of categories and also the opportunity just to wing it and write something down, and we put that in the database. And then sometimes we search by those names, [with] big [topics] like quantum mechanics, . . . we’ll print out 200 people. But just looking at that [list] may ring a bell. It’s a sort of mix of what’s in the computer and what’s in my head.

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A geography editor with many years of experience described how he went about choosing reviewers: I’m trying to deliberately make sure I have a broad sweep, and I think so far I’ve had quite a range. In fact, probably I would say 85 percent of the people that I’ve chosen as referees—already, at least—are people that I would never call an acquaintance. But I will contact acquaintances and say, ‘‘Can you suggest some people?’’ But I don’t just do that either. I try to figure out an area, and I say, ‘‘Who’s done it?’’ And I also look at the publication itself and see who’s cited. So I’m not afraid [to contact people]. . . . I look at them [and] it triggers in my mind who might be the best people in the area. But I try to sweep all over North America.

Extra care was given by these editors to the process of finding and choosing reviewers. There is precision about how they do it, and indeed, this kind of work demands precision. Maybe that is what separates one group of editors from the other. Those in the first group feel that the peer review process should not be left up to the whims of the editor. A memory lapse, a forgotten colleague, or any unforeseen event could hurt the process. There is integrity to the process, which, by following a set standard of assignments, can be preserved. This is not to say that these editors view other methods as deficient in integrity. It is simply that their experience is that reliance on a systematic method of choosing reviewers is the best way for them to assure that the process will proceed as it should. Another experienced physics editor described what I found to be an unusual situation. He described a database maintained by his scholarly society to which he had access: It’s a very large computer there. It’s stock-full of interesting information. Now, once I think of the name of a referee, I must go to the database and see if that referee already has a manuscript. If so, I’m not going to send him two or three at the same time. So, that’s where some trouble comes in, because at certain times of the year almost all the referees are busy, and then I have to search high and low to come up with an appropriate referee. There are also some people, I’m sorry to say, who do not respond to referee requests. That is, manuscripts are sent to them [but] they do not referee them. And after a certain period of time, we just give up and send it to another. Now, if I look at [the file on] a referee and see that there are a large number of these cases, I’m not going to choose them, obviously. Well, periodically, because some of our referees are getting older and [are no longer] available because they die[d] or retire[d], we send out, I would say at least once a year, questionnaires to our set of referees and authors asking them to suggest junior people. Then we send out to those junior people information about what it means to be a referee. But I must say, almost all of them accept the responsibility. So that’s how the database gets renewed.

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Editors use a variety of methods to choose reviewers. Sometimes the author of the manuscript provides the names of reviewers. A mid-career chemistry editor explained: Well, I think most of us select our reviewers primarily from the references cited by the author. We look over what the references refer to in the body [of the paper], what they’re referring to for this reference, and I try to pick the reviewers from the references. And that could be younger or older authors. And sometimes we get letters from people saying they’d like to review. [For] others, we have a database here with thousands of reviewers in it, and it’s available to all the associate editors. And in my field, in the ten years I was associate editor, I built up a list of five or six hundred names, according to category, to select reviewers. And that’s based on publications from reviewers or talks at national meetings. I would say most of the reviewers—a large number—most of them I don’t really know personally. I only know . . . their publications.

What this says about the scholarly network is that there are clear and accepted norms for gaining membership. Doing a book review, presenting a paper, having one’s work cited in the right places—these are all benchmarks that are relied on by these editors. The scholarly circle is a place where membership is achieved through remote means. Accomplishments that are achieved on paper are the primary criteria for inclusion, in the experience of the editors interviewed here. Reputation is established through the performance of clearly defined tasks instituted by the network itself. This experienced physics editor used his extensive knowledge of the people working in his discipline to solicit reviewers. He was quite confident in his coverage: I know this field exceedingly well, and so it’s easy for me to either pick one of the experts in the field or to review papers myself. There’s one meeting that dominates the field in the United States, and that’s the [Society X meeting] every June. And almost all spectroscopists active in the United States attend that meeting and present short papers. And it’s one of the few meetings where graduate students—there are no posters, they’re all spoken papers. And so beginners do get a lot of exposure, and the grand old men, of which I’ve been accused of being, sit in the front row listening intently and remember a few of [the] people who look like they have something to say. I also get a lot of papers to review from other journals. And so I could probably write down fifty people in this area with their specific qualifications and whether I would trust them to review one of my papers.

A veteran history editor explained his precise method for keeping track of scholars working in the field:

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These conventional methods of achievement are highly valued by these editors. Why do they place so much value on these impersonal methods? Perhaps the scholarship is so disparate that they can’t keep track of everybody. They have to rely on somebody else to pass judgment on what new people have done. If new scholars have passed muster into the scholarly network, then editors simply have to trust that their status has merit. This is another level of trust, which has to do with how these editors see their colleagues. For those who rely on this more systematic method to select reviewers, there is, perhaps, a reliance on the scholarly circle to do its job and not admit anyone who does not belong. The editors in this group trust that there will be vigilance among scholars and that the members of the scholarly circle will show passion for their work. This passion will, in turn, galvanize them into enthusiastic watchdogs determining which junior scholars gain membership. Only those who have conducted solid research should be in this circle. Therefore, when it comes time for these editors to choose reviewers, they can feel confident in turning to their particular scholarly circle, knowing that their colleagues have been on the watch and would not admit someone who had conducted substandard work. In this way, editors can go about constructing databases and keeping lists of colleagues, and they can experience a level of comfort in doing so by relying on colleagues. This is one type of relationship between the editor and the network. In sharp contrast, many of the editors I interviewed did not use a systematic method in finding and using reviewers. These editors relied instead on what could be called intuitive methods. Of course, this is not an attempt to portray one method as superior to another. The comparison is made simply in order to illustrate the experiences of these editors. A mid-career political science editor explained how she recruited reviewers for individual articles: Well, at first I would just do it through my own contacts or the contacts of colleagues, saying: ‘‘I’ve got an article, could you recommend a reviewer that would [give] suggestions? Could I send the article out?’’ Lately, there is a more formal procedure that we have on the editorial board, and members of the editorial board take on two or three articles a year. And we try to instruct the editorial board so that the people would have a mixture of both generalists [and] experts in particular areas.

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This editor went on to be quite explicit in her description of finding reviewers. Her language seems to come right out of the Coser model (Coser, Kadushin, & Powell, 1982). She explained that most of the names were generated: through our own personal networks, once again, our personal scholarly networks. Each of us knows who’s doing what in the field and whom to recommend to do a particular review. And we also keep mental track of how often somebody has reviewed for us so that we can try to open up a little bit and bring in new people. But it’s largely a question of our personal network and whom we happen to know. Even though we may not know these people personally, . . . we know that they’re working in such and such an area [and] that they might be interested in actually doing a review for us.

The informality of the process was underscored in this explanation offered by an economics editor with over fifteen years’ experience as a professor: Well, it’s part of a gang. Plus we’re always looking for new guys. In particular, any author who succeeds in getting his article published with us would be fair game for being a referee [on] a future article. Sometimes I’ll just send [manuscripts] out to friends that we haven’t been associated with. There are groups of people that are known to be interested. At one time I probably knew them all, firsthand, but they’ve . . . changed quite a bit. And there are always new kids coming up that you haven’t heard of—and somebody will have heard of somebody, and he gets invited to a conference, and he does well at the conference, and then he’s thought of as a potential member of the gang. And then he’s asked to referee or invited to submit an article. It’s sort of a loose thing. You know, the usual suspects—round up the usual suspects. Well, we have usual suspects. It’s not closed. People die, people retire, and new people enter. But there’s a core of people, and you sort of know who’s an expert in what.

These editors experienced a comfort level with their knowledge of the network. They seemed to feel entirely comfortable with their knowledge of the field and the people in it. They also took simple steps to continue to learn about scholarship in their discipline. Coser provides some interesting structure on which to place some of the data when he explained that scholarly circles define for editors what is good and important. Perhaps the two elements, the editors and the scholarly circle, influence each other. Not only do editors have their standards defined by the scholarly circle, but that circle is affected by the new scholarship that emerges through the refereeing process. In this way, the two elements do indeed influence each other. A physics editor described how important the issue of trust was to him. He experienced the responsibilities of editorial work very keenly and he wanted to

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be able to say to potential authors that their work was given sound scrutiny. Knowing the reviewers personally gave him that assurance: I selected them. That was my prerogative. And I select[ed] them on the basis of knowing them and knowing that they’re reliable—good scientists [and] also reliable as people, and people I can get along with. And it’s worked out very well. But the personal factor is extremely important. I know a large fraction of my referees personally, and I sign all the letters—I don’t let the secretary do it—and always add personal notes. So the personal factor is very important.

Sometimes the intuitive approach used by some of these editors allowed them to use unconventional methods of choosing reviewers. For example, an experienced physics editor felt that she had an opportunity to break down some barriers in this way: Well, I think I am quite a social person. I know very many people, and before I came to this country I knew Europeans, and now I definitely know Americans and everybody else. So I think maybe because of my work and all the connections, I know a lot of people. So actually I find fun in this, because I’m also experimenting. For example, I am even using brilliant [senior] graduate students, which is not a typical approach, but I feel that there is no big difference between Ph.D. and not Ph.D. [or] almost Ph.D.— . . . there is no serious difference in the knowledge, so what I am saying, I am even reaching [down] to the most brilliant, highly advanced graduate students. And of course I try to have famous names, but famous names very often are happy to accept [but] then . . . do not [fulfill the responsibilities].

Being aware of the constraints on various candidates for reviewer can help an editor pick and choose among many possibilities. A young mathematics editor explained: I just do it by the seat of the pants. I’ll just think of people. One tends to steer away from people who are very senior and have big jobs as directors of institutes, and even though I might think they’re very reliable, I know the [probability] of getting a report back from them in a reasonable amount of time is not very high. And that can be very frustrating. The bad thing about it is if that somebody is very timely, then you tend to use them more because you know that they’re going to send [back] four or five [reviews] at a time.

The language used by some of these editors shows an interesting characteristic. Words like ‘‘gang,’’ ‘‘who you know,’’ ‘‘my own personal contacts,’’ and ‘‘seat of the pants’’ tell of an almost playful informality that they experienced. This may say something about their relationship to the social network. There is an exclusivity at work here that has some comforting elements for the editors.

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This exclusivity carries with it a feeling of being a part of an elite group. The language speaks to the editors’ personal experiences. The circle is personal, and that personal element provides an opportunity for informality to emerge. That elite group is in the possession of specialized knowledge. Its members are passionate about that knowledge, and, in turn, that shared passion is one of the bonding agents for the scholarly network. NEW PARADIGMS, NEW CIRCLES How do new ideas emerge in the scholarly network? Where do they come from? What is the editor’s experience of these events? These are the questions to be explored in this section. In the past fifty years, there has been a tremendous growth in the number of scholars, the number of subdisciplines, and the number of journals. The ways in which editors have experienced these changes may provide some illumination on how scholarly circles function. An economics editor explained his experience as a new subdiscipline began to emerge many years ago. The scholarly circle had to make some adaptations: So, what you’ve got to realize is that I was developing a name in a growing field while it was growing, and we started organizing [at] numbers of conferences, drawing people from all over—the beginning, in fact, of an international crowd. When we first began, we did not have a separate society so named. There’s another journal, the [Journal of X], and [also] the [Society for X]. And for a number of years, we were given control over a number of sessions of their meetings. And, so, we had this little sort of a subgroup that was growing up, and I thought was doing very well with the journals. They had their own journal and we had our journal. And we had joint subscription. You [got] two for the price of one, basically, or something of that sort. But in any case, then they had a management change that was sort of saying: ‘‘Hey, these people are filtering off some of the types of things we would like in our organization. We want our own crack at it. Go away.’’ So, that’s when we went off and formed our own society, . . . which seems to be going pretty well.

He went on to describe how the field of economics has constructed various smaller scholarly circles that revolve around a particular ideology or individual: So, you get a very different flavor, for example, from the type of thing that would go to [Journal X], which has its little [hold on power], or the [Journal of Y], which has its [own] little [hold]. I have concerns about things like this because I look at people who do business and, yes, you can learn a lot by looking at the data, but that’s not the way science progresses. Science progresses [from the] interaction of modeling, which is an intellectual activity, and the ability of that model, in fact, to describe the data. Macroeconomics is replete with . . . different factions that have their little fads, and they get the students to come along with them. And if they’re involved in journals, those types of papers tend to be, not necessarily . . . viewed as

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The events at issue here involve editors and their experiences of how one scholarly circle gives birth to another. These editors have to keep on top of such events because they have to know where to find authors and reviewers. This process involves the relationship between the editor and the discipline. Much of the data presented here portray the editor as merely a spectator to the goingson as a new subdiscipline grows into maturity. Such editors watch as scholars with new ideas begin to make their points at conferences. This relationship is one where the pressures for change are independent of the editor. The editor cannot control what is going on and can only attempt to follow the developments and try to fashion a journal to accommodate the new trends. If those editorial undertakings prove unsatisfactory to the new people, often the result is a new journal that better speaks to the needs of the newly emerging scholarly circle. A social psychology editor provided a brief description of how her field has changed in the last thirty years: In the 1970s, there was lots of excitement. Nonverbal communication— . . . as I said, it has this cross-disciplinary appeal, and so, right around the same time, people from a number of disciplines as disparate as anthropology and linguistics—I mean, really different myriads [of disciplines]—got interested in this. One reason was that suddenly there were methodologies for recording and analyzing nonverbal behavior, which is otherwise very elusive, you know, fleeting [and] semiconscious. So the field coalesced at a time when video technology and other—now there [is] some very sophisticated stuff used for analyzing the physical properties of voice and facial expression— sophisticated coding systems for using observers to quantify what’s happening in the facial expressions—so there were methodological advancements. It wasn’t quite in the mainstream enough to [be] adequately represented in the mainstream journals, so it’s become brand new and interdisciplinary.

