Keith S. Taber
My first thought was that I did not recognise the journal title, so whatever I did for them as part of an editorial board, it could not have been much, or very often!
Have you ever wondered about those lists of academics on journal sites under the heading 'Editorial Board'? Sometimes the list is of a dozen or so names: but sometimes a great many more. A journal usually has one, or more, editors who make the key decisions about what gets published, and submissions are (supposedly at least) sent to specialist expert peer reviewers for reports to advise the editor. So, what does an editorial board actually do?
This question was brought to mind recently when I received an email asking me to provide information about what my duties were as an editorial board member for the journal AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation. The request came from an officer of the Directory of Open Access Journals:
Have I been fulfilling my role as an Editorial Board member of the journal AMPLITUDO?
Open Access journals are those that anyone with an internet connection can freely read without having to pay a fee or subscription (as an individual, or as a member of a subscribing university, etc.) or having a membership in an associated society. In principle, open access is great as it means knowledge is not restricted to those who can pay.
Unfortunately there are costs to running a journal and someone has to pay. There are probably four basic revenue streams:
- advertising (although academic articles are not the best 'click-bait')
- charging readers
- sponsorship
- charging authors
Sponsors might be learned societies such as the Royal Society of Chemistry (e.g., Chemistry Education Research and Practice "is published free of charge electronically four times a year, thanks to sponsorship by the Royal Society of Chemistry's Education Division."), or universities (e.g., "the publication costs for Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research are covered by Beijing Normal University so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge") or a government (e.g., "The Center for Educational Policy Studies Journal is published with the support of the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency").
Where journals are not sponsored, and are open access, authors are asked to pay for publication. Fees may be very modest and reflect costs (a few tens of $US), but may be in the hundreds or even thousands or dollars/pounds. The move to more open access is a move from restricting the reading of research to those with means, to restricting the publication of research to those who can pay, which can be an issue for independent researchers without grants for research, and must act against academics in some developing countries (Taber, 2013).
A bigger issue, however, is the importance of publication to academic careers, which means that those seeking university posts, or seeking 'tenure' (in those countries that initially appoint lecturers without permanent posts), or seeking promotion, have a very strong motivation to get published, and to be seen to have full publication lists.
Now, even if it was not 'always such', this is certainly nothing new. But when the journal charges readers, it only needs to publish enough articles for decently populated issues, and there is no pressure to accept substandard work if a journal has a healthy flow of submissions. It is not an issue for open access journals which are genuinely motivated by scholarly aims either – after all, publishing competent and useful work will produce enough income to keep a serious journal going as long as it has a decent reputation and the field is not over saturated with journals.
However, many purely commercial operations now publish many journals, all claiming rigorous peer review of submissions to check on article quality, but some of which will happily publish shoddy work, or in some cases any old nonsense, as long as the fee is paid. If the production and overhead costs are, say, £30 per published article, and you charge £100 for publication (and in some cases add an extra fee for the assignment of a doi reference which should be standard) then you can make a decent profit by accepting poor science, crackpot theories, or egotistical musings. I have highlighted various examples on this site – including the publications of Dr Rahul Hajare who made it so obvious the work being submitted was not to be taken seriously that it is very hard to see how anyone at the journals concerned could have read his work (or even some of the titles) before publication, e.g.:
- An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India (published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Current Research – but ALSO published in Petroleum and Chemical Industry International; AND also published in Current Trends in Gastroenterology and Hepatology)
- Facial Recognition Technology and Detection of Over Sexuality in Private Organizations Combined with Shelter House. Baseline Integrated Behavioural and Biological Assessment among Most at-Risk Low Standards Hope Less Institutions in Pune, India (published in Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatology)
- Detection of Progression over Sexuality in Indian Students and Teachers Combined (published in Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function)
- Guessing Game And Poor Quality Teaching Staffs Study Of Less Sunlight Private Pharmacy Institution In Pune University (published in Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research)
- Why Black Died by White Study of Totally Less Sunlight Pharmacy Institutions in Indian University India (published in the Journal of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Studies & Reports).
- Non-Medical Basis Characterization of Orgasm Associated with Approach Sex Can Last Up to 20 Seconds to 15 Minutes, Eligible Women Individuals' Poor Transportation Facility of Private Pharmacy Institutions in Pune, India (published in Advances in Neurology and Neuroscience)
- Scientology applied to the workday of women feels just as good as sex: Non clinical examination of less sunlight habit Pharmacy Institute in Pune University (published in the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders)
- Doggy Style Sex Distorts the Appearance of Face (published in Current Trends in Gastroenterology and Hepatology)
- and many more!
