Special issues of journals are not what they used to be
Keith S. Taber
If I just consider those where the deadline is TODAY, [what] I find…covers much of the field of education just in the scope of special issues closing today!
Dear Andrei
Thank you for your message.
I did receive your mail. Unlike most of the invitations I get these days I was pleasantly surprised that it did actually relate to an area where I had some expertise. As I have plenty of ongoing projects I was not seeking another one, and I have some reservations in editing for a journal which would charge authors to publish. I appreciate that publishing is not a charity, but academic publishing is in a strange place as Open-Access slowly becomes the norm, but many scholars are not automatically supported in paying publication fees. Whilst there are still many high quality, well-established, journals in Education that do not charge authors publication fees, I would not wish to be allowing my name to be used to encourage authors to submit to a journal that charges authors about £1200 to publish their work.
However, I was intrigued enough to do some due diligence by checking out your website.
I found that 'education sciences' has a rather different take on special issues than I was used to.
When I was a journal editor (incidentally for a journal sponsored by a learned society, so it does not charge authors or readers), we used to have one themed issue per year, and made a big thing of it. We also chose topics very carefully so as not to repeat or strongly overlap with previous themes.
On your website I find that special issues are not so special.
You have a vast number of calls for papers for special issues. If I just consider those where the deadline is TODAY, I find
- Languages and Literacies in Science Education
- Building Resilience of Children and Youth with Disabilities: New Perspectives
- Advances in Learning and Teaching in Medical Education
- Opportunities and Limitations of Using E-learning in School and Academic Education
- Education Technology and Literacies: State of the Art
- Active Methodologies and Educative Resources Mediated by Technology
- Educational Effectiveness and Improvement – Research, Policy and Practice from the UK, the USA, China and across the World
- Groundings for Knowledge That Informs Education, Schooling and Teacher Preparation
- Educational Technology's Influence in Higher Education Teaching and Learning
- Inclusion and Disability: Perspectives on Theory, Research, and Practice
- Educational Research and Innovation in the First Global Catastrophe of the 21st Century: Committed to Education
- Learning Space and Environment of Early Childhood Education
- Philosophy of Education Today: Diagnostics, Prognostics, Therapeutics and Pandemics
- Migrant Integration in Schools: Policies and Practices
- Health Professions Education & Integrated Learning
- Transition to Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities
That covers much of the field of education just in the scope of special issues closing today!
And then there is another large tranche with deadlines in July.
And another with deadlines in August.
And so on.
I am not suggesting there is anything inappropriate here, but these are hardly 'special' issues. They are themes that are used to encourage submissions, with individual articles published when ready (as open calls already have published papers) and then linked. But they do not comprise discrete issues of the journal. I see that quite a few of the closed special issues only included 5 papers, which surely reflects the sheer range of themes being pushed at once. (I did not immediately see any closed special issues with less than 5 articles, so I wonder if deadlines are extended to you have that minimum number of papers accepted?)
So, even if I had been tempted at this time to edit a special issue of a journal, it would have to be a special issue that was considerably more special than this.
Best wishes
Keith