The wariness of the editors as they examined manuscripts came to the fore in this description, by an experienced economics editor, of the subdisciplines in his field and their influence on the literature: There definitely are camps. They less have to do with points of view than just personalities. And to some extent, where you’re educated and other connections, personal relationships that you’ve established—but that’s not 100 percent the case. In the field I work in, there’s, in the United States, two main schools that produce [scholars]—[College A] and [College B]. Most of the students at [College A] are students of my advisor or a large percentage. And he is a very sensitive personality. He likes to be in control of his fiefdom. So I think there’s some other prominent people. That’s kind

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of a personality problem that he has, or whatever. So there’s a little bit of antagonism there. So you see how papers get references.

The formation of scholarly circles around emerging disciplines has had very practical effects on one psychology editor, who described how his journal started in the 1960s and how new circles were formed around it: Together we started an evening seminar, which we called ‘‘Phenomenology and Sociology,’’ something like that. And we used to lead it in the department. And that had—oh, we’d invite a speaker or one of the members of the group would give a presentation. And from that we were quite taken by the interest among graduate students who also attended, by their own motivation. And we said, ‘‘Well, why don’t we start a journal?’’ We thought there would be enough [interest]. We figured it was a new, upcoming, growing area. Now you begin to find out how broad is that community of scholars. And some journals find out it’s not broad enough. You can’t sustain [them]. For example, the other area I’m interested in is called social methodology—[suppose I were to] start a journal there. It couldn’t, it wouldn’t, work. It’s a field that’s a good field. It’s been growing. But it’s been growing at a snail’s pace. And by now what’s happened is, since the people in that area have to get published, they are getting published in a variety of other journals. Some of them are being named to editorial boards. And . . . in a way, it’s more advantageous to them in advancing their careers to be known as, say, publishing in certain broader journals, because one of the strikes against the academics, if you wanted to find fault with an academic, is that their scholarship is too narrow. They publish only in one or two or three particular journals. Their field isn’t growing, or whatever.

Coser’s idea of the supremacy of the scholarly circle is in evidence here. Editors take their cue from what the scholarly circle defines as good and important. It is ironic that while the editorship position can be a very powerful one once the journal is up and running, a great deal of powerlessness was experienced by these editors as they observed new trends. The crowding of certain fields puts pressure on the structure of the respective scholarly circles. A mid-career physics editor described one of the consequences that he experienced: The big meeting in physics in the U.S. is the March American Physical Society. It has between four and five thousand physicists attending it. And every year it seems to get bigger and bigger and more and more abstracts are submitted for it, and at the same time you hear more and more people saying, ‘‘I don’t have funding to do my research.’’ So they’re showing up for this conference and producing all of these papers, yet they have no funding for any of their research. And so, I don’t know—they figure they’re not getting funding so maybe they have to produce more papers to eventually get funding.

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Scholarly circles can serve both to limit new work and, eventually, to foster it, according to this political science editor: And I would tend to see [the proliferation of journals] as a more positive attempt to provide a voice for people whose work might not be taken seriously by some of the—but who’s to decide? These people are making decisions on the basis of their own preconceived ideas about what the discipline ought to be like, which is not necessarily any sort of holy truth about what the discipline ought to be like, or is. So . . . I see the foundation of these new journals, whereas I sometimes despair at the proliferation. . . . How can we read all this stuff? We can’t possibly keep up with it. On the other hand, these [new journals] are challenging some canon about the way in which the discipline ought to be represented or function, or the way English knowledge is created. And I think that by challenging those received ideas about how knowledge is created, I think they perform, even kind of globally, a very important function.

The ability of a scholarly circle to start a journal has changed throughout the years. This veteran history editor recalled an earlier time: Well, I suppose in the 1960s or so when a lot of these [journals] started, [there was] plenty of money around, plenty of ideas. You had an idea, you could go to somebody, they would support it, there were publishing companies. Our journal for a while was run by a New York publishing company. They obviously thought they could at least balance expenses and get prestige from it. They were wrong. So they dropped it after a while. . . . It was just, hey, if you had an idea, . . . you could go, and really it doesn’t cost a lot to do a journal, if you can get some backing from (in this case) a university that [has] plans and the personnel. The other [journal], our competitors, went to [another press, which] has a journal for everything, and there wasn’t one for [their topic]; then they made their proposal, and they got it.

The scholarly circle, however powerful it may be, is nevertheless bounded by the reward system in the academy. That reward system places a premium on publication, and much of the structure of new subdisciplines is put together in order to facilitate that system. New scholars challenge paradigms, bring fresh perspectives, and cross disciplines. Yet for all that is new in what they bring, they still must adhere to the existing reward system, and that means presenting themselves in a way that will promote peer review, editorial activity, and publication. A physics editor explained how a scholarly circle can get drawn into, and then away from, a particular subdiscipline. The editor can play an important role by choosing what to publish and when to publish it:

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Well, if a survey paper is really well done, it puts everything together in a way which makes it seem like everything is basically done. You know, if you want to make progress in an area, you . . . have to do really fundamental advances, because [then] it looks like all easy loose ends have been cleaned up. The easy way to kill a field is make it look like there’s nothing that’s solving any problem [or] is going to be advanced over what’s there’s [plus] it’s going to take you five years of work. ’Cause very few people have five years to go off and work on nothing but [an old problem].

Editors themselves may try to influence the direction of a scholarly circle. They are in a uniquely advantageous position to accomplish this. A physics editor with over ten years of experience described how this might happen: It is very interesting for people who are editors to try to make their own sign as editors and [make] some sign on science by being good editors. Of course, everybody wants to be [a] good [editor]. So I think this is how come there are new journals—because some group of people or some publishers say: ‘‘Oh, . . . I clearly see that this could fly.’’ And they find people who think that this could be challenging. Right? And here we have the new journal. And I clearly see—I never subscribe to anything new. I [say] to myself, no, if [it is] good after some number of years, I shall learn about [it].

The data indicate that editors are aware of the potential impact of the increase of subdisciplines. As these various groups form and break off into their own societies, impediments to progress in the advancement of knowledge may arise. If only those who are in the scholarly circle are looking at the research produced by that circle, then the group is only talking to itself. Scrutiny from outside tends to dissipate as scholars from other fields become increasingly occupied with their own burgeoning journals. CIRCLES, REWARDS, AND PUBLICATION We can look at what demands the network makes on its members and how those demands affect editors by examining the interview data. Editors are members of the network, yet they are also a key arbiter of the direction the network takes. Moreover, by their publication power, they can determine who is in the network. In addition, editors can have an impact on the formation of new circles by shutting out potential new members. We have also seen how the emergence of new subdisciplines affects the scholarly circle. Moreover, the career reward system in the academy relies on the publication record as a key component. In light of these intertwined issues, no study of editors would be complete without a look at journal proliferation as a reaction by the scholarly networks to the events going on around them. The interview data contain a great deal of suspicion about the proliferation

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of journals in the postwar era. However, the number and survival rate of journals in any given discipline can vary. An economics editor who had been teaching for some twenty years explained: If you want to get tenure or promotion in academia, you have to publish in refereed journals, and if there are only ten refereed journals in the field— let’s say, classics, which I know nothing about—well, nobody’s going to get tenure. And the eleventh journal is going to be accepted with alacrity. People are going to say: ‘‘My God, an eleventh journal. This is wonderful. We’ll submit stuff to [it]. We’ll referee for [it].’’ And then the eleventh will pick up. On the other hand, if there are three thousand journals in the field and the three thousand and first comes up, it’s going to have a hard time making it ’cause [it’s] the new kid on the block, and unless there’s some famous person associated with it, lends it his fame, it’s going to be hard to make it. So I guess there’s some sort of finality here. You don’t have six million journals in any field. You [may] have altogether six million [in academia], but you [also] don’t have [only] one journal in a field. So I don’t know what the optimal [number] is.

A young physics editor provided an in-depth account of his perceptions of why there has been a journal proliferation in the last fifty years. The account is worth excerpting at length: The government decided to buy research starting in the Second World War, and if you start offering money for something, people are going to start making it. And the other thing that happened is that there’s been a big worsening of the problem in the last fifteen years or so, or ten years or so, because the state governments ran into financial trouble, what with taxpayer resistance to paying for the universities. And the universities were used to a certain standard of living and what not, and when faced with diminishing state funds, they [asked], ‘‘Well, where can we get money?’’ And one of the [responses] was, ‘‘Well, we need to get research grants, because that will help pay for part of our overhead and also make us look more prestigious, [so] that we’ll get more students.’’ And at the same time the government’s been diminishing the amount of research funding, and so you publish more and you have a better chance of getting the research money. So there’s been this really unhealthy coincidence of things where, basically, the perceived need to publish has gone way up, and that’s a demand—people want to publish, and [it’s easy] to create journals [for those who] don’t think they’re getting published enough. So in physics, nobody except a student at a place where you didn’t really have active physicists would ever learn anything from a physics journal. That’s just where papers eventually were published so that [they] would look official and somebody could get tenure. All of the real action was occurring first in physical paper preprints, which were mailed around, and the hard part at that time was getting yourself on the mailing list to places,

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because that was the only way you were part of the forefront of what was going on.

Editors are experiencing journal proliferation as a reaction by scholars to the pressures placed on them. The publish-or-perish syndrome plays an important role here. Scholars are just like everyone else when it comes to following a path of job security. Strict guidelines have been put forth as to how achievement is to be measured. Publishing is paramount, and especially a specified minimum amount of publication. So it comes as no surprise that the number of journals has increased in recent decades. A mid-career political science editor spoke with great passion about what he saw as the reasons for journal proliferation. Part of his remarks speak to the connections so important in the Coser model. For this editor, those connections may not always advance scholarship: I’m not a big believer in technical journals, particularly in the social sciences, for a number of reasons. One is that they are only read by a very small number of people—[or by nobody] at all; and two, they are a vehicle for people for adding to their resumes rather than contributing anything substantive in the way of knowledge [on] a theoretical or practical level. There are too many strictly academic journals that are—people publish in each other’s journals, and all that. It’s a fact. And it’s discouraging to me in the sense that there is an awful lot of intellectual energy out there and an awful lot of bright people who spent a lot of their lives writing rather meaningless stuff. And at the end of their lives they can look back and [ask], ‘‘My God, how did I do?’’ ‘‘Well, you wrote 642 articles that were read by nobody, but it made for a hell of a resume.’’

For this history editor, journal proliferation creates problems, and she had a clear reason as to why it has been happening: It happens because of the promotion and tenure system. And it’s selfdefeating. Most of it is not good. We publish a lot of stuff that’s ephemeral. It’s not bad. It’s ephemeral because somebody is thinking through a problem that we don’t really have an adequate approach to yet. And so it’s in a kind of a dialogue, and those pieces play a role at the time in the conversation and then it moves on, and that’s fine. I think that as long as there’s overproduction of Ph.D.s, which there is gross overproduction, and as long as there’s basically contraction in professional opportunities, which there is at this point, I think this is not going to [change] because the only thing they can do is crank up the standards. And they don’t have any way to measure [them].

What does the suspicion say about networks? Those expressing irritation at journal proliferation are talking about their relationship to the network. They place themselves outside the network in some instances, which is an ironic place

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to be. On the one hand, being an editor requires that a person be very well connected to the important people in a discipline. Yet on the other hand, the experiences of these editors involved irritation at the situation. They are in the circle, but they have little control over the reward system that encourages wouldbe authors to send their manuscripts to them. A physics editor spoke of how the tenure and promotion reward system encourages the proliferation of articles: Well, in physics, and I think it’s probably true in a lot of the other sciences, a guy who has—or gal—[who] has a hundred publications on their resume looks more impressive at first sight, if you don’t look at it carefully, than somebody with ten publications. But then if you look a little more closely, you might ask, How many times were those hundred papers cited? You might find that they were never cited, any of them, but the ten papers were cited a hundred times each. And so there’s been a proliferation of [publication], in part because it looks good on the CV. And they can crank out hundreds of papers that way. So I think maybe we’re at fault by looking at that too carefully when we look at people’s promotions or tenures, and not . . . at which one of those papers really had impact.

