The ties that (no longer) bind

Editors come and editors go. This one is going. As you read these words I will have one foot out the (virtual) door; as I write them I have no idea who my successor as Editor-in-Chief of JASIST will be; that decision rests with the board of the parent organization, ASIST. Although I originally agreed to serve a second five-year term as E-in-C, I now feel that I may have bitten off more than I actually want to chew. After editing JASIST for 7 years and ARIST (Annual Review of Information Science and Technology) for 10, some of the fun, not surprisingly perhaps, has gone out of the job. The workload associated with editing the Journal continues to increase, as indeed do the demands and expectations of the authors with whom one interacts on a daily basis. I doubt, though, that JASIST is exceptional in either regard. JASIST is a small journal alongside, say, Nature, PLOSONE, or PNAS, but compared with its peers in the broad, if somewhat amorphous, information field it is one of the very largest (12 issues per year with a combined page budget of 2,600). It is also widely held to be the premier journal in the field and it is indisputably the one with the widest subject coverage, two factors that make the role of editor especially rewarding. As E-in-C I deskreview every research article, brief communication and Letter that is submitted. (The associate editor for Advances in Information Science [Jonathan Furner] and the associate editor for Book Reviews [Dietmar Wolfram] independently handle all aspects of the workflow for materials relating to their respective bailiwicks.) In addition, I routinely receive unsolicited abstracts and drafts of manuscripts from authors wondering about their potential suitability. When these informal queries are combined with all the formal submissions (i.e., manuscripts uploaded via the ScholarOne platform), the total can’t be too far short of 1,000 in any given year Currently, I desk reject 60% of all submissions, a number that probably should be higher. Given the very wide spectrum of topics that JASIST covers, an E-in-C would have to be near omniscient to not make either a Type I or Type II error when it comes to rejecting/accepting a good/bad paper: the more general a journal’s coverage, the greater the scope for editorial error. If my successor were to ask for one piece of advice I’d suggest that they put in place a structure with a number of fully engaged associate/senior associate editors, each of whom would be allocated a set of domains and responsibly for manuscript solicitation and oversight of the peer review process in these areas. This sort of approach is used by many journals (e.g., Transaction on Information Systems) and would not only alleviate the burden on the E-in-C but, more importantly perhaps, allow hand-picked associate editors to use their domain expertise to good effect, not only in making preliminary evaluations of manuscripts but also in drawing upon their professional networks to secure high-quality referees. At this point in its evolution JASIST probably needs greater distribution of editorial responsibilities and greater delegation of decision-making authority. JASIST is no longer a predominantly North American journal; less than half of all submitted manuscripts come from Canada, the UK and the USA combined, and that number will likely continue to decrease. It is also far from the case that English is the first language of a majority of the Journal’s authors. A quick scan of a random Table of