Dear Umut,

Thanks for your suggestion. While it seems reasonable at first glance, there are serious challenges to overcome in implementing such a model. One set of challenges involves editing. The other set involves reviewing. 

It is hard to imagine distributing editorial work amongst authors. There are two reasons for this. First, editorial work requires experience and expertise. It takes many years to develop the background knowledge and skills required of an editor. This is a specific set of skills. It is distinct from the skills required for research. The second reason is continuity and smooth management of workflow. Editing a journal is a continuous day-by-day process. The editorial team works together to ensure smooth work flow, and the work flow of a journal may involve several hundred manuscripts in different stages of development. Editing and managing a serious journal involves several people working on a nearly daily basis to handle the editorial process. It would be difficult to distribute this process across a network of occasional volunteers drawn from the author base. While costs are an issue, editing and editorial management is a matter of quality. 

On the reviewing side, drawing on authors who volunteer to review also raises quality problems. A good journal usually has a large pool of reviewers — in addition to calling on expert editors and advisors for some reviews, we have over four hundred ad hoc reviewers. A strong journal needs many reviewers because writing serious value-added reviews for different kinds of articles requires different kinds of reviewers. Subject field, discipline expertise, professional experience, and methodological expertise all play a role in the kind of review that one can deliver. Reviewers advise editors — this is far more than a matter of accepting or rejecting an article, and it often involves helping and advising authors. 

In some cases, editors choose reviewers for additional reasons. For example, we are now reviewing a potentially brilliant but highly speculative article that is quite promising, yet poorly developed. The article proposes a design solution to a serious contemporary problem. Even before sending the article out for formal review, we asked one reviewer to give her opinion on the background science and the likely possibility of the proposed solutions. She reported back that the background science is solid, while the proposed solutions are speculative but worth considering. Then we asked her whether she felt that she could help the author develop the article so that it reaches publishing standard. She agreed to do so, knowing that this review involves much more work than the average review. 

In another case, we had a serious article involve a highly advanced research method in a field where we lack reviewers. We reached out to a specialist who read the article, even though we knew that he is too busy to review it. He was kind enough to offer informal advice, and then to help us find two well qualified reviewers. 

Reviewing involve dozens of issues that involve both the expertise of the reviewers, and the expertise of editors in choosing reviewers and managing the review process.   

The system you suggest cannot address these at an adequate level for a serious journal.

Two excellent books cover these aspects of editorial work. 

Opening the Black Box of Editorship examines what it is that editors do, the issues that attend different kinds of editorial responsibilities, the issues involved in editing different kinds of journals, and the ways to address many of these challenges and problems.   

Baruch, Yehuda, Alison M. Konrad, Herman Aguinis, and William H. Starbuck. 2008. Opening the Black Box of Editorship. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The “look inside” feature of Amazon allows you to get an overview of these issues and to sample some of the content:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Opening-Black-Editorship-Yehuda-Baruch/dp/0230013600

https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Black-Box-Editorship-Baruch/dp/0230013600

Irene Hames’s book Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice describes the nuts and bolts of taking a manuscript through peer review, and discusses the requirements of a solid peer review process.

Hames, Irene. 2007. Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice. Oxford, and Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing in association with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers ( https://www.alpsp.org ).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Review-Manuscript-Management-Scientific-Journals/dp/1405131594

https://www.amazon.com/Review-Manuscript-Management-Scientific-Journals/dp/1405131594

While I understand the apparent benefits of the kind of service model you propose, the practical details become a problem. Some services require expertise — I can make many of the minor adjustments that a MacBook computer user generally knows how to do, but I must call Apple Support several times a year to solve problems that are beyond me. I would not trust medical care or dental care to a volunteer service network. 

Editorial work and peer review work involve a great deal more than reading manuscripts and offering opinions. The goal of scientific and learned journals is to publish expert information at a high level of quality. Even with all the skill and expertise that editors and reviewers can muster, using care and due diligence, journals still publish mistaken material. The virtue of the processes that most journals use is that we slowly catch our own mistakes, correct them, and in this way create progress in the knowledge of the fields that we represent. 

To some degree, this is based on a great deal of volunteer service by editorial board members and reviewers. What makes it work is that a core editorial and publishing staff coordinates and manages the process.

Yours,

Ken   

Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

—

Umut Burcu Yurtsever wrote:

—snip—

Thank you all for the valuable discussions (that regretfully I have not
been contributing to) so far.

In a recent conference experience (Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities)
I came across with a system where authors review each other. It might sound
obsolete in a conference system where attendance fees can easily compensate
editorial work. Is is also naive to suggest such a co-operative system for
journalism?

I agree that service to the community should be taken as part of the
university work. Provided this, an open access journalism, where the
accepted authors contribute to the reviewing and other editorial works,
sounds very “right” for me. Rather than paying for publishing or accessing
the papers, as in a business model, but working for each other and
transforming the whole structure into a “service” model other than
“business”, how does that “dream” sound to you?

—snip—


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