A social psychology editor provided a vivid portrait of some of the dynamics of the scholarly circle and their effect on the experiences of editors: Now, what that does is, you can see how the whole—all of these threads— come together. If you’re a new Ph.D. and you’re trying to get a foothold in academia, you can’t get published in these mainline journals, which are highly regarded. Then you have a hard time getting promoted, getting tenure. If you’re seen as publishing—[there are] some people who have published two and three articles with us—and if your CV has five publications [but] three of them are in this journal, that counts against you because gee, you can’t get published anyplace else. What’s the problem? How come you haven’t sent anything in? I guess [the others] must have turned you down [and so you’ve come to] the journal of last resort. . . . The journal can become known for that. Like there’s a journal in linguistics that’s—I know the editor. He says, ‘‘Send me anything and I’ll publish it.’’ I tell my students: ‘‘I don’t believe it. [Submit your articles to him.]’’ And they do, and they get published.

Here we can see at work a guiding principle of Coser, who wrote that personal connections are crucial in an ‘‘external economy industry,’’ where the items to be produced (i.e., the manuscripts) come from a place beyond the control of the editor. Most often, the manuscripts are produced by scholars doing work on speculation. What can be seen in the editors’ experiences in this chapter is that having their own place within the scholarly circle does not necessarily mean that they have an impact on the overarching reward structure of that community.

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Editorships may indeed be high-profile positions, but editors still have to operate within a structured system that is not of their own making. However, there were some sharp differences in the interview data. Many of the editors with whom I spoke had more sanguine views as to the scholarly circle and the model rewarding publication. One psychology editor recited a number of factors that she felt drove the proliferation of journals. One of the key elements, in her analysis, was the impetus from the scholarly circle that perpetually generates a corps of would-be editors: There might be a kind of tacit agreement. I mean, if it’s in the publisher’s interest to publish another journal and the people who propose a new journal . . . want to do it and . . . to be the editors. And there’s a journal called XY. And another one called XYZ. If [one] journal is . . . flooded with manuscripts, [does it] actually need to subdivide and [create] another one? I doubt it very much. And now this new one is struggling. Of course, new journals always struggle. So, it’s too soon to pass judgment. As of right now, [there’s] not enough coming [in] because there’s too many journals on the same topic. There are probably even others, too, that suckle or siphon off some of those manuscripts. I’m not sure where the impetus comes from— I suppose from the scholars. But the publishers make money, too, so they must be receptive. I mean, they’re keeping this process, too.

A veteran political science editor recounted her experience in a favorable way in regard to journal proliferation. For her, there was a compelling need for expansion in her discipline: Over the past six or seven years, we’ve seen the appearance of maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, seven (that I can think of) journals, that have been devoted just to women’s studies, and I would say women’s history and also, maybe, more broadly, interdisciplinary women’s studies. And I think that that very clearly has to do with the fact that these were [launched by] people whose work was rejected by some of the older, traditional journals. They couldn’t get their stuff published. And now these newer journals [have emerged], such as Sign, such as Feminist Studies, Gender and History, The Journal of Women’s History, Gender and Society, which is more sociologically oriented. There’s also Women International Forum, which is a more interdisciplinary journal. All of those journals are now considered very legitimate, serious publications.

The community is structured in such a way that there is a lack of connection between author and journal. The author can simply write an article independently and then choose which journal to send it to. There are some editors and scholars who care deeply about quality, and careers can be greatly aided by having an article appear in a high-quality journal. Yet all scholars seem to complain about the proliferation of low-quality journals. The paradox is that

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many scholars benefit greatly by having many journals, even including the lowquality publications. Proliferation creates a bigger market for scholars’ work. This paradox shows the decentralized nature of the scholarly community. There is no governing body at the helm and no voice of authority. Once again we can look to Coser for an examination of authority in scholarship. He wrote that editors need only to look to scholarly circles for definitions of what is important scholarship. Here we can see that the strength of personal connections can help an editor define such values. Indeed, many editors have no difficulty recognizing merit when they see it. It is simply a case of having to sift through the mediocre in order to find the high-quality material. Another veteran psychology editor talked of the pressures that emanate from the scholarly circles themselves. These pressures are recognized by the publishers, who respond by producing more products: I can tell [that] publishers see if they can make money out of [the situation]. There are enough libraries out there that feel obligated to carry most journals. Whoever wants to do something, then there’s probably a publisher out there who would be more than happy to publish it. And I’m sure it’s the same with books. I don’t know. I find it just remarkable the number of people who want to sit down, publishers [that] want to sit down, and talk with me—[and] publish my book on whatever.

This young economics editor experienced the proliferation simply as a necessary outgrowth of the increased numbers of scholars in the postwar era: This is a journal that was founded in 1985. It certainly fits into that count. I feel that most of the journals are being justified. For example, this journal started because the editor was frustrated that there was no outlet for work in this area—that if [material] wasn’t good enough for the very top journal in the field, then people needed somewhere to go. So he wanted to found the journal and also to have his own impact on things. At the same time, there seems to be too many. There’s the top tier and the second tier. It’s the proliferation at the low tier which I find to be a waste of financial resources. Yet the reason why this seems to be necessary is that the young scholars in the profession need to publish, and that’s true whether you’re at Boston College or University of Southern North Dakota or whatever, and so the people at the minor institutions still should be doing research, and there’s a view that this is important for their educational process, in any event. But they still need to publish, so they publish in these very fourthrate journals that no one reads. And so it’s not clear. It’s true that probably being involved in the research process is an important part of them being scholars and educators. But the fact that [their work] ends up appearing in print—it’s not so clear to me that it’s serving anyone’s use. Now maybe I’m completely off the ball here. Maybe really those small journals people do read, but I’m skeptical.

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This history editor also had ambivalent feelings about how the scholarly circles define what is good and bad for the individual. Do the demands of the network contribute to journal proliferation? This editor gave his views: I don’t know whether [proliferation has] been healthy or not. I’m somewhat ambivalent about that. . . . I don’t say that in any sense of envy or competition, because we’re strong. I mean, [this journal] is very strong. There’s no one nipping at our heels. But one does have to wonder at times, particularly when you see some journals that are, I think, clearly by most—not very good. But nonetheless, there’s publishing going on. And I suppose one thing I do—just [the] dissemination of information itself. It’s also part of a fractionalization of the discipline. Like medicine—no more general practitioners, right? They’re all specialists. And so every specialty needs its journal, needs its method of communication. It’s the old publish-or-perish syndrome. In fact, as my predecessor used to say, there’s far too much publishing and not enough perishing. Because promotion, tenure, etc. [are] so dependent upon my business, publication, and record. There’s been a kind of demand for additional places to publish. That’s part of it.

Contained in this excerpt we see three experiences of what drives journal proliferation; (1) dissemination of information, (2) the needs of a specialized profession, and (3) pressure to publish. These editors have found a way to overcome the impediments of remoteness from colleagues through their immersion in their scholarly network. Scholars are spread out all over the globe. Developing working relationships under such conditions can be difficult. Nonetheless, editors need to rely on their colleagues in a very profound way. Allowing themselves to rely on someone in the absence of a personal connection is a difficult experience, and, therefore, delving into a scholarly network is a tactic to combat the distances that exist in high-level scholarship. This is one of the values obtained in Coser’s view of the scholarly network. This is why editors pursue a deep level of immersion in the network, and the comfort they feel being part of it is reflected in their language. Editors experience scholarly circles as perpetually evolving networks that coalesce around a given topic at a rapid pace. These circles form in interdisciplinary colonies in order for scholars to share their insights and their passion. Again, the flexibility and decentralization of scholarship are on display, as people are free to go wherever their interests take them. Perhaps the editors can provide some insight into scholarly circles when they talk about scholars exploring new fields. Some editors report that these new scholars often feel the need to branch out on their own. This may be a reaction to a general conservatism among those in established circles. Perhaps this is the flip side of Coser’s assertion that the circles themselves decide what is good and important. Some editors reported that the circles established a definition of

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quality but then were loathe to revisit that definition in the face of new paradigms. In this way, the power of the circle to define standards can act as a bottleneck. Consequently, ideas that run counter to the established definitions often do not find full expression until a new journal is formed.

7

The Impact of Scholarly Culture on Editors in the Sciences and the Social Sciences INTRODUCTION Are there different cultures in the sciences and the social sciences? What role do these cultures play for editors? How do the models of Lewin and Coser fit into the different patterns in the data? These are the questions that form the theme for this chapter. DIFFERENCES IN RESOURCES One of the big differences between editors in the sciences and those in the social sciences has to do with finances and staff. Editors in the sciences are more apt to have a larger, full-time staff of professionals. In contrast, the social science journals had, for the most part, fewer professional staff. This was the case because, in my data, journals in the sciences were more likely to be administered by a scholarly society, whose dues-paying members provided a great deal of support. In contrast, most social science journals I looked at had only departmental support from the dean at a particular school. The only social science editor in this study who had what could be called an extensive staff was an eminent anthropology scholar at a major research university: Let me give you a little bit of the sense of the structure. I’m sort of overall person in charge, but there is also an associate editor, [a] staff associate

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A psychology editor gave a description of her support staff, which was much more typical for the social science editors in this study. Her remarks were cited earlier, but this excerpt on staffing levels bears repeating. I have an editorial assistant, who’s a graduate student here, who works a couple of hours a week. And she Xeroxes and mails and all this stuff. I type the letters myself, because I write my own correspondence.

A veteran political science editor described the duties of his only staff member: And if the manuscript is satisfactorily revised, it then goes to a copy editor—we employ a professional copy editor—and I will spend some time myself rewriting parts of the article and—just because somebody has something to say but they’re not saying it very well.

These people are talking about staff size and the kinds of tasks that they perform. Most of the editors in the sciences had the backing of an organization. Quite often a scholarly society with an army of support staff was available to do a lot of the work. In sharp contrast, the editors in the social sciences generally had to keep a close eye on all the small details of the journal on a daily basis. What kind of impact does this difference have on the experiences of the work? For many in the social sciences, the data show frustration at things like the lack of aesthetic quality of manuscripts, the delays in getting reviewer reports back on time, and disputes about manuscript assignments. Perhaps editors in the social sciences have these experiences because they tend to be much closer to the front lines of scholarly communication. Unlike their counterparts in the sciences, social science editors are not two or three levels removed from things like the assignment of reviewers or the correction of manuscripts. This experienced history editor was typical of the understaffed operations in the social sciences in this study. He had his hands in nearly all aspects of the day-to-day activities of the journal: The bulk of that time is spent with dealing with the manuscript. The bulk of that time is spent with dealing with authors, reading manuscripts, editing manuscripts, reading proofs. So the bulk of my time is spent in preparing the journal.

Another mid-career history editor worked at a very small operation:

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Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that in theory, I’m paid half to work— only work half time. But in practice, that’s silly. I can do other things but I can’t do anything else continuously, because there’s a kind of continuous maintenance it takes just to read the mail. I mean, I screen everything that comes in.

A geography editor with some fifteen years as a professor recounted what proved to be a consistent theme in the data for the social sciences: It’s a lot of just checking here and there, and calling and e-mailing people. . . . And then there’s the paper processing of the letters—I might have everything on the computer—but then just going through that whole process of recording and checking, ’cause I don’t have the money for a secretary. And even if I did, the scale of the journal is not huge. [A secretary] could do some things, but [only] maybe 30 percent of the time.

In the Lewin (1951) construction, this puts the focus of the social science editor in the first part of the model, the ‘‘cognitive structure,’’ which looks at the terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation. There are questions in this portion of the model that are of an immediate nature to the person engaged in daily editorial work. Among them are, Is the material that I let in going to be accessible to my group? What kinds of manuscripts are coming before me? How should I present these ideas to my group? How are ideas expressed in this journal? Many editors in the social sciences are described by this portion of the Lewin gatekeeping model. The smaller staff obliges the editor to deal with these more pressing needs. There is little time or inclination to step back from the activities and take a broader look. In contrast, many of the editors in the sciences had larger, more professional staffs. This longtime mathematics editor’s description of how his staff operated is common in the data: Well, when [the manuscript reaches] me, I pick an associate editor to send it to and [Mary] takes care of it. She’s very good. She’s both an administrative person and a copy editor. She’s very good at copyediting. She’s a Radcliffe graduate. Her dissertation is in the classics. And then the associate editor sits on it and has it reviewed, and eventually I get it back.

A veteran physics editor described the staff at his disposal provided by the scholarly society of which he is a member: Mostly the composition is done on Long Island, it’s the publishing division of the American Institute of Physics, which is set up in—I think—as sort of an umbrella society to provide efficient ways of publishing lots of physics, and most of the physics in the United States comes from right there.

