Ponderings on Journal Editing

DALL-E created image. prompt: A baroque painting that shows a young journal editor who is considering taking over the editorial management of an academic journal. He isn't sure if he should do it but really wants to do it, even though be might not have a lot of support

Part II of my 2024 academic wayfinding ponderings! 🎓🤔

If you remember my last post of 2023, you probably remember that perhaps the thing that's been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth has been the CIEE journal (Current Issues in Emerging eLearning).  This is a journal that I co-founded with my friend and colleague Alan Girelli back in the day (in 2012-2013, if I remember correctly).

At the time, Alan was the director for the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning (CIEE), which was part of our College of Advancing and Professional Studies. The idea behind the center was to foster innovation on research (across the UMass Campuses), and to provide venues for the dissemination of knowledge.  The center was the brainchild of the CAPS Dean.  Alan arranged for a variety of events over the years, including events on MOOCs, learning analytics, active learning, and so on. The journal on his end was also a means to this end. At the same time, I had this crazy idea that now that our university had a publishing venue that we supported (BePress/ScholarWorks), we should create a journal to foster the dissemination of student research, as it pertained to teaching and learning. Along this line, we could also have special issues where we could publish conference proceedings for UMass-related teaching and learning conferences, which was done by another journal back in the 2000-2010 period, but they stepped back from this commitment at some point. These days we'd call this particular field SoTL.

In any case, Alan's goals and mine aligned, so we started the journal. Along the way, austerity hit our campus, different campus politics occurred, and the College of Advancing and Professional Studies was no more. This was around 2018 (if I remember correctly).  Fellow colleagues from that unit, including Alan, basically either found another position on campus or they left (or retired).  The Center (CIEE) was no also more, as it didn't get moved to another college, and Centers more broadly were victims of campus austerity politics in that they had to be self-sufficient or close.  However, the journal (CIEE-J) kept going due to Alan's willpower to keep it going; and it hobbled along until the pandemic really messed with the gentle balance of keeping the journal going as a volunteer endeavor. I had also taken a "sabbatical" from the journal to focus on my dissertation around 2016 (so I watched most of this from the sidelines), and it was my intent to return to it after I graduated with my EdD, but by the time I was done, the journal was on life support.

Over the past few years, I've attempted to mingle the journal with other things so I can take care of two birds with one stone, but those stars have never truly aligned, so taking over the journal had been back-burnered. Over the summer, I arrived at the conclusion that it's best to let sleeping dogs journals lie. 

While I do still believe there is a place in this world for CIEE-J, doing so as a hobby is most likely going to bite into a lot of my free time. I may have been a good editor, had I taken it on, but looking at it from a gains/drains perspective, running a journal is all drain, no gain.  There's no money in it (not that we do things strictly for money, but there are other things that do pay for my time), and there is no acknowledgment of the work done as part of my regular work; for example, faculty tend to get service-to-the-profession brownie points for doing such work, whereas this isn't the case for non-faculty work.  In trying to do all the things over the past five years, I think I've come to the realization that I need to not only pare down the extra-curricular work (the work outside of my regular hours), but also not take on additional roles.  Sadly, this means that a thing I helped create, is now a vestige of the past 🫤.

Anyone out there got any wisdom to share?

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