Not only are many of these titles nonsensical, most clearly have very little to do with the supposed topics of the journals that published them. And most touch on 'sensitive issues' where special editorial care might have been expected. But, presumably, Dr Hajare had funds from his employer (The Indian Council of Medical Research, apparently) to pay for publications.
Those who are already established in a field will likely know which journals have a strong reputation (e.g., Where is the best place to publish science education research?), but new researchers may be taken in by professionally presented but low-quality journals with impressive names; and how are those outside the field, such as school children undertaking projects, supposed to know which journals are careful about what is published?
Anyway, given the large number of predatory journals now flooding the internet, it is good that there are organisations looking to offer quality 'kite marks' for those new journals that are making a decent effort to do a good job of publishing quality work, rather than just looking to maximise income and publish any old nonsense.
So what do Editorial Boards do?
I have been on a number of Editorial Boards over the years, and they are all different. There seem to be four main types of qualification /role for these boards that apply to different degrees:
- peer review
- strategic advice
- oversight
- status
Peer review
Expert reviewers are essential to quality assurance in academic publishing. However the role of the reviewer (advising on the merits and any changes needed for specific submissions) is distinct from that of an editorial board member. Yet sometimes being a regular reviewer for a journal with a reputation for returning detailed and useful reports may be seen as a potential qualification for Board membership.
Some journals specify that Board members will be expected to review occasionally (though reviews need to be assigned based on a fit with the topic/perspective/approach of a research report, so board members should not be assigned manuscripts on any kind of quota basis).
Strategic advice
Editors will expect the editorial board to offer general advice about the development of the journal. An example might be about suggesting topics and guest editors for special/theme issues. The Board is made up of senior academics in the field who should be well placed to advise on such broad matters. Other such issues might be changes in relation to sections (that is, having internal topics or themes within a journal), or types of article (e.g., should a book review section be added?)
Oversight
Going beyond advice, the Editorial Board may be seen to actually stand above the editor as having lead responsibility for the journal's quality and direction. Board meetings may include papers submitted to the Board about aspects of journal performance (numbers of submissions, countries of origin, acceptance rates, times to publication, etc.) and the managing editor (someone who is not involved in individual editorial decisions but manages the business aspects of the journal) and editor/editor-in-chief may each be expected to make a report. When this approach is taken there is usually a Chair of the Editorial Board (who is not an editor) who runs the Board meeting and may be involved in discussions about issues arising between meetings.
Status
One of the indicators of high status of a journal is that it has an editorial board made up of well-respected academics who are widely seen as leading scholars in the field concerned. If these people are prepared to be associated with the journal, it offers one sign for junior academics that this is a serious journal which should have high standards.
Being on an Editorial Board (of a decent journal) also potentially offers status to members. This creates an interesting tension in that the journal will likely want to recruit the academics in the field with the greatest reputations who are normally senior, well-established academics (likely already having several such roles and little time for more), but the people with most to gain by Board membership are academics who are still establishing their reputations and know such an appointment will look good on their next application for a more senior post. Senior academics on the Board suggest a journal is high status: membership of an editorial board of a good journal suggests an academic has a strong reputation as a scholar.
A senior academic, recognised as a leader in a field, may still think it is is worth accepting an invitation from a top journal, but is unlikely to feel they want to commit time and effort getting involved in less established journals, unless they see this as an opportunity to mentor (for example to support scholarship in national contexts developing expertise in a field).
Invitations to Editorial Boards
In a sane scholarly world, an academic invited to join the editorial board of a journal should expect the invitation to be from a journal in her/his field where they are in a position to usefully advise the journal. In the current world of a multitude of open access journals, including many predatory journals, this need not be so.
I have had many invitation to join boards of journals I know nothing about. Sometimes these seem totally random: indeed, sometimes an invitation to join the board, on reading further, morphs into an invitation to fill in a form to be considered for Board membership. Presumably (but who knows) at that stage the journal filters out those who clearly know nothing the about the particular field.
Reading between the lines:
I am inviting you to join the editorial board of the new Journal of Virtual Jovian Robotics and Inverse Implicit Hermeneutics because your email address was on a list of contact details of arbitrary academics that I bought. If you are interested, please send me a copy of your c.v. so I can find out who you are and what you do.