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This physics editor in mid-career described his office operation, which would have been the envy of the social science editors with whom I talked: [My staff provides me with] sheets for me to select reviewers. So I do that part and then it’s our policy to contact all reviewers before we send them the manuscript. That distinguishes the journal from others. He runs that whole thing. We have a computerized system for reviewers. When I started five years ago, they basically gave me some Xeroxed copies of some rolodexes. And we’ve committed all of that plus all of the names of reviewers to an electronic list of reviewers that is, well, hundreds. We are in the process of making the electronic database of these reviewers. We’ve attempted to keyword their interests so I could actually choose several kinds of search utilities in WordPerfect or anything, just to kind of leap through this thing. This actually has evolved. In the beginning, it was done more manually. So anyway, . . . I’ve looked through these things and I’ve begun to use the electronic database to help me to do that.

Editors in the sciences have a different level of experience than their counterparts in the social sciences. Their larger staff sizes allow them the time and ability to think about what they are doing on another level. The second part of Lewin’s model, depicting the motivation of the gatekeeper, comes into play here. This requires an examination of the system of values that lie behind the gatekeeper’s choices. In this study, the larger staffs available to the science editors, compared to the social science editors, provided an experience whereby the group values in the Lewin model came to the fore. Lewin’s model demands that each gatekeeper ask, What values does my group hold? How are individual manuscripts linked to these values? How is this particular manuscript presented? This chemistry editor was at the top of quite a large organization. He described how things worked in his office: Once the manuscripts leave our office and [go to] an associate editor, we have nothing further to do with the evaluation. So it’s entirely up to the associate editor. And it’s their job to pick two or three competent reviewers, evaluate the review, make a decision on what is required to the manuscript. I don’t do any of the contacting of associate editors. . . . The managing editor, who’s next door, does all of it. My job principally is [that] when the manuscripts come in, they log them in—she has an assistant—and they then put the manuscript on my desk and I have . . . seven [full-time] and [one part-time] associate editors to assign them to, and I have to look it over, evaluate the contents and [decide] who would be the first person [to see it], and then put the name of [that] person on the manuscript. And as far as processing papers, that’s about it.

A veteran biology editor’s experience with her staff included her ability to put some distance between herself and the work. Once she decided which associate editor would review the manuscript,

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then it just goes into the process and [to] someone else in my office. I have one and a half full-time people and people who do a couple [of] specific functions, so I don’t see it again.

As shown in my data, one of the de facto values for the sciences (compared to the social sciences) is the emphasis on larger journal staffs, which encourages a more proscribed, communal decision-making process on the fate of manuscripts. The great majority of science editors in this study experienced the decision-making process as one where sifting, sorting, and reviewer relations were a step removed from the editor’s office. We can see phrases in the data about processing manuscripts like, ‘‘Once the manuscripts leave our office to [go to] an associate editor, we have nothing further to do with the evaluation.’’ Another editor finished with ‘‘—so I don’t see [the manuscript] again,’’ and a third said, ‘‘Most of the effort is carried out by the support staff in the other office.’’ There is an emphasis here on procedure. Perhaps for these editors, this is where they can gain assurance about their gatekeeping role. By implementing conventional filtering procedures and staffing their operations with the appropriately qualified people, they can distribute the questions Lewin poses about group values back where they belong—namely, back to the group itself. Hence, the army of associate editors and reviewers, who, by definition, embody the values of the group, provides the road map that guides the gatekeeper.

SIMILARITIES IN GROWING INTO THE JOB How do editors view their own talents? What skills did they already have prior to entering the job, and what were developed over time? These kinds of questions are the focus of this section. Lewin described this analysis as part of the ‘‘cognitive structure’’ that each gatekeeper constructs in his or her own way. Individual gatekeepers develop terms in which they think about their own situation. I found a great deal of similarity here among all the editors. This section represents a departure in this chapter in that the data here indicate more similarities than differences. There was a great deal of common ground among all the editors in this study about the difficulties encountered during their respective learning curves. I found these people to be forthcoming in the descriptions of their limits as scholars and as arbiters for the literature. A veteran economics editor described his own skills and how they fit the requirements of the job: Everybody has talents in this world, and we’re all lucky if we’ve got a couple. That happens to be one of mine: I can take—not only can I write reasonably clearly, which surprises me, given my high school performance, but I can take other people’s work and knock it into very good shape. I’m not the final arbiter in this world of what’s bunk and what is not.

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The experiences of these editors concerning their own motivations showed a remarkable degree of variation. A physics editor explained one of the things that drove him: The one thing you strive for, besides getting grants and things like that, is peer recognition. The bottom line is that we’re all looking for that—‘‘Do my peers value what I’ve done?’’ And so that’s what [an editorship] does, and that makes you feel good.

This social psychology editor spoke of how she got the job and how she might be perceived by her colleagues. Her expressions of her talents contained considerable humility and self-knowledge, which in all likelihood, have served her well in her scholarly circle: I was the only person to put my name in. And, so, it wasn’t very hard to get the job (laughter). My reputation is probably as somebody that—maybe some people even feel I’m controlling, because I get involved in [an] editorial [way], sort of nuts and bolts of the editorial process more than most editors would. So, I’ll tell them: ‘‘I don’t think this is a good choice of a word here, ambiguous. You know, it could refer to this antecedent or that antecedent.’’ And they say, ‘‘What is an editor telling me that kind of stuff for, you know?’’ And, so, there might be a little bit of feeling that I’m controlling in that way.

These people were talking about the decisions and consequences of taking professional risks. These editors are a self-selected group in the sense that they all decided (or agreed) to become editors. By taking this action, they decided to challenge themselves in a special way. That challenge involves venturing outside their area of academic subject expertise. That is to say, they each have stepped out of their exclusive roles as scholars and added the role of editor. This additional role involves a variety of tasks that pose certain risks. These tasks involve interpersonal and organizational talents that may place the editors into new situations, where they may be apprentices, just as they were at the beginning of their careers. These new environments call on the editor to develop a sense of what is needed to get the job done. There are production deadlines to meet, subscriptions to increase, and, in some cases, staff members to supervise. These tasks were not always easy for many editors in this study, and the interview data reflect this fact. Being a good editor involves knowing one’s own limitations, explained an experienced history editor who relied on his reviewers a great deal:

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But you know what? The fact of the matter is, I will confess to being ignorant. I don’t know enough. I couldn’t, I’m an Early American historian. I look to find the best scholars to review these books. I don’t know enough about things outside my field to know whether I’m stumbling or not.

The same theme was echoed by a young economics editor: See, I can’t be an expert in everything. Even the three of us [in the office can’t be], although three people have at least pretensions of being expert in everything in a narrow area. But, . . . then, we’re biased and we want other people’s opinions, too. We don’t want to just do it ourselves. Otherwise, we might as well not have a refereeing system.

These editors are open and willing to learn. They learn on the job in rapid fashion, under what they experience as significant pressure. The events here were experienced in a very open-ended way by these editors. The data show that they entered these new roles without rigid expectations as to how things should be. To be sure, the experiences the editors gained in getting to these prestigious positions enabled them to form some kind of picture of what to expect. Yet on the whole, it was their flexibility that helped these people survive their adjustment period. A sociologist who had been editing the journal he founded for some twentyfive years recalled how an openness to learn and a willingness to try new things guided him as he embarked on a long journey in scholarly publishing: So one thing led to another. It was the director who invited me to a [professional society] meeting . . . in New York, just about this time of year. He took me out to a Japanese restaurant. It was the first time I’d been to a . . . Japanese restaurant. We talked about anything and everything. And he was interested. So he worked out a deal with us, which eventually led to a contract. . . . [At] any rate, that’s how it began. So we said, ‘‘All right, how do we start?’’ And it was—for almost all of us, it was a new adventure.

For this veteran physics scholar, who took on the job of editing late in his career: It was terrifying. The first summer I was doing it, the previous editor had pretty much shut down six weeks before I officially began. And then mail started coming here [even] before I became editor, and I didn’t know what to do with it. And then the moving trucks arrived from the previous editorial office [with] file cabinets full of stuff, not all of which had to be attended to right away, but a lot of it had been piling up—and the mail keeps coming.

What we are seeing here is the humility to realize that the editor’s own professional perspective should not be exclusively relied on in matters that come before him or her. These editors are acknowledging the initial bureaucratic mis-

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steps and the insecurities that they underwent during their first days as editors. Lewin’s model may be applicable here. Lewin wrote of the cognitive structure of the gatekeeper, whereby, in part, the gatekeeper looks at the feeling of group belongingness and the group culture that exist in the discipline. A particular group culture that allows for missteps and insecurities among those attaining new, important positions may be experienced with some comfort by an editor. That comfort level should be reflected in the interview excerpts concerning the experiences that these editors underwent.

DIFFERENT MOTIVATIONS IN TAKING ON THE ROLE A key component for Lewin in examining gatekeeping revolves around the motivation of the gatekeeper, a concept that is also an important part of my study. Having explored the implications for all thirty-five editors in previous chapters, I now look at the differences that arose between the sciences and the social sciences. When I classified the data according to these two large categories, one of the more striking differences involved the reasons and the motivations that animated the two groups of editors. Social science editors generally undertook the work in order to have an impact on their profession. They sought to bring new ideas to their colleagues, which included challenging existing paradigms with interdisciplinary material. On the other hand, editors in the sciences generally spoke of motivations dealing with individual fulfillment. There was little interest here on how their work would affect their profession. Science editors took on this role because they thought it would be fun or interesting. One of the major factors in the editorial work of a veteran psychology editor was the prospect of promoting certain methodologies that he feels have been given little notice: You know, it’s the journal—[in] a particular journal with this much autonomy, you have an opportunity to do different things. And a good example is, there’s a very small group in sociology that’s interested in computer models of social behavior. They do a lot of simulation work, and a lot of it’s this sort of extension of expert system stuff, or neural networks, and so on. And most of this discipline, the vast majority, has no idea what these people are doing. . . . So I called up these people this week and [asked]: ‘‘How would you like to do a special issue? And your special issue would be the idea of reaching out for a broader audience.’’ Well, there’s a nice opportunity to do something . . . and really have some influence. And it sort of changes the relationships with people, that [is something] one can do as an editor. So it’s that kind of strategic possibility that really interests me in editing a journal. I thought about it before, and I think there is a growing group of people who—who have this idea that this stuff could be done rigorously. It is not hard to do, is what they’re saying. And [the editor can] really help

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in development. So [you] call up and say, ‘‘How would you like to do this special issue?’’ So you have to promote a different kind of research.

The role of the editor in shaping discussion within a discipline is a clear one for many editors with whom I talked. A social psychology editor explained how influence can be wielded in a subtle way: You can do it in two ways. You can do it by changing [the] composition of the editorial board so that by weeding out the people that are interested in a particular subfield, let’s say, it becomes clear you’re not going to be accepting stuff in that subfield. If you add people in a particular subfield, it means that you may indeed be interested. . . . It signals to people in the broader scholarly community, because, as I tell my students, look at the editorial board before you decide you’re going to send your paper, and if you see you don’t have a chance with this one, . . . maybe [with another journal] you do.

This experienced history editor felt it was his responsibility to bring to the job his experiences in scholarship. He knew what was important and that sometimes broader trends would exert themselves on the journal: I think that where we would go with a trend, I think the trends are—they go beyond just [our journal], and again they tend to reflect even broader institutional priorities, or whatever. I mean, to give you a couple of examples of that—I think, clearly, the kinds of articles we’ve been publishing in the last ten or fifteen years at least, particularly the time that I’ve been here—are different from the articles of thirty, forty, fifty years ago, when a lot of the articles were fairly—what we would not consider to be fairly traditional political history or religious history. I think what I guess would characterize the publication of the last ten or fifteen years is— . . . the easiest forum, I guess, for it is cultural history. I mean, it’s social history, it’s somewhat intellectual history, but it’s kind of a combination of it, and I [am] very much interested, I think, in ways in which cultural business was done in the past [and] so on. And certainly, [there is] much more interest in the—not just the history of elites, but the history from the ground up, and so on.

These remarks show the editor assuming a kind of supra-gatekeeper position, transcending the confines of the constituency members to bring them new material that otherwise would not have been presented. It is a position requiring the editor to have a view that extends outside the boundaries of the present paradigms. That vision has to assimilate what is being developed in other areas of research into material for his or her constituency. Perhaps this is one way in which new paradigms are generated. Editors who experience their roles as involving the responsibility to place their individual stamp on a journal may be

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more accepting of multidisciplinary material as a means to bring something fresh to their readership. The social sciences may be more susceptible to this kind of attitude because of the multidisciplinary nature of many of the fields. For example, economics and political science often merge in the form of political economy; sociology and psychology cross paths in social psychology; and the list goes on. In addition, many of the same methodological tools are employed by the different disciplines in the social sciences. These include demographics, the statistical analysis of social trends, qualitative research, and others. In sharp contrast, there is quite a different picture for science editors. It seems that they take on the job for reasons that are more personal and individual. There is virtually no mention made about influencing the discipline when science editors talk about their motivations. For this veteran physics editor, deciding to edit a journal was a very personal experience as he had had great interest in the journal as an intellectual entity throughout his career: Actually, in my case, I cared a lot about the journal. I’d been involved with it as an associate editor, and I was book review editor of it at the time. And I was the oldest player. And I cared a lot about who edited. I actually didn’t think of myself as an editor. I went through [a] long list of names, and I found only one person on it that I wanted, and I nominated him. And then, a while later, I got a letter from the search committee saying several people had suggested me, and so it worked like that. My wife and kids said, ‘‘Yeah, you’d be good at that.’’

