Selections from Bonnie Wheeler’s 2008 CELJ/MLA Presidential Address

I want to address a couple of recurrent questions that have come to my attention as president of CELJ over the past 2 years—questions that provoke the nightmares or inhabit the dreams of journal editors. Last year I focused our conversations (here and on-line) on some issues of scholarly journal identity in our digital age. We’ll talk about ERIH and metric evaluation schemes again at our Round Table session. Sometime in 2010, I expect to see these discussions, along with my Presidential Address (on the pressure cooker of peer review), formally presented in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing. Before I turn to my major concerns today, however, I’d like to mention some matters of practical interest to CELJ members.

Even as an experienced editor, when I first joined the executive committee of CELJ, I myself wasn’t aware of the diverse models of scholarly journals in the humanities. Of course, I was aware of disciplinary varieties (for even niche there is a journal or five), but I was oblivious to the wide range of business models that we represent. As Mariyln Gaull later instructed me, it is useful to keep in mind the inevitable but ofen invisible effects of these distinctions, since some journals are independently funded, some are owned by associations and societies, others by universities, and others by presses, and even others (now) by institutional mega-conglomerates. Each of these periodicals are governed, funded, and evaluated differently, and their practices and concerns are thus quite different. The ‘journal’ itself is ontologically perplexing. Some journals are quarterlies; some annuals, some even publish once every two or three years. Some periodicals don’t come out in any measured interval at all, yet ‘self identify’ as journals. Some even carry ISBN along with or instead of ISSN designations, or use ISSN /ISBN to snag different audiences and points-of-sale. So what is a journal beyond a self-designated object? And these days, can we describe it as having ‘thing-ness,’ as an ‘object’ more than a set of pixels? The death of the Author was only the first salvo in this complex and continuing conversation.

My professional experience of the broader world of editors was equally limited before my introduction to CELJ. All the journal editors I knew were academics, so I foolishly generalized that all scholarly journal editors were fellow academics of a traditional tenured sort—teachers and scholars—for whom ‘editing’ is (and for most part remains) an unrewarded ‘leisure time’ activity. I learned the hard way that many if not most institutions don’t credit editorial work under the category of research, and at many places it is ‘professional service’ equal only to, say, having lunch with students in the cafeteria. If you want merit raises and ego strokes, look elsewhere. Lucky are those who get course reliefs! Lucky are those who have campus space allocation! Even luckier those who have paid student or staff gnomes as helpers. But many are those who tend their own garden and even mount their own websites. These are our unsung heroes.

I am sure that you all knew before I did that some journals have editors of a different stripe altogether—long -term editors who occupy a professional rung way above that of the ‘managing editors’ of yore. These editors, including two of our previous CELJ presidents, Michael Cornett (Duke U Press) and Jana Argersinger (Washington State University/Pullman) worked hard, along with such lights as Beth Luey, to elevate scholarly editing to a reasonable status as a separate (and equal) profession. One segment of the 2009 issue of MLA’s Profession is a result of their efforts to help redefine the Academy’s understanding of scholarly editing. Collectively, all of us in CELJ continue to think about our foundational classic questions: “What does an editor do? What qualifications, training, knowledge, experience, sources does one need? What sources were most useful in taking on the editorial tasks? How do you do to hone your skills to adapt to different media? What is the relationship between journal editing and book editing and editing for on-line reading? How were you chosen, assigned, elected to edit your journal? How are you evaluated? How should editors be chosen, evaluated? What is the function of an editorial board? Who appoints it? And so on....”

For each of us, whatever the shape of our editorial duties and sense of our distinctive role, these past few years have seen amazing changes. We’ve seen some changes in CELJ that I would like to highlight.

1) Increased costs mean that we are no longer able to provide hard copies of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing to members unless they pay an additional fee, although we will continue to contribute content to the JSP annually.

2) In 2009, for the first time, the MLA has agreed to subsidize our ‘Chat with an Editor’ feature by providing space in a room more amenable to private conversation than the book display zone: see p. 1961 of your program. [Thanks here to the generous editors who volunteer their time to talk to emerging scholars and editors.] We can thus now rent smaller booth space from MLA exclusively to display member journals. These changes allow us to avoid an increase in our membership dues. Our goal for the ‘Chat with an Editor’ sessions has also been amplified, in ways that return us to our historical roots. Of course, individual editors continue to advise authors about strategies for publications, but what we also offer is a chance for editors to seek advice from our community of fellow editors for self-improvement. As an early officer observed, recalling our original goals, “what CELJ wanted to do [is] probably [what we] would do best again--namely sharpen editorial skills and develop professional procedures.

3) A question that kept coming up: what do editors of learned journals do?” How does what we do change? How can we help each other upgrade our skills? One terrific idea in addition to amplifying the ‘Chat with an Editor’ conversations is that we revive and expand CELJ workshops at MLA and several other disciplinary conventions to which interested editors can be invited (and thus appear on the program and receive travel subsidies). These workshops might focus on different issues—from copyright to copyediting—and provide practice sessions led by experienced editors for other editors that would be preceded by a reading list and hands-on exercises.

4) Simultaneously, we might develop a sort of meta-CELJ with a sequence of on-line tutorial groups dedicated to specific issues. There are professionals, of course, who provide and charge for real-time editing seminars—some enterprising individuals as well as some groups like the Society of Scholarly Publishing—but their charges are steep. CELJ could quite distinctively manage this service as a dedicated segment of Editor-L and archive the results of these conversations in edited form as part of our collaborative wisdom, freely available to rising editors.

5) Some of us have access to sophisticated journal management databases, but these are very expensive investments for smaller journals. Our fine CELJ webmaster, my former student Mike Widner, has finished installing Open Journal Systems software to allow a free flow of the editing process from e-submission through double-blind peer review through authorial and editorial revision into a final PDF or other format. This software is now freely available and easily personalized through the CELJ site here: http://submissions.celj.org. If you would like to use this system, please contact Mike Widner for details.

6) And our site has a couple of new elements that may not be familiar to all. We started a blog for all CELJ members that has received more international attention than sustained participation. We hope that some web-savvy editor will become blogmaster and keep our conversations fluid (please e-mail if you are interested).

7) We are compiling an annotated, permeable bibliography of recommended resources and books on best editing tips and practices for editors.

8) We have designed a private forum for journal editors-in-chief only. We haven’t activated this ‘closed’ forum yet because we’ve hesitated to have a forum within a forum, but our community is so diverse, and some conversations about editorial matters so delicate, that we though it wise to make it possible for the chief academic editor of a journal to join a private forum under http://www.celj.orf/phpbb. The secretary of CELJ will give user permission to members upon request.

9) In addition to these initiatives, CELJ these past two years has reached out to members and fellow editors outside the confines of this convention. I met with the American Historical Association last year to share common concerns about both the ERIH rating system and what I called the “fragmentation of journal identity” in our age of digital information access. It behooves us to reach across all humanistic disciplines more consistently: we all need help from our friends.

And speaking of help, no one could be more helpful than our secretary/treasurer Nicholas Birns, who deserves our collective thanks for his great generosity and fine organizational talents. Welcome to Joycelyn Moody, who now assumes the CELJ presidency. With her wise guidance, I am sure that we will thrive.