Sometimes the invitation is based on some modest familiarity with your work – but that means little when the person inviting you to join the Board either does not know anything about the field themselves, or simply does not care. So, I was invited " to join the Editorial Board of Medical Imaging Process & Technology…" because I was the lead author of a study that explored learners' misconceptions about ionic bonding in England, Greece and Turkey (Taber, Tsaparlis & Nakiboğlu, 2012) – which obviously makes me qualified to advise a journal concerned with medical imaging.
What was my role at AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation
But these thoughts were triggered by the request for information about my editorial board duties in relation to the journal AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation.
My first thought was that I did not recognise the journal title, so whatever I did for them, it could not have been much, or very often!
But I am very aware that memory is not always reliable, so I checked my email folder for editorial work just to see if there was a subfolder for this journal that I had somehow forgotten. No.
But I do not always file email as I should, so I did a whole system search of my university email account – and found no record of any communications about this journal.
I wondered if the email from the the Directory of Open Access Journals was genuine as (like most people I expect) I get various scam emails daily. But the link in the email sent me to a journal page which did indeed show me listed as part of the editorial board of AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation.
It seems I was an editorial board member of Amplitudo!
Was there an innocent explanation? It seemed the journal was based at the University of Mataram, Indonesia; and "The publication fee is $35…This cost used for journal printing, journal website maintenance, and indexing machines". I had made a virtual contribution to a conference at that University (Going round and round in circles: Scaffolding learning in science) and I could see myself being open to being associated with a journal that was seeking to make publication affordable for academics. Had I agreed to this? Despite the title, the journal did seem to publish science education work. Perhaps the journal title had been changed after I was asked?
I could find absolutely no evidence of any agreement to join the Board, but – even so – wished to give the 'benefit of the doubt' if possible – as otherwise this seemed to be serious academic malpractice of misappropriating my name and the University of Cambridge affiliation.
I wrote to the editor-in-chief and copied the message to the managing editor.
I do not recall having agreed to this role, and can find no prior correspondence in my records relating to this journal. … Please could you remind me, by sending me a copy of my agreement, when I offered to take up this role
This would give an opportunity for the journal editor to 'remind' me, or more likely explain if there had been some sort of mix up – or indeed to find out if Prof. Susilawati and Prof. Aris Doyan of the University of Mataram were not implicated, but were also having their identities used fraudulently and knew nothing of the malpractice by the journal.
I waited ten days, and then not having received any kind of response from Profs. Susilawati or Doyan, replied to the Directory of Open Access Journals along the lines:
"I was not familiar with the journal 'AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation' and had not been aware that I was named as a board member before receiving your enquiry. I could not find any prior correspondence relating to this journal in my files. I sought to contact the journal (on 2nd August) in case there was a viable explanation, but have not had yet any reply."
I see today that my name has been removed as an Editorial Board member of AMPLITUDO: Journal of Science & Technology Innovation.* I would be interested to know if the journal offered the Directory of Open Access Journals any explanation of why they were using my name without my agreement (or even notifying me).
I am also interested to see if this level of academic malpractice will be sufficient for the Directory of Open Access Journals to decline the journal for inclusion in its lists of approved journals.
And what about Todd?
* Although my name had been removed from the editorial board, I saw that "David Todd Campbell, University of Connecticut, United States" was still a member. I had wondered if that was another creative membership listing**. I soon found that Prof. Todd Campbell was currently head of Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Connecticut, where he's a professor of science education.
I also found that Prof. Campbell has the role of 'Editorial Advisory Regional America' for another journal, the Journal of Science and Science Education which has Prof. Aris Doyan as Editor in Chief **. Oh, and they also have someone listed as their 'Editorial Advisory Regional Europe'…
… and I did not know about that 'appointment' either!
Update (19th August 2024)
** Prof. Campbel informs me that he has no involvement in these journals and was unaware that his name and university affiliation were being used in this way.
Read about the behaviour of predatory journals
Read about selecting a research journal to submit to
Work cited:
Taber, K. S. (2013, 29th November). Challenges to academic publishing from the demand for instant open access to research [published in Chinese translation]. Chinese Social Sciences Today, A06.
[Download article (with English text)]
Taber, K. S. (2022) Going round and round in circles: Scaffolding learning in science, Keynote presentation for the 2nd International Conference of Science Physics and Education, Physics Education Department, University of Mataram, Indonesia.
Taber, K. S., Tsaparlis, G., & Nakiboğlu, C. (2012). Student Conceptions of Ionic Bonding: Patterns of thinking across three European contexts. International Journal of Science Education,34(18), 2843-2873. doi: 10.1080/09500693.2012.656150. [Download article]