This veteran physics editor, whose first language was not English, spoke of the sheer fun of the prospect of editorial work: They asked me if I would like to be the main editor. I said no, but I said I would be interested in being executive editor, that is, really, working editor. Because I was thinking then— . . . it was the beginning of the 1980s—that it could be . . . fun to run a large, international journal. And I [had] never [done] it, and I was thinking that it could be challenging and interesting. It is extremely important [that] the editors should [want] to do that work. That is, it’s not only qualifications and whatever. They should want and have the time—they should want [time], because [then] they [will] find the time. . . . This is [a] very important issue. So it was really challenging. But [I] decided it could [also] be fun.

These science editors were talking about their motivations for entering editorial work. Unlike the social science editors, their motivations revolved around interior personal issues rather than the impact they could potentially have on their profession. What was important to them was the stimulation and enjoyment they derived from the work. The data contain phrases like, ‘‘I thought it would

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be interesting,’’ and ‘‘I thought it would be fun.’’ These people sought personal rewards. Unlike with the social science editors, internal motivations seem to drive many of the editors in the sciences. Another physics editor began his editorial career in a unique way: he wanted a free subscription to a particular journal, and so he asked a member of the editorial board how he could [get one], and: he jokingly said, ‘‘Well, there is one way, and that’s to become an editor.’’ And he said that I guess the next time the opening came up in this area, maybe he would suggest my name. And that happened, maybe about six months later. And in fact, they had a number of openings in my area. I guess two or three people in the area had done research, which I work in. So I was even consulted about who else, maybe, to bring in, all at the same time. So that was just to be a member of the editorial board. I guess I had already been an editor for [another journal], and I had thoroughly enjoyed it enough to think it was quite reasonable to do. The nice thing I saw about [this journal] was that an editor has a lot of responsibility—you’re making decisions—[and] I feel very strongly about this particular journal. It’s one of the few that, I think, . . . both mathematicians and physicists read. I really don’t think there are many successful interdisciplinary journals, so I felt quite eager to be a part of that.

Simple, personal reasons for taking on editorial work were more prevalent in the data from science editors than that from the social science editors. Here an experienced physics editor explained how he first came to his present journal at the initial associate level: An acquaintance of mine who knew my work there, and at that time was editor of what’s called [Journal X], asked me if I’d be interested in becoming an associate editor. I thought it would be very interesting. So I gave up my other editorial post and took the associate editorship of this [journal].

This chemistry editor retired from teaching but had retained his interest: Of course, [being editor is] a way of staying active in the field. I knew I was going to reduce the amount of research I was doing. I wouldn’t really have any professional activities in the department. I don’t teach in the department, I don’t attend faculty meetings. But I didn’t want to completely remove myself from the university, and with this position and the emeritus position, I’m able to keep this very nice office.

The Coser model may be instructive here (Coser, Kadushin, Powell, 1982). He emphasized the strength of personal connections that allows an editor to garner the best material for the journal. These personal connections form a strong central theme in the data from the science editors. Many of them reported that editorial work was their way of being ‘‘active’’ in the field. They also

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reported that they ‘‘cared a lot’’ about the journal. When examined through the lens of the Coser model, we can see some parallels. The level of immersion that, Coser asserts, characterizes a deep commitment is echoed by the data that talks about having fun, being active, and caring about the job. Those with a strong interest in the field and the people who inhabit that field will take on a demanding post like journal editor. Their immersion has reached such a degree that they feel uncomfortable or unchallenged if they are not continually awash in the back-and-forth intellectual discourse with their colleagues. If remaining active simply meant keeping up with the literature, that could be done by sitting at the library and reading the journals. These people want something beyond that. The data here reflect a level of immersion that the editors felt compelled to achieve by being at the center of the discourse. Purely personal reasons spurred this biology editor to try her hand at editorial work: I was wondering whether I wanted to get into scientific publishing and maybe even making a career change. I’m fifty-three years old and I thought, ‘‘Well, . . . I’m [never] going to be a cutting-edge scientist.’’ I would like to believe I’m going to work until I’m ninety, but that is probably not true. So, I’ve known many writers. I’ve known many magazine writers. I lived in Europe for a number of years and sort of lived in a group that were writers and publication people. [As a result], I was curious about whether I would like to get more involved. So this was a test in that way, and also, I’m committed to this society and the area and feel that all scientists—well, I shouldn’t say all scientists—[most] should contribute to their discipline in some sort of public service way. And I consider this my public service, and I feel I would do as good a job as possible to make this publication rise in stature and deliver what the readers want.

Perhaps the notion of removal from ideological involvement in the direction of the literature was best put by an oceanography editor: Most of these ideas, again, have come from the authorship, you know, because of the community out there, and we’re responding. And again, my attitude is [that] we’re supposed to reflect the community, for the most part. The trick is to figure out what the community is and make sure that small parts of it don’t dominate.

It is interesting that there was little evidence among the science editors of a desire to push the direction of the literature in one way or another. They had not taken on the job to put their imprint on a journal or the literature in general. (This idea was explored in Chapter 4 in the discussion of meaning making.) It seems reasonable to assert that among the editors I interviewed, those in the sciences saw themselves less as a judgmental gatekeeper whose task was to weed out inappropriate material. The attitudes expressed in the data indicate that

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in the sciences, the editorial role is seen as more like serving as a clearinghouse, where the idea is to pass along to colleagues, in an orderly and intellectually sound way, the latest research from the field. These editors are not there to steer the paradigms. They are there to sort and display research. DIFFERING SOURCES OF MEANING Group values play a large part in Lewin’s portrait of the motivation of the gatekeeper. He was concerned with questions like, What values does my group hold, what is the relative weight of each value, and how are individual manuscripts linked with these values? The meaning making done by these editors revolved around their relationship to their groups. The degree to which they used their editorial work in order to locate themselves in a particular position vis-a`-vis the group testifies to the relevance of the Lewin model. One of the differences that emerged from the data between editors in the social sciences and those in the sciences surrounds the different meanings of their work. To be sure, there were also similarities and the differences here were subtle. Nonetheless, the data contain elements that clearly point to some important distinctions. For their part, editors in the social sciences found their meaning making through their place in their respective communities. This veteran history editor explained the central role that editorial work had in his life: It is my intellectual stimulation. It is a constant source of intellectual excitement, because here at [this journal], we do everything. We handle subscriptions. We handle promotions. We handle editorials. We handle production. We handle everything. And so, even with a journal such as ours—this isn’t Time magazine—but the fact of the matter is that it never ceases to be interesting and exciting. I deal with hundreds of people every year, with book reviewers—we do a book review or two—essayists. And so it’s . . . constant [and] rather fast paced, contrary to what the impression might be—certainly authors don’t think we’re fast paced. So I find that it is a center of my intellectual life. It really is the anchor to my intellectual life.

An anthropology editor who was just starting out put things in a similar way: But I find [that] in many ways the most rewarding part . . . is [to be] in communication with people about ideas. I also think—and you’ve got to remember that people who edit academic journals are themselves scholars, and therefore they want to be intellectually engaged. They want to have the justification that there’s some intellectual excitement in what they do, for taking on all the bureaucratic stuff as well—and I think that [this justification] may be another part of what you’re seeing, to be quite frank.

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These people made meaning of the work through its impact on their own individual mental structure. It is a satisfaction that is achieved through relationships with others in which mutual growth occurs. The meaning they made was necessarily achieved by interacting with colleagues. This interaction can take many forms. For some, the peer relationships were the most profound. Here they could discuss topics on a level plane with other experienced colleagues. For others, the mentoring relationship carried the most meaning, and helping junior scholars shape their manuscripts into important scholarship was the basis for their work. Interactions with people formed the basis of the meaning made by one history editor, who explained some of her motivation: It’s fun. I mean, . . . there’s three people in Australia who work on this. And he’s now had five people in the U.S. and the U.K. reading this stuff, who also work on this—in labor history. And it’s, I think, actually the kind of collegial relationships you need to do really good work, and that it can happen through a review process is sort of wonderful.

A history editor with decades of experience gave an example of working with a scholar to shape a manuscript. This editor found meaning in the interactive work between himself and the author: And this article was, in effect, an article that dealt with a single [craftsman] and this [author] had managed, through a careful analysis of widely scattered [pieces], [to] link all of these [pieces] as the work of this one particular man and to categorize these [works of art] into different types and phases of this [craftsman’s] work. And [the article] was written by a person who is, by training, a professional biologist and entomologist—that’s the person that deals with insects, right? And in effect, what he was doing was using his skills as a biologist classifier and kind of turning them into this more artistic material, [a cultural] thing. And he was a distinguished scientist and had published tons of scientific articles, but this was the first nonscientific article that he had ever published. And the article was, as submitted—[it] was not really ready for publication. But I clearly could see that there was something good here, and I worked very hard on working with him and restructuring it and helping him rewrite it and so on, and I think it came out to be a very interesting and nice article, and [a] useful article. [The author] said later that even though he had published scores of articles in scientific journals, this one gave him the most pleasure of anything that he had ever done.

Deriving occupational fulfillment through the establishment of connections with colleagues appears as well in the remarks from a geography editor with over fifteen years in the professoriate:

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The satisfaction is working with—I think, trying to get some good articles out, and then working with new scholars. I think that, to me, is satisfying. It’s nurturing people along that I think are worth nurturing (if [indeed] they are), and helping them to begin to see how you have to write to do a good job of writing, by saying important points.

Collegial relations formed the meaning made by an experienced political science editor: I like being able to conceptualize an issue and talk to people about how they might contribute and what they might do, and kind of brainstorm with them. It’s a question of intellectual stimulation, of conversation, that makes you think about things you haven’t thought about before, that may open some new doors, intellectually. I think that’s what I like the best.

The academic give-and-take is important here. Perhaps one of the most important factors involves the drive for collaboration and affirmation. Much of scholarly work is solitary. This is perhaps more true in the social sciences than in the sciences, where research produced by multiple authors is more prevalent (Garfield, 1979). The isolation may be why we see the meaning of connections expressed in this important way in the social science data. The research, the writing, and the manuscript submission processes are, for the most part, done in a solitary fashion. A deep passion for the subject matter drives many scholars to work long hours on topics that frequently have only a narrow audience. It is the striving to reach that audience, to connect with those people, that provides the meaning making for many scholars in the social sciences. Here we can see where the Lewin model has application. The motivation of the gatekeeper is determined, in part, by the group values that lie behind his or her choices. The data indicate here that an important value for editors in the social sciences was the desire to feel connected to others in the field. The Coser model is also worth taking note of in connection with group values. On more than one occasion in the data, the word ‘‘conversation’’ arose. Perhaps there is more here than mere dialogue. It is interesting to note that the initial definition for ‘‘conversation’’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘‘the action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons’’ (emphasis in the original). These editors found meaning through the social locale in which they were situated. In short, this too is a case of Coser’s ‘‘levels of immersion.’’ The value that editors received from their place among persons involved mental and emotional stimulation from their colleagues. To be sure, editors occupy highprofile positions. They indeed have influence over the wide range of responsibilities under their purview. Yet, according to Coser, the influence of the group and its capacity to define what is good and important lie at the heart of the meaning making for these editors. In contrast, editors in the sciences described sources of meaning that were

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different than those experienced in the social sciences. The science editors generally experienced meaning through their ability to see the results of their work in some tangible way. A physics editor talked about what was important to him about the work: When I see the first article that I commissioned in there—’cause one’s in the works right now, I have it out for review, and the other one will come in January—When I see it in print, I’ll just look and say, ‘‘I was the one that started that new [line of research].’’

A mathematics editor recounted the surprising nature of the meaning making that he did: Well I get more satisfaction than I expected, and that’s probably because I’ve been able to institute [some] innovative things, which . . . seem to be— they certainly seem to be working with respect to the author constituency. Whether the readers like [the changes] is still open, but I certainly think it’s better from the point of view of creating some good information that people should want to read, I think. So I’ve been able to introduce some innovations that are both worthwhile—at least I consider [them] worthwhile—and that are appreciated. So that’s given me a lot of satisfaction.

A veteran physics editor described another theme: There’s some satisfaction in looking through the editions of the journal as they arrive and seeing the [papers being] communicated.

The meaning made by the editors in the sciences revolved around the evidence of their contribution to the profession, the literature, or the journal itself. This was in sharp contrast to the data from the social science editors. The editors in the sciences used language that underscored the sensory nature of their satisfaction. Phrases like, ‘‘when I see it in print,’’ ‘‘it’s a thrill every month [when] I get my copy in the mail,’’ and ‘‘there’s some satisfaction in looking through the editions of the journal as they arrive and seeing the [papers being] communicated,’’ all indicate that the heart of the meaning lay in seeing tangible results. For this geophysics editor, whose first language was not English, again we see that the scholarly impact of the work carried the most meaning: So at these [national professional] meetings, I’m extremely happy if different people see me and say: ‘‘Oh, this [recent] topical issue . . . is just fantastic. I am using it, I am giving this to my students,’’ etc. So, you know, if I hear such things I am happy, and sometimes people [send] me e-mail, and besides, I see . . . the sales [figures]. Oh—[it’s] because in this journal—this may be unusual—every topical

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issue is going out as [a] journal issue, as everywhere else, but also at the same time, the same material is published in the form of [a] soft-covered book, [entirely] at the same time [but with] a much [lower] price. The prices are around thirty to forty dollars. It depends on the size of the volume of the topical issue. So they are highly available for graduate students and normal researchers, [and] I see how [well] they sell. So it’s very challenging [to] see the appreciation.

To be sure, this view was not unanimously upheld in the data on science editors. For example, a retired biochemistry professor who now edited a journal explained the meaning for him: Well, as I mentioned before, being able to stay active in the field [is important]. In my particular case I’m retired, and I’m not doing any teaching and I’ve got this research group, and so it’s very nice to be able to remain active and to use the experience of all my years to apply to something useful and productive. It’s very nice to be able to maintain contacts with all the people I know around the world, and when they send in manuscripts they often have a personal note [attached], and that’s nice.

However, his was the only voice to express this type of experience among editors in the sciences. More typical was the sentiment expressed by a geophysics editor, who reiterated the experiences of his colleagues about the tangible evidence of his work: One of the bigger pieces of satisfaction to me was when I started the editor in chief position, . . . the citation rate for [our journal increased] by the time I left, and so I felt pretty good about that. That meant we were doing a good job. And like I said before, it’s the leading citation of all journals in geophysics.

This ten-year biology editor found meaning in the changes she brought to her journal: I’m very happy with what I see, you know, physically see. This was the old journal and— . . . I know appearance isn’t everything, but there’s a big difference in layout and everything. There’s a lot of inappropriate figures in here that can actually be a third of the size, you know. . . . And we’ve reduced the size of the figures, . . . and . . . this has a fair amount of color figures, [which] catch people’s eyes. And I know appearance isn’t everything, but the quality, I assure you, has also increased (laughter).

Professional affirmation comes in many guises. For these editors, affirmation came in the form of clear, irrefutable evidence of their presence in the literature. It is as if the scholarly work and the collegial relationships that occur along the route during research were deemphasized. What was emphasized was the words

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on the page. A consideration of the reward system in scholarship is illuminating here. Publication records are the stock-in-trade of scholars. This is how careers are built. Perhaps an excerpt from the data bears repeating here: So it all sort of fits into that broad philosophical thing, and of course, the bottom line is, the more recognition you have is, when you go to those funding agencies and [ask], ‘‘Can you give me some money to support my research?’’

The meaning these editors made out of their work involved professional recognition. That approbation, in turn, allowed them to pursue their research interests on a deeper level as funding and recognition followed each other over and over. The emphasis on tangible accomplishments may also betray a discomfort with a reward system based on more ephemeral achievements. The mark these editors have made in print cannot be dismissed. They cannot be ignored by tenure committees or funding agencies. These editors ultimately found meaning in the accumulation of tangible, measurable accomplishments. The accomplishments garner recognition, which in turn garners funding. Finally, the funding provides the resources and the freedom to pursue individual interests. In this sense, the meaning made of the work has many layers, one built on the next. The data suggest that there are indeed differences in the experiences of the editors in the social sciences and those in the sciences. Differences in staffing levels are the most apparent. The varying levels of staff place quite different demands on the editors in the respective fields. Editors in the social sciences have to necessarily be concerned with the day-to-day activities that keep the journal on time and accurate. In this role, they have to keep aware of a great many aspects of the journal’s operation. This attention to detail provides them with a constant awareness of the journal’s constituency and how it will view the various elements of each issue of the journal. On the other hand, the editors in the sciences, for the most part, run larger operations. They have staff people working for them to handle some of the more routine tasks. Thus, their experience allows them to sidestep some of the gatekeeping questions posed by Lewin. For many journals in the sciences, it is the staff people who are concerned with constituencies, ideological camps, and group belongingness within the discipline. As a result, the editor in the sciences can remain some distance removed from these issues. This is a much different picture than the one emerging from the social sciences. There are different sources of meaning making for these editors. Immersion in a particular field can take two forms. The social scientists experienced meaning making by positioning themselves among their colleagues in order to obtain a feeling of group togetherness. They wanted to be part of the inner circle and the important dialogue. For many in this study, that inclusion appeared to be its own reward. The meaning of being part of the circle was an achievement of

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becoming recognized as a ‘‘known quantity,’’ to use a phrase from one of the editors themselves. In contrast, editors from the sciences made meaning from more concrete manifestations of their work. The published journal, the printed page, the masthead, the journal cover—all these things had meaning for many editors in the sciences. This involved getting something tangible accomplished. Perhaps, after all, in the push and pull of the scholarly life where indisputable avenues for establishing one’s mark are rare, this was where the science editor’s experiences meant the most.

8

Conclusion: Editors and Gatekeeping Today INTRODUCTION Scholarly journal editors operate within a complex system that buffets them about in a swirl of technology, bureaucracy, and group dynamics. Editors learn to adapt and thrive by assessing their individual skills and temperaments and matching them to the demands of the work. These adaptive steps include the ability to discern the nature of academic standards, the establishment of a relationship to manuscript submissions that allows for judicial and efficient processing, and the development of knowledge of a discipline and the scholars within it that allows an editor to know when to rely on colleagues and when to use his or her own judgment. This work investigated the experiences of thirty-five editors of scholarly journals. The basis of this research was an analysis of the editorial work that these people chose to undertake and their experiences of the work. I sought to gather data that reflected the individual story that each editor had to tell about how he or she entered editorial work, the meaning made of that work, and experiences of the changes occurring in the world of scholarly communication. From these personal stories I sorted and displayed the data to allow for an examination of my topics, each of which is summarized in this chapter. PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUNDS Establishing a sound reputation is the first thing these editors saw as crucial. This required knowing what accomplishments were valued by colleagues. After

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assimilating this knowledge, they had to have the passion and ambition to go out and do the things that would get them recognized. This kind of path leads to a paradox. While these editors all reported the value of becoming a ‘‘known quantity’’ in their respective fields, the data reveal numerous expressions of their surprise and reticence when offered editorial posts. It seems that these scholars had a mindset whereby they initially focused virtually all their career energy on scholarly work and let the rewards and achievements (i.e., editorial posts) come along as a matter of fate. Perhaps the role of editor is only a secondary career goal. Many faculty are likely to concentrate more on achieving the ranks of assistant, associate, and full professor. All individuals have their own goals, depending on where they see themselves in relation to the scholarly community. Coser’s model reinforces this idea (Coser, Kadushin, & Powell, 1982). He writes that the scholarly community defines for itself what is good and important. The editors whom I interviewed started out their careers with an understanding that the standards established by the scholarly community were legitimate and that playing by the rules would allow their careers to flourish. The identification and cultivation of mentors are also important here. The scholarly community is highly decentralized. As a result, junior scholars have a difficult time getting visibility. This is where mentors play a role. Professors at prestigious graduate programs can convey to their peers that a particular junior professor is a diligent and reliable colleague. This helps the junior scholar start on the road to becoming a known quantity. The dispersed nature of scholarship generates a value for the personal connections that a mentor can provide. These mentors provide a comfort level for established editors looking for sound editorial staff. The comfort comes when a trusted colleague recommends a new scholar. In this way, the established editor can cut through a mountain of names and feel confident about the recommended person. In addition, areas of uniquely personal development were uncovered in the data. One example is the necessity for many editors to assess their own temperament and how their particular personal background fits with editorial work. Two different camps emerged from the data. Nearly 40 percent of those with whom I spoke viewed much of the editorial work in terms of ‘‘petty detail,’’ where small bureaucratic decisions dominate the job. However, the remainder (over 60 percent) saw these rather small tasks in another light—as a kind of network reinforcement. It was through a series of regular, consistent contacts dealing with all areas of the journal that some editors gained a sense of the community of scholars, which they valued to a high degree. Coser used the term ‘‘level of immersion’’ to describe this phenomenon. Different people seek to place themselves at different depths within a community. Their temperament and their talents guide them to the location in which they will perform at their best. A second example of personal development that arose here is the development of scholarly dispassion about one’s own work and the work of others. The data show that this is a difficult task. There are numerous examples explaining how

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editors had to learn to view scholarship. One of the guiding principles that helped them has its roots in the Lewin model (1951). He wrote that one of the terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation involves the constituency. The editor as gatekeeper has to maintain an awareness of the various needs of the different camps in the group. It is this very focus on the readership that allows a beginning editor to learn to look beyond his or her personal perspective and incorporate the broader picture of the journal and its readership. Scholars have to take a personal inventory of their interests, skills, and temperament in order to assess their fitness for editorial work. The variety of tasks involved in the job demand this kind of self-scrutiny. Editors have both a deep commitment to scholarship and a connection to their discipline. These two forces drive them to pursue their work.

THE NATURE OF THE WORK The editors discussed the time devoted to various tasks in imprecise terms. Over half the editors could not account for the time spent on editorial work as distinguished from the variety of other tasks that are part of scholarly life. Perhaps this vague language tells us that they viewed scholarly work as a seamless whole, where all the duties run together. These people were scholars, and editorial work made demands on them that were little different from the other tasks they performed. Their regular duties of keeping up with the literature, reading students’ work, teaching classes, and maintaining contacts with colleagues were embodied in the roles that editorial positions asked them to play. They were, more or less, one and the same. However, fourteen of the thirty-five editors I interviewed spoke of dividing their work into small chunks of time. They accounted for the amount of work per week and time spent on specific tasks with great clarity. They typically said that one day per week was sufficient for their duties. For these editors, flexibility was the key. By looking at their multiple responsibilities in discrete terms, they were able to gain some measure of control over their work lives and could choose when to apply themselves to various tasks. Teaching, research, and service are the hallmarks of the scholarly life, and those who organize their work in small chunks have found for themselves a method of coping with the busy schedule. Reliance on staff took various forms in the data. Those editors who had a consistent staff presence at their disposal were often removed from the level of detail that Lewin described in his basic model of the gatekeeper. In the Lewin model, the gatekeeper passes judgment on the material that comes before him or her. Thus, the gatekeeper has the burden of liability for multiple responsibilities in arriving at a decision. However, some editors worked within structures that confounded the Lewin model. Their mindset allowed them to be removed from the judgmental role. Instead, for these editors, reflecting the sensibility of

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the discipline was paramount. Toward this end, they simply followed the recommendations of a majority of the reviewers. In this way, they were able to simplify the tasks before them while at the same time providing an avenue for sound research to be published. Editors who are also scholars have a tremendous workload. Approximately 25 percent of those whom I interviewed followed a strategy that allowed them to allocate time. In Chapter 3, I labeled this strategy ‘‘triage.’’ Here the editor must judge how much time he or she has to devote to a manuscript that contains some worthwhile ideas but has serious flaws that require major changes. The term ‘‘triage’’ is borrowed from emergency medicine and describes how an emergency care physician determines the sequence of patient care, in part by the potential for survival of each patient. Editors have only so much time in their day. Terrific work will go through the submission process unabated, and poor work will go through the rejection process rapidly. However, the work that falls in between these two extremes—and that comprises the majority of manuscript submissions—demands varied levels of attention. Some editors struggled with this problem on a regular basis. The bureaucratic mechanisms put in place by editors to guide the process of manuscript review and decision making varied widely. Some preferred a simple approach, whereby reviewers reports are simply tallied and the majority opinion rules the day. These individuals could be called ‘‘concept editors,’’ who allow the particulars of the manuscript, and of the job itself, to be handled by others. Concept editors do not concern themselves with the details of individual manuscripts. The editors I interviewed cited two features of this method. First, there is the problem of time. As some editors have multiple scholarly responsibilities, they cannot devote as much time as they would like to their editorial work. However, there is an interesting strand in the data that points to another reason for allowing the majority to rule in reviewing submissions: some editors experienced this method as reflecting the state of the discipline. By choosing reviewers from different points in the scholarly spectrum and letting their comments rule the day, the ultimate disposition of the manuscript should be much more reflective of the state of the discipline than if one person—the editor—was the final arbiter. I found concept editors to be more prevalent among the sciences than the social sciences. Perhaps this was a result of the larger staffs found at the science journals. The presence of others to handle the manuscript processing allowed the editor to take this stance. In sharp contrast, other editors took on the gatekeeping and judgmental responsibilities with enthusiasm. These could be called ‘‘detail editors.’’ For them, involvement with every level of manuscript processing was both a personal preference and a necessity arising from limited staff. They sent out manuscripts for review and then pored over the comments in great detail. This resulted in a detailed letter to each potential author about the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript. For detail editors, the data revealed an interest in controlling the direction of the journal. According to this scenario, the reputation of the journal

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(and, by association, the editor) is in the hands of those at the top. It would not do to allow the recommendations of the reviewers to play the paramount role. Many editors in this situation experienced the arbiter role as necessary to uphold standards. The individual at the top has to be accountable for what is published. Detail editors were more prevalent in the social sciences. Once again, levels of staffing most likely contributed to this phenomenon as social sciences editors generally had fewer personnel at their disposal than science editors. (This idea will be explored further in the section titled, ‘‘Two Worlds.’’) MAKING MEANING OF THE WORK When the editors were asked to express themselves through metaphor on how they made meaning of the work, the data revealed two important distinctions in the relationship between the editor and the content of the manuscript. Some editors related to the content purely in order to decide which reviewer would examine it, whereas others saw it as their duty to examine the content as an intellectual product both before and after the reviewers did their work. Lewin’s model tells us that this phenomenon involves the ‘‘cognitive structure’’ of the gatekeeper (i.e., the terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation). Some editors experienced the job as involving scrutinizing the content of the manuscript, while others applied themselves to the integrity of the process of manuscript evaluation. Some 20 percent of those whom I interviewed made meaning of their work by looking at it as a small part of the slow advancement of knowledge. They were not looking to make some great leap forward in knowledge. Rather, they experienced the work as building a structure, brick by brick, on which future generations would rely. There is a leap of faith involved in taking this position. These scholars placed their trust in the marketplace of ideas. They trusted that sound research would rise to the top and unsound research would disappear soon after its publication. The scholarly values maintained by colleagues are a key element here. The personal needs of the individual comprise the meaning made by some one-third of the editors. For these people, personal satisfaction was found on narrower terms than for the other editors. Being of service to the profession was a primary concern. This attitude helped them feel they were giving back to a field that had provided them with much. Simple gratitude was at work here. Many of the editors I interviewed recounted how fortunate they felt at being able to freely pursue their deepest interests. Consequently, their choice to become editors was experienced as a way to serve a profession that had already served them. Nearly all the editors made meaning from the intellectual material that came across their desks on a daily basis. They believed that ideas matter and that exchanging ideas with colleagues all over the world is important and (for some) simply enjoyable. This kind of stimulation was what motivated them. Editorial

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work was a life-enhancing undertaking. For those with this outlook, the Lewin model of constituencies and ideological camps has little meaning, for they did not look to others for meaning making. They were content to do the work because it filled a need that was personal. Lewin covers this territory in the portion of his model devoted to the motivation of the gatekeeper. This is not an outward-looking experience; rather, it is inward looking. Overcoming the isolation in scholarly life comprised much of the meaning making for some editors, who were stimulated by the process of seeking and finding like-minded people. This need has become more prevalent as academic specialization has led to increasing fragmentation among scholars. Thus, the connections established through the scholarly community become increasingly valued. It feels good to connect with other people who have walked the same trail of research, mastered the same paradigms, and are encountering the same research problems. The isolation of scholarship can be overcome through editorial work. Coser provides the most relevant model here. For him, the nature of the connections established in the scholarly world can simultaneously create an experience for editors and be created by editors. A half-dozen editors whom I interviewed found meaning in looking after the financial health of their journal. They were so devoted to the idea of scholarly communication that they placed their central focus on the economic picture. They were at the controls of a commercial enterprise. Regardless of whether their journal was part of the for-profit sector, some editors made meaning of their experience through this kind of lens. They also believed that the health of the paper-based journal might be in peril, as forces of all kinds have been working against it. Their responsibility was to look after the practical future of their journals, with a constant eye toward market issues. The roles of the readership, of library subscriptions, and of journal competition and proliferation held key importance for these editors. It is this realm that was the repository of meaning for them. THE INTERNET A journal’s ability to act as a galvanizing force to hold together a scholarly community is a crucial issue. Nearly all the editors with whom I spoke saw some inevitability in the process of fragmentation that the Internet encourages. This fragmentation is enhanced by the ease with which small subgroups of likeminded scholars can find each other on the Net. Having thus established contact, they are then able to promote their own brand of scholarship for a fraction of the cost and bureaucratic burdens, which had previously made such undertakings impossible. This can lead to isolation, where broad scholarship, targeted at a readership that spans many subfields, gets little attention. The Internet puts a premium on speed and distribution. Research results can be put on the Net literally as they happen, and distribution can cover anyone who has a computer and a phone line. However, some editors felt that speed and ease of distribution

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might not be the most nourishing elements for sound scholarship. In this new world, reflection and context may take a back seat. The data show concern that fads and attendant foundation funding may generate an excessive level of momentum in the new world of rapid communication. Taking time to pause and reflect on the long-term direction of a discipline may thus become more difficult in the future. The physical, finite nature of paper has played a subtle role in the nature of scholarly communication, which generated little examination until the Internet arrived. This revolution has empowered the would-be author by wresting some of the control from the gatekeeper. During the era when the gatekeeper/editor had sole control over what material got committed to paper in his or her journal, the potential author had few alternatives for distributing research. Everything was done on paper, and the widespread distribution of paper (i.e., journal subscriptions) was expensive and required a complex production organization. A single scholar simply could not match the levels of distribution that could be routinely accomplished by a journal. However, the Internet has started the tide turning in the direction of the individual author. Dissemination of research is cheap, thanks to the Web, which promises millions of readers by simply posting a document on a site. The gatekeeping functions under the Lewin model take on a different shade in this new world. Today, assessing the ‘‘cultural availability’’ of a manuscript may not be necessary as the manuscript no longer has to undergo scrutiny from the gatekeeper in order to be granted distribution. The readers who once used the office of the editor as a mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff will have to devise sifting mechanisms of their own. The data reflect that this is happening at some level already. Editors expressed uncertainty about the role of money in regard to the electronic journal. Sources of revenue have not yet been fully established, and the editors had experienced a great reluctance on the part of publishers and scholarly societies to jump into communicating via the Internet without a full understanding of how costs will be recovered. As a result, the editors expressed some divided loyalties. The Internet holds out the possibility for a scholarly utopia of sharing research with unlimited numbers of colleagues. However, that tantalizing prospect has a price. If publishers cannot generate an income stream from these new outlets, they will likely decline to participate, and the anarchy of the vanity publishing that has been building on the Internet may increase. For editors, the physical relationship to the text is an important element that can often be compromised by the electronic revolution. They spoke of the pleasures of ‘‘feeling a book in their hands’’ or ‘‘curling up somewhere’’ to do some reading. The physical nature of the computer, with its glass-covered monitor, its keyboard, and the accompanying humming noise, plays a large role for editors. Many experienced a degree of tedium in their work that could be traced back to the increasing use of computers in the production and consumption of research. The rise of the Internet and the computerization of research had cut

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into a source of pleasure for many. This problem occurred because editors experienced their scholarly work as necessarily transcending their simple proximity to a computer. The generation and examination of ideas is a mental and emotional process that goes on all day and night. The portability of paper and pencil aids in this endeavor. Ideas can be generated and honed anytime and anywhere, provided editors are free of the constraints of a microchip. The very craftsmanship of editorial work can be seen in the data as sensory issues are discussed. It is as if these editors were speaking of working with wood to create some kind of artifact. They wanted to feel the item in their hands, and they wanted a tool in their hands (i.e., a pencil) to hone and improve it. The editors comfort level with computers generally followed along with their identity as concept editors or detail editors. The detail editors experienced the greater level of chagrin in the face of the electronic revolution. Perhaps this revolves around the idea that, as detail-oriented gatekeepers, they valued the craft of honing the artifact (that is, the manuscript). This close relationship to the manuscript necessarily draws the detail editor into a close relationship to the medium in which the manuscript exists—the computer. The detail editors thus faced restrictions in their craft. For their part, concept editors experienced less change as their relationship to the manuscript was different. Thus, when the electronic revolution established its presence in the manuscript production process, concept editors already were so removed from the craft of honing the work that this had little impact on them. TWO WORLDS: THE SCIENCES AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES In this study, the journals in the sciences had larger, more professional staffs than those in the social sciences. This requires some further discussion concerning the difference between concept editors and detail editors. One consequence of the staffing pattern is that editors in the social sciences more often dealt with immediate issues of publication deadlines, reviewer delays, and correspondence with potential authors. There was a small, but noteworthy, trace of frustration in the comments from the social science editors that was not evident in the data from the sciences. Dealing with these issues provided them with experiences that occurred less frequently in the sciences. The Lewin framework illustrates some of these differences. He described the cognitive structure of the gatekeeper as being concerned with attracting authors, the needs of the constituencies, the aesthetics of the manuscripts, and other things that are the concern of an editor who feels the need, either out of necessity or from personal preference, to be involved in every aspect of the journal. The terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation revolve around these ideas. The second half of the Lewin model looks at the system of values that lies behind the gatekeeper’s choices. Editors in the sciences experienced editorial work as being at the service of the group. They saw their job as coordinating the flow of manuscripts from authors to reviewers and then into print. The

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paramount value for many editors in the sciences lay in placing the responsibility for the direction of the literature into the hands of the group as a whole. This idea carries forward in the data where we can see some editors in the social sciences taking on the role of a kind of supra-gatekeeper. Here they experienced editorial work as including the responsibility to look beyond the literature of their particular discipline in order to bring to the readership new perspectives from other fields. They wanted to bring to their constituencies things that might otherwise have been missed. This is the gatekeeper-as-leader. The gatekeeper in this model feels the need to influence and educate the readership. He or she experiences a responsibility to move the readership in one direction or another. For their part, editors in the sciences generally experienced the job in terms of personal needs. Many of them spoke of the notion that it simply was fun to do. Coser’s idea of level of immersion might be useful to explain some of this phenomenon. Coser suggested that there are those in scholarly publishing who do it almost exclusively for the enjoyment of the lifestyle—for its own sake. They like to read the incoming literature and to be in contact with bright people about important ideas. Even Coser’s language is illustrative here as ‘‘immersion’’ connotes being awash in a bath. These people experienced the work as being awash in the bath of the group and its ideas. When scholars expose themselves to new challenges by entering editorial work, they face some problems. There is a certain humility expressed in the data. These scholars were willing to be apprentices in editorial work. However, this was not always an easy task after they had gained expertise in their chosen discipline. The flexibility and desire to take on something new were evident throughout the data. Lewin urged us to look at the system of values that lie behind the gatekeeper’s choices. The discipline as a group allows individuals to embark on the kinds of career choices that editors make. These choices may result in early difficulties as young scholars adjust to the demands of teaching and research along with editorial work. Yet the culture of the group encourages people to take these risks. IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION Journal editors are at the center of scholarly communication. The kinds of choices they make can influence the professional lives of many different people within a discipline. On an individual level, would-be authors’ career paths can be affected. On a disciplinary level, whole new directions in research can be encouraged or ignored. The research presented here can be helpful to many different people in higher education. Potential authors may benefit from learning how editors operate and how best to present material. Department chairs and deans can gain an understanding of the demands made on editors. Perhaps those in authority could provide more staff and other bureaucratic support to editors. For their part, scholars contemplating a career move to an editorial post may

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also learn, from the results presented here, what the life is like. Moreover, college librarians may be able to glean some insight when they contemplate the role of the journal in scholarly communication and its place in the academic library. With all the changes involved in the electronic revolution, some difficult decisions will have to be made by librarians about where they spend the library’s money. Perhaps equally instructive for potential editors in academia is the seeming haphazard method by which many of these people came to their editorial positions. It seems that doing what one enjoys and working hard at it can lead to the building of a sound reputation. The reputation then attracts more and more invitations to participate in the discipline on a wider level, which in turn can lead to invitations to editorships. The experiences examined in this study reflect what happened for people in scholarly editorial positions. These editors recounted events in their professional lives. One of the more interesting examples emerging from this research involves the reticence so many expressed concerning the Internet. The importance of the tactile values that go hand-in-hand with craftsmanship and the honing of a manuscript should not go unrecognized. People want to have control over the medium and the pace at which they consume its fruits. The accelerated pace of Internet presentation has the potential to radically alter the nature of scholarly communication. The control mechanisms that once determined how new ideas were presented are undergoing enormous change. The journal editor as gatekeeper has been at the very center of those centuries-old mechanisms, but now that position is facing alteration. Scholarly communication in higher education may need gatekeepers more than ever before as the glut of information grows and the professoriate looks to find reliable filters as a guide to sound scholarship. SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH An important area for future research would be an examination of gender and racial diversity in relation to the experiences of journal editors. The crucial role of networks, circles, and mentors in establishing diversity could be examined. In light of the underrepresentation of women and people from minority groups in powerful positions in academia, it would be enlightening to see how scholars from these groups experience their journey into such positions. Coser’s notion of group identity may take on a new perspective in the light of data gathered from women and people of color. In a climate of ubiquitous glass ceilings and the attack on affirmative action, there is fertile ground here for study. Perhaps another fruitful area would be an examination of the experiences of people who formerly worked as editors. There is potential value in gleaning insights from those who withdrew from the role. This could provide information from a perspective opposite to what is contained in this study. Furthermore, an examination of editors from different types of higher education institutions could be valuable. I found most of the people I interviewed

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at major research institutions. However, some editors were located at smaller, doctorate-granting schools and some were located at four-year liberal arts colleges. Given the impact of staffing and bureaucratic support, which has been emphasized by this study, perhaps further investigation could be conducted on the nature of the employer institutions and how they may affect the experiences of editors. FINDINGS AND THEORY By placing the Lewin model of the psychology of the gatekeeper as a template over the data in this study, I was able to break it down into valuable categories. These constructions had a theoretical basis that allowed me to query the data in terms that would guide me to an understanding of the internal processes at work for these editors. The Lewin model stands up well against the findings of this study. Both sections of the model provided sound scaffolding on which to place the data. Part 1 of Lewin’s model looks at cognitive structure, examining the terms in which the gatekeeper thinks about his or her situation. Here the editors in this study provided varied experiences about the examination of manuscripts, the needs of the various ideological camps within their disciplines, the roles of new and old paradigms, the feeling of the overall culture of the group, and how ideas get expressed through the journal. The second half of the Lewin model looks at the motivation of the gatekeeper, which encompasses the system of values that lies behind the gatekeeper’s choices. Editors recounted numerous experiences wherein they had to consider the group values held by their particular subdiscipline and how that picture played into the decision-making process for manuscripts. Gatekeepers’ values also included promoting variety in the chosen manuscripts. Many of the editors I interviewed confirmed Lewin’s identification of the importance of variety in the gatekeeper’s consciousness as he or she goes about making choices. Perhaps less relevant in this study was Lewin’s notion that the gatekeeper has to take into account the textual obstacles to be overcome for a manuscript to pass muster. With the advent of all kinds of graphical software, little in the way of research results cannot be duplicated on a page or computer screen, and editors are even less likely to confront this issue as time goes on. To be sure, some of the editors I interviewed had experiences completely outside the Lewin gatekeeper model. For example, some editors rejected entirely the idea that they were in charge of any kind of mechanism to let in some material and keep out the rest. For them, the gatekeeper model placed them apart from their colleagues, whereas they experienced the editorial role as something that operates within a group. Editorial work for them involved interaction with colleagues. The gatekeeping model, so their experience told, contains a notion of hierarchy that was not present for them. They did not see themselves as especially qualified to judge the work of their peers. What they did was

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simply to coordinate the funneling of manuscripts and reviews to and from their colleagues. Once a manuscript went through this process, it was up to the community at large to come to their own conclusions about the soundness of the research. This leads us to look at the Coser model of networks and connections, which has a solid application throughout the topics covered in this study. The interview data on obtaining initial editorial positions early in one’s career are most applicable here. Establishing connections begins with the first day of graduate school as collegial relations are formed with other students. Quite often these relationships last a lifetime. In addition, the mentor relationships formed with faculty are also durable. Appointments and recommendations made by veteran scholars can start a junior scholar on the road to a solid career. As editors immerse themselves into editorial work, the data show that many experience this state as its own reward. In Chapter 4, on meaning making, most of the editors were quoted to the effect that the interaction with colleagues and the fun of being a part of the conversation about their discipline provided for them the most profound meaning. The Coser model emphasizes that editors who find meaning in this kind of experience are more likely to become exposed to, and therefore more able to garner, the latest high-quality research. Finding meaning in connections places an editor in the center of the informal communication network that develops in any circle. Coser noted that publishing is an external economy industry, where the raw material, in the form of manuscripts, comes from outside the enterprise. Therefore, the editor who is immersed in the proper scholarly circle will have ample opportunities to attract the latest and best research.

Selected Bibliography Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coser, L., Kadushin, C., & Powell, W. (1982). Books: The culture and commerce of publishing. New York: Basic Books. Cummings, A. M., Witte, M. L., Bowen, W. G., Lazarus, L. O., & Ekman, R. H. (1992). University libraries and scholarly communication: A study prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Washington, DC: Association for Research Libraries. Fry, B. M., & White, H. S. (1976). Publishers and libraries: A study of scholarly and research journals. Lexington, MA: Heath. Fyfe, J. J. (1994). Cops and robbers in academe: Editing Justice Quarterly. In R. J. Simon & J. J. Fyfe (Eds.), Editors as gatekeepers: Getting published in the social sciences. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfield, E. (1979). Citation indexing: Its theory and application in science, technology, and humanities. New York: Wiley. Getman, J. (1992). In the company of scholars: The struggle for the soul of higher education. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hamilton, D. P. (1990). Publishing by—and for?—the numbers. Science, 250, 1331– 1332. Hamilton, D. P. (1991). Research papers: Who’s uncited now. Science, 251, 25. Harcum, E. R., & Rosen, E. F. (1993). The gatekeepers of psychology: Evaluation of peer review by case history. Westport, CT: Praeger. Irizarry, E. (1994) Redundant and incremental publication. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 25, 212–220.

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Selected Bibliography

Jencks, C., & Riesman, D. (1968). The academic revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Kent, A., et al. (1979). Use of library materials: The University of Pittsburgh Study. New York: Dekker. Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. New York: Harper. Patterson, S. C. (1994). The itch to publish in political science. In R. J. Simon & J. J. Fyfe (Eds.), Editors as gatekeepers: Getting published in the social sciences. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sauer, J. S. (1990). Unused current issues: A predictor of unused bound volumes? The Serials Librarian, 18, 97–107. Schwartz, C. A. (1994). Scholarly communication as a loosely coupled system: Reassessing prospects for structural reform. College and Research Libraries, 55, 101– 117. Schwartz, C. A. (1997). The rise and fall of uncitedness. College and Research Libraries, 58, 19–29. Smith, A. (1976). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. (Rev. ed., edited by Edwin Cannan). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ulrich’s plus international periodicals directory [CD-ROM]. (annual). New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker. Webster’s new collegiate dictionary. (1976). Springfield, MA: G. and C. Merriam Company. Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1–19. White, H. (1990). Librarians, journal publishers and scholarly information: Whose leaky boat is sinking? LOGOS, 1, 18–23.

Index Anthropology editors: on cultures and networking, 88; on meaning making, 58, 119; on tasks of the job, 37, 107 Appointments to editorships, 18–20 Author relations, 38–42, 120 Background. See Reputation, personal; Reputation, professional Biology editors: on the Internet, 79; on meaning making, 118, 123; on starting out, 29 Chemistry editors: on cultures and networking, 89, 91; on the Internet, 68; on meaning making, 117; on starting out, 17; on tasks of the job, 110 Collegial community, 14–15, 21–22, 24– 25, 54, 59–62, 99–104, 119–21, 132 Commercial considerations, 62–66, 76, 78– 81 Computer science editors, on meaning making, 62 Concept editors, 130–31, 134 Constructivism, 51

Contributing to knowledge, 54–55, 122– 23, 131 Conventional paper journals, attributes of, 81–85 Conversation, definition of, 121 Coser model, 2, 6–7, 107; community relationships, 21, 26, 93, 117, 136, 138; external commodity industry, 7, 24, 102, 138; immersion in a community, 24, 75, 118, 121, 128, 135; scholarly community establishing norms, 15, 75, 97, 101, 104–5, 128, 132 Creativity, 39 Detail editors, 130–31, 134 Dispassion. See Objectivity Division of labor, 35–38, 108–11, 129–30 Earth science editors, on meaning making, 50, 51 Economics editors: on cultures and networking, 88, 93, 95–96, 100, 104; on the Internet, 68, 70, 76, 81; on

142 meaning making, 50, 54, 63; on starting out, 14, 17–19, 23, 27, 29, 111, 113; on tasks of the job, 32–33, 41–42, 44 Editorial boards, 14, 18–19, 20, 22–23, 33, 47, 50, 64, 97, 108, 115, 117 Editorial work as a craft, 83–85, 133–34 Editors and higher education, 135–36 Electronic journals, 9, 81–85 External economy industry, 7, 24, 102, 138 Fragmentation of disciplines, 73–76 Gatekeeping on the Internet, 72–73, 136 Geography editors: on cultures and networking, 90; on the Internet, 69; on meaning making, 59; on starting out, 14, 16, 22, 26–27; on tasks of the job, 38, 41, 45, 47, 109 Geology editors, on starting out, 18 Geophysics editors: on the Internet, 71; on meaning making, 60, 122–23 Hero myth and the scholar, 2–3 History editors: on cultures and networking, 92, 98, 101, 105; on the Internet, 69, 74, 82, 84; on meaning making, 54, 57, 63, 65, 119–20; on starting out, 14, 18, 27, 108–9, 113, 115; on tasks of the job, 31–32, 34–36, 38, 41, 43, 46–47 History-of-science editors: on the Internet, 75; on starting out, 22; on tasks of the job, 40 Ideological conflict, 25–26, 28–29, 47, 52– 53, 95–97, 114–16 Individual and the gatekeepers, 2–5 Information glut, 69–71 Intellectual stimulation, 40, 50, 52, 54, 56– 59, 60–61, 115–24, 131–32, 135 Internet: and authors, 2, 132–34; as change agent, 3–4, 68–73, 132; and economics, 76–81, 133; and peer review, 72–73, 132–33; and research presentation, 68–69, 132–34

Index Journal identity, 46–48 Journal proliferation, 4–5, 8, 95–106 Journal usage studies, 9 Lewin model, 6–7, 37, 107, 137–38; accepting variety, 59; cognitive structure of the gatekeeper, 53, 72, 109, 111, 114, 131, 134; constituencies, 72–73, 129, 132; cultural availability, 68, 72; data rejecting the model, 42; group values, 80, 110, 119, 134–35; meaning of the situation, 73; motivation of the gatekeeper, 52, 62, 110, 114; obstacles in accepting material, 35, 73 Liberation from print, 67–73 Library subscriptions, 64–66, 77–78 Manuscripts: poor writing, 40–41; rejection of, 25–28, 39–40; selection of, 38–48, 130 Mathematics editors: on cultures and networking, 94; on the Internet, 74, 77– 78; on meaning making, 55, 122; on tasks of the job, 42, 109 Mentors, 20–21, 128 Metaphor for editorial work, 49–54 Motivation in taking on the role, 114–19 Networking, 14–15, 18, 92–95, 132 New paradigms emerging, 95–99 Objectivity, 24–30, 128–29 Oceanography editors: on the Internet, 79, 83; on meaning making, 58; on tasks of the job, 34, 44, 118 Peer review, 17, 23–26, 38, 42–48, 69– 74, 110 Personal fulfillment, 55–59 Personal reputation, 13–18, 91 Physics editors: on cultures and networking, 90–91, 94, 97, 99–100, 102; on the Internet, 70–72, 78–79, 81– 84; on meaning making, 51–52, 56–58, 60–61, 116–17, 122; on starting out, 16–17, 22–23, 25, 28; on tasks of the job, 32, 35, 37, 39, 41–42, 44–45, 109– 10, 112–13

Index Political science editors: on cultures and networking, 92–93, 98, 101, 103; on the Internet 82; on meaning making, 50, 60–61, 121; on tasks of the job, 36, 40, 46, 108 Psychology editors: on cultures and networking, 87, 89, 96–97, 102–4; on the Internet, 68, 76–77; on meaning making, 43, 45, 55, 57, 61, 64, 66; on starting out, 14–15, 17, 21, 24, 26–29; on tasks of the job, 33, 35, 39, 108, 112, 114–15 Publish or perish. See Journal proliferation Publishers, 76–80, 107–11 Referees. See Reviewers Relations with colleagues, 59–62, 121–22 Reputation, personal: of reviewers, 89, 91– 94, 112; of scholars, 15–19, 26, 28, 39, 55–56, 60 Reputation, professional, 2, 4, 13–18, 21, 46–47, 59, 87–88, 90–91, 102, 124, 127–29

143 Reviewers: performance, 17; role, 43–46; selection of, 87–95 Revisions, 23–30, 36–42, 44–45, 88, 112 Reward structure for scholars, 3–5, 13– 15, 19, 75, 97–106, 124 Scholarship, poorly done, 69–72, 74. See also Manuscripts, poor writing Social science editors: on starting out, 26 Sociology editors: on starting out, 20, 113; on tasks of the job, 40 Staff levels, 34–38, 107–11, 130, 134–35 Supra-gatekeeper, 115–16, 135 Tactile values and paper, 81–85 Temperament, 21–24, 33, 111–14, 116– 17, 128 Tenure, 4, 98–106, 124 Theoretical foundations, 6–7 Time on tasks, 31–34, 129–30 Triage, 38–42 Uncitedness, 9

About the Author STEPHEN McGINTY is the Collection Development Librarian at Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts.