The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication 3031065182, 9783031065187

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The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication Edited by Pejman Habibie · Anna Kristina Hultgren

The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication “Getting published in academic journals is a challenge for those new to the publication process as well as more established scholars. Both groups will find much of interest in this fascinating collection of reflective narratives and autoethnographic accounts by a wide range of journal editors and experienced reviewers who shed light on the often mysterious processes of peer review and editing while taking care to locate these within the pressures of neoliberal academia. This edited volume is an important addition to our growing understanding of the many facets of writing for research purposes.” —Sue Starfield, School of Education, UNSW Sydney, Australia “This volume sheds a new light on gatekeeping practices in academic settings by looking at the endeavour from the inside, and recalling the personal histories, narratives and autoethnographic accounts of a number of experienced Applied Linguistics researchers around the world – once newcomers but today safe gatekeepers after an endurance journey. It is also a reflective exercise on the asymmetries that set up additional hurdles to non-Anglophone gatekeepers in an Anglophone-centred academia, and how these can be successfully cleared and turned into windows of opportunity for career development. The book is innovative in that it extends its scope well beyond the traditional focus of the do’s and don’ts of research writing and peer review practices. The editors have delved into the different dimensions of scholarly publication by exquisitely weaving the personal gatekeeping trajectories of contributing authors as journal editors, book series editors, journal article reviewers, book reviewers, book proposal reviewers, mediators, custodians, referees, mentors, or research auditors. The result is this inspiring compilation that brings together all the individual threads of the research writing experience under the emic perspective. This is not merely a book about gatekeeping and gatekeepers in academia; it is a book about negotiating discourse, mediating literacies, navigating authority, building up expertise, legitimasing participation, valuing research, and certifying scientific knowledge. Quite simply, it is a thoughtprovoking book about the game of scholarly publication and the success and failure of its players. With an entertaining prose and a personal focus, each and every chapter will certainly appeal to experienced researchers, who will enjoy and identify themselves with many of the snapshots, anecdotes and

stories recounted herein, as well as to early-career researchers, who will be pleased to see that riding the waves of scientific publication is a complex but rewarding adventure.” —Ana Bocanegra-Valle, University of Cadiz, Spain

Pejman Habibie · Anna Kristina Hultgren Editors

The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication

Editors Pejman Habibie Faculty of Education Western University London, ON, Canada

Anna Kristina Hultgren The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-06518-7 ISBN 978-3-031-06519-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Preface: Gatekeepers or Facilitators? Ken Hyland

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Different Faces of Gatekeeping and Gatekeepers Pejman Habibie and Anna Kristina Hultgren

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Part I 3

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Identities, Positions, Beliefs

Gatekeeping and Gateopening: A Narrative of Becoming Pejman Habibie To the Inner Circle and Back Again: An Autoethnographically-Oriented Narrative of an EAL’s Identity Trajectory and Professional Development from Novice Researcher to Research Auditor Rosa M. Manchón

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On Becoming a Bilingual Gatekeeper: The Journey of a Francophone Editor for an English-Language Journal Guillaume Gentil Opening the Gates for the Next Generation of Scholars Peter I De Costa

Part II 7

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Discourses, Norms, Values

Polycentric Peer Reviewing: Navigating Authority and Expertise Maria Kuteeva

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The Rise and Fall of an Editor-In-Chief: A Field-Theoretic Autoethnography Márton Demeter

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Rhetorical Structure and Types of Comments in My Manuscript Reviews Ling Shi

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Certifying Knowledge Under Neoliberalism: Global Inequality and Academic Wellbeing Anna Kristina Hultgren

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Part III

Roles, Relationships, Challenges

11 The Tug-Of-War of Journal Editing: Trust and Risk in Focus Carmen Sancho Guinda 12

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On Mediating and Being Mediated: Experiences of Harmony and Contention Sally Burgess

13 The Journal Editor as Academic Custodian John Edwards

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Contents

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From Birth to Maturity: Reflections on Editors’ Experiences and Challenges in Founding, Managing and Promoting Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research Karim Sadeghi and Farah Ghaderi

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Burgess Sally is a lecturer in English at the University of La Laguna, Spain. Her main research interests lie in intercultural rhetoric, the contribution of language professionals to the preparation of research publications, the teaching of writing in the university context, and the effects of research evaluation policies on Spanish scholars’ publishing practices and professional trajectories. With Margaret Cargill, she organized the first PRISEAL (Publishing Research Internationally: Issues for Speakers of English as an Additional Language) conference in early 2007 and is the book reviews editor of the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes. De Costa Peter I is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His research areas include emotions, identity, ideology, and ethics in educational linguistics. He also studies social (in)justice issues. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly. Demeter Márton is an associate professor at the University of Public Service in Hungary, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Hungarian Academy

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of Sciences. His primary focus of research is global knowledge production, with a specific emphasis on the sociology of communication studies. His works are published in recognized international journals and his new monograph entitled Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South: Questioning Inequalities and Underrepresentation was published in 2020 by Palgrave. Marton is a founding co-editor of KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry and he is an associate editor or editorial board member in a dozen of international journals. Edwards John was born in England, educated there and in Canada, and received his Ph.D. from McGill University. He is a Senior Research Professor at St Francis Xavier University (Antigonish) and an Adjunct Professor, Graduate Studies, at Dalhousie University (Halifax). His main research interest is with the establishment, maintenance, and continuity of group identity, with particular reference to language in both its communicative and symbolic aspects. His recent books include Challenges in the Social Life of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012) and Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013). Edwards is a fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada. Gentil Guillaume is an Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and former co-editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing. His research interests in second language writing and biliteracy development in professional and postsecondary settings originate from his academic literacy experiences in France, the USA, and Canada. His research work has appeared in Canadian Modern Language Review, Discourse & Society, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Written Communication, and several co-edited books. His theoretical and programmatic piece “A biliteracy agenda for genre research,” originally published in JSLW, was reproduced in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals, 2011.

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Ghaderi Farah is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Urmia University, Iran. Her recent research has focused on intercultural encounters, travel and gender studies, teacher identity, and EFL education and has appeared in Iranian Studies, Angelaki, Interventions, RELC , Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, and Gender, Place and Culture. Her co-translated work (Robert J. C. Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction) was published in Iran in 2012. Guinda Carmen Sancho is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), where she teaches Academic and Professional Communication and in-service seminars on EMI teacher education. She is editor-in-chief of Ibérica and editorial board member of JEAP and Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas. Habibie Pejman is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Western University, Canada. He is also a founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes and a founding co-editor of book series Routledge Studies in English for Research Publication Purposes. He has university teaching experience in under/graduate programs in Latin America and Asia. His research interests and scholarly publications focus on EAP, writing for scholarly publication, geopolitics of knowledge construction and circulation, and academic literacies. His work has been published in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Hultgren Anna Kristina is a Professor of Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at The Open University, UK. Her work contributes to uncovering fundamental principles driving English as a global language in the political economy and has been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and others. Kristina serves on the editorial boards of Journal of English-Medium Instruction, Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, Journal of Applied Language Studies, and Routledge Studies in English-Medium Instruction.

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Hyland Ken is Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia. He is well known for his work on academic writing and has published over 240 articles and 27 books on academic discourse and EAP with nearly 35,000 citations on Google Scholar. A collection of his work was recently published as The Essential Hyland, Bloomsbury, 2017. Kuteeva Maria is a Professor of English linguistics in the Department of English, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research and publications have focused on the use of English in multilingual university settings, academic discourse analysis, and academic writing in English as an additional language. Her work has appeared in Applied Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Higher Education, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and other peerreviewed outlets. She serves on the editorial boards of Applied Linguistics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Ibérica, and Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes. Manchón Rosa M. is a Professor of Applied Linguistics, has published extensively on L2 writing. She has served the profession as journal/book series editorial board member; AILA Publications Coordinator; editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing; and editor of 2 book series. Additionally, she has held and still holds relevant research evaluation/auditingrelated positions in the Spanish National Research Agency. Sadeghi Karim has a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia (UK) and is a professor of TESOL at Urmia University, Iran. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research (with a Q1 rank in Scimago SJR and Scopus/Elsevier). He serves on the editorial board of RELC Journal (SAGE), Research in Post Compulsory Education (Routledge), TESOL Journal (WILEY), Heliyon (Elsevier, as an Associate Editor for Education Section), and Language Testing in Asia (Springer). His most recent publications are Assessing Second Language Reading by Springer (2021) and Talking about Second Language Acquisition (Palgrave, 2022).

Notes on Contributors

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Shi Ling is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on second language writing, citation practices in academic writing, and teaching English as a second/foreign language. She has published her research in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Second Language Writing, Research in the Teaching of English, Written Communication, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and English for Specific Purposes.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Peer reviews included in the present study (n = 50) were submitted to the following journals: Applied Linguistics, Discourse, Context and Media, English for Specific Purposes, Higher Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, Multilingua, Nordic Journal of English Studies, Studies in Higher Education, System Reviewer roles and (dis)alignments in stance-taking towards a journal manuscript submission, inspired by the stance triangle by Du Bois (2007) The relations of the concepts of norms, habitus, and the agent. My own representation Overlapping hierarchies in the field of scholarly publication with growing institutional power. My own representation

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Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 11.1

List of Figures

My culture-gram represented on the basis of Chang’s (2008) recommendations. My own representation The matrix of norms and agents from my perspective as a scholar with double identity. My own representation The circular dynamics of journal editors’ positioning

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List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Table Table Table Table

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

Table 11.1

Five most frequent 4-word lexical bundles in the peer review data set (n = 50) Examples illustrating reviewer roles and (dis)alignments in the data set of 50 peer reviews Types of comments Moves across categories of recommendations Summary of positive and negative commentary Types of specific comments across categories of recommendations Analysis of the interplay between facts, risks, positioning values, options, and trust through the lens of Decision Theory

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112 150 150 153 155

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1 Preface: Gatekeepers or Facilitators? Ken Hyland

Today’s international research scene is unrecognizable compared with 30 years ago. In 1990 my first serious research paper appeared in the RELC Journal . I had typed the manuscript on the office IBM, printed it on a dot matrix printer, and sent three copies to the editor by post. The reference list comprised only those sources I could find in the University library in Papua New Guinea and last-minute editorial corrections were faxed to the journal. The whole to-and-fro of review to publication took 18 months. There is, of course, less post and pray now and the submission and editorial process are as different today as scratching images into cave walls with sharp stones. All of us, in different ways, have experienced these changes directly in our working lives as we face greater pressure and competition, with our careers increasingly dependent on the ability to publish in prestigious K. Hyland (B) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_1

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journals. There are, as a consequence, numerous accounts by authors who feel they have been treated unfairly by ‘gatekeepers’ and cheated by the system; whose work would tilt the world’s axis if only obdurate reviewers could look past their prejudices. This book then offers something of a balance to these views. Here we get to hear the thoughts of some of those who have spent considerable time at the sharp end of this process, contributing to their profession as editors and reviewers as well as writers and mentors. Here are the voices of a group which are rarely heard, often overwhelmed by work, castigated by authors, and unheeded by the publishers they serve, yet central to the publishing machine. These chapters reveal something of this neglected aspect of publishing: a glimpse of the human face of the knowledge-construction industry. The changes I mentioned earlier have happened quickly and on such a huge scale that they seem beyond human intervention. Today there are more journals, more researchers, more scholarly papers, more publishers, more co-authorship and, crucially, more academics writing in a language which is not their native tongue (Hyland, 2015). At the same time, there have been changes in technology and business models which have created greater access to the world’s store of scientific literature and opportunities to work with academics across the globe through collaborative writing platforms such as Google Docs, Authorea, and Overleaf . In sum, how research is done, how collaboration is organized and managed, how the literature is stored and accessed, how texts are written and disseminated, and how the output is counted and rewarded have all changed dramatically. Scholars everywhere now find themselves in a global research arena which would have been alien to their older colleagues less than a generation before. One constant in all this change has been the continuing reliance on journal editors and reviewers as guardians of the citadel against an ever rising torrent of papers. The scale of submissions is staggering, with over eight million scholars working in 17,000 universities seeking to publish in English-language journals (Johnson et al., 2018). The global scientific output is now doubling every nine years with more than 3 million new peer-reviewed articles each year (Johnson et al., 2018) and just one publisher, Elsevier, reporting over two million articles submitted and one billion consumed in 2019 (Page, 2020). This not only creates

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massive profit margins of 35% or more at the top end of the market for publishers, but also huge headaches for unpaid and overworked journal editors who struggle to find competent and willing reviewers. This surge in submissions obviously demands more reviewers. So, just one publisher, Elsevier, made use of 700,000 peer reviewers in 2015 alone to conduct 1.8 million reviews (Reller, 2016). But while the population of researchers is growing, the pool of potential reviewers may be shrinking, certainly the proportion of writers to reviewers is shifting significantly. Chinese authors, for example, are among the most prolific of submitters but publish twice as much as they review (Warne, 2016). This requirement for ever-increasing numbers of reviewers has also occurred alongside an ever-narrowing coverage of journals. There is now a bewildering proliferation of journals as publishers step up their search to fill every conceivable disciplinary sub-niche to bursting. At the last count, for instance, there were 61,500 dentistry journals listed in Pubmed (National Library of Medicine, 2019) and over 900 in language and linguistics (SJR, 2021). This increases the demand for reviewers with specific expertise and makes it even harder for editors to find suitable readers. Reviewers are also becoming an endangered species as the job is not only unpaid, but largely unrewarded by publishers and unrecognized by universities. Nobody ever got hired or promoted for the number of reviews they agreed to do. With additional pressures on academics for more teaching, more outreach, more admin, more research, more articles, and more everything else, academics are now said to suffer levels of psychological distress higher than those of staff in hospital accident and emergency units (Grove, 2018). Time for reviewing inevitably suffers and even willing reviewers may be forced to do a hurried job or hand it to their inexperienced students as ‘good practice for you’, while editors turn to untried individuals. Either way, decision delays lengthen and the quality of reviews suffers. These frustrations may result in the severely dismissive and ignorant reviews we sometimes receive and which disgruntled authors often post on the shitmyreviewerssay site,1 discussed by Kevin Jiang and I recently (Hyland & Jiang, 2020). Becher and 1

https://shitmyreviewerssay.tumblr.com.

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Trowler (2001: 89) describe this kind of reviewing as ‘venting of personal preferences or antipathies’. But while some reviewers are unreasonably crabby, overworked, or perhaps biassed against certain approaches and methods (Hyland, 2020), it is also the case that there is a fair amount of poor research around. I understand, for example, that some teachers at Chinese universities make a journal rejection a requirement for Bachelor’s students to graduate— and some of this gets through editorial screening to reach reviewers, despite over 50% desk rejection rates at some humanities journals. The pressures on reviewers and editors are, therefore, not dissimilar to those faced by author themselves. In fact, as several of the contributors to this book make clear, they are actually the same people. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why, despite all the criticisms and obvious shortcomings of the process, there is broad support for the ‘gatekeeping’ process. Two large-scale surveys of over 6000 academics indicate that reviewers typically spend five hours on each review and overwhelmingly do this because they want to contribute to the academic community and improve new papers (Publishing Research Consortium, 2016; Taylor & Francis, 2015). But they also strongly believe that reviewing is inadequately acknowledged and should carry more weight in institutional evaluation processes (Warne, 2016). It might even make a difference if some of the £1.9 billion a year or more which publishers save in free reviews (Research Information Network, 2008) was transferred to those who actually do the work. There is also a sense in which the review system, admitting its imperfections and perceived injustices, is not just a gatekeeping barrier standing between our beautifully crafted cutting edge research and an eagerly awaiting world. In many ways it represents a core element of academic life: a central plank in how we see our professional practices as fair and democratic, adhering to objectivity rather than personal selfinterest, and rejecting any claim that a theory be accepted merely on the authority of the proponent (Howard, 2012). It is, then a facilitating, not just a gatekeeping, process, and fundamental to the credibility of academic claims and to the development of new research (Hyland, 2015).

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Reviewers add a layer of expertise to the publication process, bringing their professional insider knowledge to both screen submissions for publication and showing authors how another researcher understands their work and its contribution. It is the guidance of useful feedback which is usually responsible for bringing ‘Revise and Resubmit’ papers to publication. In fact, because most papers eventually find a home in a journal somewhere, peer review may be regarded as a mechanism for deciding where a paper is published rather than whether it is published. Unreviewed research posted on personal websites is generally either ignored or regarded with scepticism by the academic community. In their study of 4000 researchers, for example, Mulligan et al. (2013) found that most respondents saw peer review as ‘the most effective mechanism for ensuring the reliability, integrity, and consistency of the scholarly literature’ (p. 149). This also explains the disdain for the opportunistic fraudulent, or predatory, journals, expanding by around 1000 new publications a year and seeking to exploit the anxieties of highly stressed academics. Unlike legitimate journals, they bombard academics with emails, misrepresent their country of origin, fabricate their editorial boards, accept almost all submissions and overstate the rigour of their peer review processes. This market, based on the Gold Open Access ‘writer pays’ model, stands as an indictment of the publish or perish culture engendered by governments, universities, and publishers by tempting authors to side-step the quality control of editorial rigour. Editorial gatekeeping, in this rough and ready context where publishing sits on the edge of racketeering, therefore, play an important facilitating role. With more than a million papers published each year, trusted reviewers are needed to filter the literature in an environment where we are supposed to know, or at least fit our own work into, an ever-expanding disciplinary oeuvre. Moreover, when it works, reviewing acts as a supportive, and even mentoring, process to improve what we have written and point out what we have overlooked. More generally, of course, it reaches deep into our lives so that appearing in peer-reviewed publications has become the benchmark for ranking us in a cut-throat career game.

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Overall, the scale of academic publishing, the high stakes prospects and perils involved, the absence of any rewards for reviewers, the increasing problems of finding willing and competent readers, and the lack of training or any clear criteria for the process, is pushing the system to breaking point. As several of the personal accounts in this volume testify, becoming a reviewer or editor is a long and uncertain process, achieved with little support or training. In much the same way as many of us learnt to become academic writers, developing reviewing skills is a journey of serendipity, blind alleys, false turns, and endless trying. But one advantage we have as writers over those we often disparage for their comments on our texts, is the feedback we receive from conscientious and supportive journal reviewers. While decisions can be perplexing and comments occasionally brutal, I have written very few papers that haven’t been improved in some way by the good sense of a reviewer or editor. I suspect the same is true for most of us.

References Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Inquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines 2nd ed. SRHE and Open University Press Grove, J. (2018). Half of UK academics ‘suffer stress-linked mental health problems’ . Times Higher Education Supplement. Howard, G. (2012). Peer review as boundary work. Journal of Scholarly Publishing., 43(3), 322–335. Hyland, K. (2015). Academic publishing: Issues and challenges in the construction of knowledge. OUP. Hyland, K. (2020). Peer review: Objective screening or wishful thinking? Journal of English for Research Publication Purpose, 1(1), 51–65. Hyland, K. & Jiang, K. (2020). “This work is antithetical to the spirit of research”: An anatomy of harsh peer reviews. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 46 . Johnson, R, Watkinson, A. & Mabe, M. (2018). The STM Report 5th ed . International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

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Mulligan, A., Hall, L., & Raphael, E. (2013). Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64, 132–161. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalogue. (2019). Accessed June 2019. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?term=dentistry%20OR% 20dental%20OR%20oral%20OR%20facial Page, B. (2020). Elsevier sees 2019 profits and revenues lift. The Bookseller. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/elsevier-sees-profit-and-revenuelift-1192787 Publishing Research Consortium. (2016). Peer review survey 2015. Mark Ware Consulting. Reller, T. (2016). Elsevier publishing—a look at the numbers, and more. Elsevier Connect. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/elsevier-publishing-a-lookat-the-numbers-and-more Research Information Network. (2008). Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK . http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/ files/attachments/Activities-costs-flows-summary.pdf SJR. (2021). Scimago Journal rankings. https://www.scimagojr.com/journa lrank.php?area=1200&category=1203 Taylor & Francis. (2015). Peer review in 2015: A global view. A white paper. Taylor & Francis. Warne, V. (2016). Rewarding reviewers—sense or sensibility? A Wiley study explained. Learned Publishing, 29, 41–50.

2 Different Faces of Gatekeeping and Gatekeepers Pejman Habibie and Anna Kristina Hultgren

Introduction Research productivity is an important aspect of the current neoliberal knowledge economy (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Academics globally are expected to engage in research and circulate the outcomes of their scholarly investigations to target academic discourse communities. By the same token, academic publication has become one of the major indicators of scholarly productivity and one of the means through which academics are expected to prove their worth to their institution and the global knowledge economy. In other words, scholarly publication is P. Habibie (B) Western University, London, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Hultgren The Open University, Buckinghamshire, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_2

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a decisive factor in the initiation, survival, and establishment of many academics and in the advancement in their career and academic life. Moreover, scholarly publication is a socio-politically charged practice in that scholarly products are stratified based on the medium and the venue in which they are circulated (Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022). Current institutional, national, and international adjudication bodies and ranking regimes (see Welch & Li, 2021) tend to ascribe higher value to scholarly work that is published in English-medium high-impact refereed journals. This translates into the fact that many scholars globally are required to publish in a language which is not their first language and consequently deal with discursive and non-discursive challenges (Ferguson, 2007). More importantly, they and their scholarly output will be reviewed, refereed, adjudicated, and certified based on discourses, practices, norms, and mores that may be similar or different (or even incompatible with) their local discourses, ideologies, and modes of knowledge making and seeking. There is no doubt that scholarly discourse cannot be imagined without the practice of refereeing and adjudicating, and, as we shall refer to it in this volume, certifying knowledge. In other words, gatekeeping is at the heart of academic discourse and an important aspect of the rules of the game of scholarly practice. Merton and Sztompka (1996) enumerate disinterrestedness, “ultimate accountability of scientists to their compeers” (p. 275), as one of major canons or imperatives for scientific ethos. That is, scientific work needs to be filtered through a normalized (standardized ) intellectual process or procedure in knowledge construction and dissemination mechanism whereby the produced cultural capital is measured and its quality is dissected based on a set of agreed-upon (hegemonic ) criteria by idealistically impartial expert compeers in one’s discipline. Ultimately, this is how the academic community assures itself and the general public that the certified knowledge has been intellectually processed and is therefore reliable, noteworthy, and a part of the existent knowledge repertoire. This description provides a pretty straightforward picture of the significance and the procedural knowledge of the gatekeeping process. However, it sounds simplistic and reductionist in the sense that it glosses over the complexity, multidimensionality, contours, and nuances of the knowledge production and certification enterprise.

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By the same token, in what follows, we intend to have a closer look at different dimensions of the gatekeeping practice (and similarly gatekeepers) in order to understand what makes the process and its analysis both worthy and challenging. It is worth mentioning though that in spite of our separate discussion of these aspects below, they are closely interconnected and constitutive of each other.

Discursive Face Gatekeeping can be conceptualized and analyzed as a discursive and rhetorical practice in which authors and gatekeepers engage in disciplinespecific discourses and perform normalized genres at different stages of their interaction and so-called knowledge negotiation. This discursive and rhetorical dimension of gatekeeping is the most focused and studied aspect compared to other dimensions (at least in the discipline of Applied Linguistics and domain of discourse and genre analysis). The bulk of the research in this area is conducted by gatekeepers (editors and reviewers) themselves as they are the ones that have privileged access to (semi)occluded discourses and genres (e.g., Belcher, 2007; Flowerdew & Dudley-Evans, 2002; Fortanet, 2008; Gosden, 2003; Kourilová, 1996; Hewings, 2004; Hyland, 2015; Paltridge, 2015, 2017; Samraj, 2016, also see Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022 for further details). Given that this research strand sheds light on the formal, rhetorical, and discursive nuances of the review process and relevant genres (e.g., review report), this knowledge base can play a significant role in the legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) of junior scholars and their initiation and socialization into the interactions of the gatekeeping practice. Accordingly, this scholarship can feed into the curriculum and content development of professional academic initiatives (such as English for research publication courses and workshops) and pedagogical resources and know-how manuals (e.g., Paltridge & Starfield, 2016) that delineate those discursive contours. Recent years have witnessed the mushrooming of those resources. It is important to note though that not all of them are developed by insiders and provide research-based and research-informed discursive advice. Plus, in spite

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this growing scholarship, the discursive face of gatekeeping is still a mysterious process for many academics, especially novice scholars, and many junior scholars are struggling with navigating and negotiating the discursive game (see Habibie & Burgess, 2021; Habibie & Hyland, 2019). In addition to the discursive focus of this perspective, it also highlights the fact that gatekeeping is a political and ideological act. That is, gatekeepers enjoy a superior social position compared to authors. Although recommendations for revision are mostly mitigated, hedged, and discursively index an egalitarian discourse and negotiation, realistically, not much negotiation is flowing and disregarding gatekeepers recommendations can have serious implications for both the submission and the submitter (see Paltridge, 2017, 2020). In sum, the power-infused nature of gatekeeping and the status and class dynamics shape and impact discursive interactions between the stakeholders to a large extent. This brings us to another face of the gatekeeping process.

Political Face An important yet under-researched aspect of the gatekeeping enterprise is its political and ideological underpinnings. As mentioned earlier, this aspect is most often backgrounded and hidden under the objective gloss of the practice and invested trust of many scholars in the overall mechanism of gatekeeping and their fellow scholars. However, the issue of existence of bias in the peer review process has been a controversial matter in recent years. Many English as an additional language (EAL) scholars argue that there is systematic structural bias in the gatekeeping process in international English-medium journals toward their nonnative status and that this makes their output more prone to rejection compared to their Anglophone peers (e.g., Belcher, 2007; Canagarajah, 2002; Martín et al., 2014; Pérez-Llantada, 2014; Ross et al., 2008; Strauss, 2019). Additionally, some EAL scholars also argue that there is confirmatory bias (Nickerson, 1998; Oswald & Grosjean, 2004) toward their scholarly work where the gatekeeper’s belief system and framework filter knowledge and scholarship that does not match it and considers

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that as deviant and therefore rejectable. The opposite camp to this position dismisses the claim regarding the existence of systematic structural bias in the gatekeeping process based on the lack of confirmatory evidence (Perez-Llantada et al., 2011, also see Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022 for further details). The proponents of this camp argue that there is “little evidence to support the idea that there is widespread and systematic bias against writers whose first language is not English” (Hyland, 2016, p. 20) and linguistic factors (i.e., being an EAL or Anglophone) do not play a determining role in the overall review process (Belcher, 2007; Bocanegra-Valle, 2015; Coniam, 2012). They highlight though that “[P]eer review is a human process and subject to human imperfections. Bias may exist, but it is often a bias of beliefs and preferred interpretation, rather than bias against certain theories or individuals” (Hyland, 2015, p. 168). The fact remains that there are huge geopolitical asymmetries and inequalities in participation in the global knowledge economy. Although it is difficult to confirm or reject the (non)existence of systematic bias in any form or shape without in-depth research and concrete evidence, it should be noted that any act of adjudication and certification is by nature political and ideological. Gatekeeping and its stringent measures and practices consciously or subconsciously warrant certain ontological, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, socio-rhetorical, and formal imaginings and realizations. That is, certain discourses and practices are (re)regulated, (de)legitimized, (re)produced, excluded, marginalized or discredited. In other words, gatekeeping as a socio-political practice can be or give rise to an epistemic bubble or an echo chamber (Nguyen, 2020) in which specific discourses and practices are perpetuated and exalted, a form of intellectual hegemony and epistemic colonization. From this perspective gatekeeping is not necessarily a neutral scholarly process and gatekeepers are not necessarily disinterested academics devoting their benevolent service to their thought collective and academic community. Gatekeeping is a power-laden mechanism for maintaining hegemonic discourses and social and intellectual control. It is an intellectual panopticon. There is also vested commercial interest in gatekeeping by publishers and data crunch companies who profit from the system (see Hultgren’s chapter in this volume).

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This ideological and political aspect of gatekeeping can be gleaned from the position of academic journals toward disciplinary issues summarized in their aims and scopes and guidelines for authors. It is also recognizable in the composition and configuration of their editorial boards and professional trajectories of their editorial board members. This issue also highlights the significance of individual gatekeepers in the overall gatekeeping regime and the fact that we are not only dealing with a social field of forces and its structure but also the individuals and their habitus in shaping (and being shaped) by this structure. More importantly, it underlines the exigency of further ethnographic research into the system of gatekeeping and the practices of gatekeepers to shed light on the extent to which overt and covert structural and individual ideologies and politics direct and shape the process and those involved. This research strand is not definitely an easy endeavor as ideologies, politics, and discourses at both individual and structural levels normalize themselves, and it is difficult to detect and debunk them. However, the resultant scholarship may enable us to shed more light on the abovementioned critical issues such as systematic bias, regulatory mechanism, and power-infused nature of gatekeeping.

Humanist Face Another hidden and under-researched aspect of the adjudication and certification of scholarship is its humanist nature. The principles of rationalism and empiricism in science have tried to render gatekeeping with an aura of objectivity and impersonality, and gatekeepers as a community of unidentified John Dos and Jane Dos. However, we all know that gatekeepers are not cogs in a refinery machine. They are human beings, flesh and blood, our friends, colleagues, mentors and mentees with whom we communicate and socialize in our everyday academic or personal life. This fact has major implications for understanding, analyzing, and exploring the gatekeeping process and gatekeepers. First, we come to see the fact that gatekeepers have different professional identities other than merely “custodians of knowledge” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019) including literacy mediators (Luo &

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Hyland, 2017), mentors, instructors, supervisors, writers through which they not only adjudicate and certify new scholarship but also guide, facilitate, and scaffold the producers of that scholarship. In other words, they care about not only the produced knowledge but also those involved in the production. This aspect is very important when it comes to novice scholars and early-career researchers as the gatekeeping process can serve two purposes. First, it is the common process of knowledge surveillance and what Merton and Sztompka (1996) call organized skepticism, “temporary suspension of judgement and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria” (p. 276). More importantly, it serves as a mentorship and learning process in which junior scholars learn the ropes of the game and hopefully receive quality expert feedback which they can incorporate into their work and make it publishable. Second, we become more aware of the (semi)occluded identities of gatekeepers, the humanist and personal side, realizing that gatekeepers are also struggling with similar personal, social, and professional challenges and responsibilities that other scholars are encountering and dealing with including family problems, employment, promotion, and of course scholarly publication. The fact that they are gatekeepers in a specific academic venue and carry socio-cultural and symbolic capitals and therefore in a position of power does not mean that scholarly publication can be taken for granted for them. Attention to this humanist and mainly neglected aspect of the gatekeeping process and gatekeepers themselves may be useful in different ways. To begin with, it will help us better see, understand, and appreciate the unpaid dedicated service these gatekeepers are offering to their academic communities and fellow researchers and the time and energy that are taken away from their personal and social life. Additionally, this humanist look at gatekeeping and gatekeepers may help us better understand and analyze the controversial topics such as the existence of systematic bias and discrimination in gatekeeping. On the one hand, we have people who have committed themselves to serving their academic communities and validate the knowledge produced through an idealistically objective mechanism. On the other hand, just like any other human being, they have their own strengths and weaknesses, they are fallible and carry different (un)packed biases of which they may (not) be

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aware. Most importantly, attention to this aspect of gatekeeping helps researchers in Applied Linguistics and English for research publication purposes (ERPP) to conceptualize and conduct research that further examine and analyze how different and multiple identities and personal and professional trajectories of gatekeepers interact and impact their knowledge adjudication practices. Gatekeepers enjoy a high power position and are active participating agents in the discourses and practices of their academic communities and the journals they serve rather than mere passive recipients of those discourses and practices. Research can also investigate how their habitus is shaped and also shapes the overall gatekeeping structure in different academic cultures and journals. The findings of this research can complement the knowledge base in other aspects of gatekeeping practice and shed more light on other faces of gatekeeping and gatekeepers. More importantly, it can help develop structured policies and ERPP pedagogical practices that can inform and enrich the education of academic gatekeeping and the training of gatekeepers. Regrettably, due to the lack of policies and pedagogical practices in many academic contexts, the development of gatekeeping knowledge and expertise relies heavily on the sink or swim model and depends on the personal initiative of individual academics.

Current Volume As discussed above, recent years have witnessed the emergence of various scholarship that has tried to demystify the gatekeeping process and show the inner workings of academic gatekeeping. However, this scholarship has extensively focused on the discursive and textual aspect of gatekeeping. In other words, gatekeepers themselves are mainly left out of the discussions. In response to this gap, this volume shifts the focus to the certifiers of scientific knowledge. By bringing together experts in a variety of areas in Applied Linguistics, it intends to address the complex topic of gatekeeping in scholarly publication and adopt a multifaceted view of the gatekeeping process examining the above-mentioned dimension of knowledge adjudication and certification.

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Drawing on auto-ethnographic perspectives, self-study accounts, as well as discourse and textual analysis, it intends to bring to the fore personal (hi)stories, narratives and first-hand experiences of editors and reviewers and help paint a richer and more nuanced picture of the discourses, practices, successes, failures, and challenges that frame and shape trajectories of both Anglophone and EAL gatekeepers in accrediting academic output. Accordingly, the book examines both being and becoming a gatekeeper within the broader socio-economic, sociocultural, and socio-political contexts in which different identities and practices are negotiated and situated. That is, it will trace editors’ and reviewers’ trajectories toward becoming auditors of academic discourse and showcase how these experts in diverse contexts across the globe developed the required literacies and expertise, were socialized into their target communities of practice, developed and negotiated their identities in academic peer review process, arrived at the decisions they made, the criteria they used in certifying academic output, and also the ways in which they framed their decisions discursively. By bringing together a range of international perspectives from editors and reviewers of prestigious academic journals on this topic, the volume aims to address recent calls and the urgent need for more (auto)ethnographic approaches to the study of the enterprise of knowledge construction, adjudication, and circulation (see Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022). It also intends to offer new and useful insights for earlycareer and established scholars and stakeholders and enrich the field’s understanding of the issues and complexities involved in auditing scholarly publication. While the discursive and textual analysis presented in some of the chapters complements the already existent pool of knowledge on the discourse of gatekeeping, the emic approach of the volume and its humanist, self-study, and autoethnographic focus engages gatekeepers in “rigorous self-reflection” and provides an opportunity to “identify and interrogate the intersections between the self and social life” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 1) as their trajectories and (hi)stories are “never made in a vacuum and others are always visible or invisible participants” (Chang, 2008, p. 69). In addition to this introductory chapter, the current volume comprises three parts. The first part entitled “Identities, Positions, and Beliefs”

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consists of four chapters that look at the identity development and trajectory of a number of gatekeepers and the positions they had and achieved in their academic discourse communities. The first chapter in this part is written by the first editor of the volume. In Chapter 3, Pejman Habibie adopts a self-reflective perspective on his academic trajectory and identity development in becoming a reviewer and initiating and co-editing an academic journal in ERPP, Journal of English for Research Publication Purpose. Situated in a moderate paradigm of auto-ethnography (Wall, 2016), the chapter seeks connections to social-constructionist notions of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and academic identity trajectory (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011). Accordingly, the author discusses his personal initiatives, mentoring relationships, and the ways in which the socio-cultural context of his academic context shaped his academic trajectory, constructed his reviewer identity, and scaffolded his transition and socialization into editorial practice. The chapter aims to offer insights and thoughts on resilience, collaboration, and support that both novice academics and established scholars and mentors may find useful. In Chapter 4, Rosa M. Manchón, an established scholar and experienced editor, used a similar self-reflective and narrative framework to analyze her personal history and identity development from a novice scholar to an auditor of research and scholarly publications at both national and international academic contexts. In this auto-ethnographic chapter, the author looks at the personal, interpersonal, and professional aspects of her academic life to depict a picture of her journey as an Outer Circle scholar initiating and socializing into an Inner Circle discourse community. The author also discusses the insights and implications of this journey for her professional growth and practice in her own national / local community of practice. Chapter 5 is about a self-case study of a francophone academic who worked as an editor of a high-impact English-medium journal. In this chapter, Guillaume Gentil situates his narrative in the scholarship related to multilingual genre learning to discuss the contexts and interactions that scaffolded his socialization into peer review genre and his journey as a scholar with different degrees of proficiency, confidence, and (in)securities in English and French. The chapter sheds light on the

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challenges that EAL scholars encounter in the current dominant Englishmedium knowledge economy and the controversial topic of linguistic injustice in the production and dissemination of knowledge. It also offers implications for socializing novice reviewers through a genre-based pedagogy. The last chapter of this part is also a narrative by an editor of a high-impact scholarly journal in Applied Linguistics (AL). In Chapter 6, although Peter De Costa highlights the difficulties involved in initiating into academic communities, he brings to the fore the positive aspects of his own socialization experience in joining and serving his discourse community. He traces his trajectory and scholarly development from starting as a book and journal manuscript reviewer and highlights the significance of collaborative work for both one’s research and academic growth. Last but not least, De Costa provides suggestions and implications on how AL community, especially established scholars, can support junior and emerging scholars in developing the required literacies. The second part of the book entitled “Discourses, Norms, Values” consists of four chapters. In two of these chapters, Chapters 7 and 9, academic journal gatekeepers self-analyze and reflect upon their own discursive and rhetorical practices, choices, and preferences in reviewing scholarly output to shed more light on the discourse of the peer review genre. In the other two chapters, Chapters 8 and 10, the gatekeepers look at and critique the norms, values, and socio-political discourses and local and global structures that frame and constitute their gatekeeping responsibilities as the auditors and certifiers of academic knowledge. In Chapter 7, Maria Kuteeva uses Blommaert’s (2007) notions of orders of indexicalities and polycentricity and Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle to look at a corpus of her own peer review report submitted to fifteen academic journals. The analysis traces register features in stance acts involving the reviewer, the author, the editor, and the journal readership and indicates that variations in register features are related to different roles that reviewers adopt. Kuteeva highlights that the mediatory role of the reviewer in the dialogic interactions between the author and the journal and the significance of this role for maintaining and challenging the authority of academic journals.

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In Chapter 8, Márton Demeter presents a field-theoretic interpretation of the position of a journal editor in the academic context of an Eastern European country. In this autoethnographic account, he looks at the differences between mainstream academic norms, discourses, and structures in terms of knowledge production, dissemination, and adjudication and those of his local context and the ways in which they inform and impact his gatekeeping position and responsibilities in the peripheral context of Hungary. Demeter highlights the significance of inclusivity and diversity on the part of mainstream academic discourses and practices and commitment on the part of peripheral scholars for the fulfillment of a balanced global knowledge economy. Chapter 9 adopts a similar approach to Chapter 7. In this chapter Ling Shi analyzes a corpus of her review reports for 82 manuscripts submitted to 14 Applied Linguistics journals between 2010 and 2019. Drawing on Swales’ move analysis, this chapter examines the rhetorical structure of the review report genre focusing on two sections: recommendation section and specific evaluation commentary. The findings of this analysis highlight that Shi’s suggestions for revisions are qualified in a way that critical comments are presented in a less threatening manner. This analysis highlights the humanist aspect of the discourse of gatekeeping and the review report genre and has insightful implications for novice gatekeepers and reviewers. The final chapter of this part is authored by the second editor of this volume. In Chapter 10, Anna Kristina Hultgren offers a critical autoethnography of her experiences as an author, reviewer and editor in the current system of academic publishing and knowledge certification. With an analytic gaze at its neoliberalist underpinnings, she highlights two among many problematic issues in the current system: threats to the well-being of individual scholars on the one hand and exacerbating global inequalities on the other. Both of these, she argues, are a result of profitdriven, metrics-obsessed forces that lock private and public actors into a co-dependent, exploitive and runaway system. Locating the problem within the system rather than the individual, the chapter echoes wider calls within Socio- and Applied Linguistics to engage with the political economy, particularly if linguists are serious about social justice, social

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transformation and global inequality. She finishes by calling for an overhaul of the system of academic publishing while also expressing some skepticism as to how to go about this. The third part of this volume entitled “Roles, Relationships, Challenges” consists of four chapters in which the authors of those chapters look at their responsibilities as a gatekeeper and the challenges involved in this role. In Chapter 11, Carmen Sancho Guinda draws on the Positioning and Decision theories to reconceptualize the role of the journal editor shaped and being shaped by an interplay of trust and risk in the peer review system. Using an experiential (auto)ethnographical method, she presents the challenges and struggles that the trust and risk factors bring about and the ways in which risk can be alleviated. Last but not least, she discusses the significance of social media and its impact on both the possible evolution of the peer review mechanism and the responsibilities and professional identity of the journal editor. In Chapter 12, Sally Burgess focuses on the concept of mediation. She extends the study of this concept and discusses authors’ responses to instances of mediation focusing on the emotional and affective aspect of mediation in reviewing the book chapter genre. Drawing on a sample of narrative accounts of both harmonious and contentious experiences of mediation, this chapter highlights that the perception of both the author and the editor of the dynamics of power and authority in their relationship and the management of potential threats to their face has a key impact on the outcomes of their relationship and interactions. The chapter also offer suggestions as to how potential face threats can be dealt with and managed. In Chapter 13, John Edwards draws on his personal experience as an experienced journal editor to explain some of the key criteria that gatekeepers, especially academic journal editors, consider in adjudicating scholarly submissions and some of the common problems that can result in the rejection of manuscripts submitted to academic journals. This chapter highlights the role and responsibilities of the journal editor as a key figure in the overall peer review system. The final chapter of this volume is co-authored by two gatekeepers from the Middle East. In Chapter 14, Karim Sadeghi and Farah Ghaderi share their autoethnographic narrative about initiating and co-editing a

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journal, Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, in the academic context of Iran. They explain how the role and position of the journal editor is different in this peripheral academic context compared to that in a mainstream context, other responsibilities that this position requires in addition to administrating the peer review process, as well as the challenges involved in initiating and establishing a journal and running the gatekeeping process. Finally, we hope that this book provides an insightful glimpse of the inner workings of scholarly gatekeeping and the socio-rhetorical practices of academic gatekeepers.

References Adams, T., Ellis, C., & Holman Jones, S. (2017). Autoethnography. In J. Matthes, C. S. Davis, & R. F. Potter (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of communication research methods (pp. 1–11). John Wiley & Sons. Belcher, D. D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16 , 1–22. Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: Orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2(2), 115–130. Bocanegra-Valle, A. (2015). Peer reviewers’ recommendations for language improvement in research writing. In R. Plo & C. Pérez-Llantada (Eds.), English as a scientific and research language: Debates and discourses in English sin Europe (pp. 207–230). Mouton de Gruyter. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method . Routledge. Coniam, D. (2012). Exploring reviewer reactions to papers submitted to academic journals. System, 40, 544–553. Du Bois, J. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). John Benjamins. Ferguson, G. (2007). The global spread of English, scientific communication and ESP: Questions of equity, access and domain loss. Ibérica, 13, 7–38. Flowerdew, J., & Dudley-Evans, T. (2002). Genre analysis of editorial letters to international journal contributors. Applied Linguistics, 23, 463–489.

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Flowerdew, J., & Habibie, P. (2022). Introducing English for research publication purposes. Routledge. Fortanet, I. (2008). Evaluative language in peer review referee reports. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7 (1), 27–37. Gosden, H. (2003). “Why not give us the full story?”: Functions of referees’ comments in peer reviews of scientific research papers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(2), 87–101. Habibie, P., & Burgess, S. (Eds.). (2021). Scholarly publication trajectories of early-career scholars: Insider Perspectives. Palgrave-MacMillan. Habibie, P., & Hyland, K. (Eds.). (2019). Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers. Palgrave Macmillan. Hewings, M. (2004). An important contribution or tiresome reading? A study of evaluation in peer reviews of journal article submissions. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(3), 247–274. Hyland, K. (2015). Academic publishing: Issues and challenges in the construction of knowledge. Oxford University Press. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58–69. Kourilová, M. (1996). Interactive function of language in peer review of medical papers written by NN users of English. UNESCO-ALSED LSP Newsletter, 19, 4–21. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Luo, N., & Hyland, K. (2017). Intervention and revision: Expertise and interaction in text mediation. Written Communication, 34 (4), 414–440. Martín, P., Rey-Rocha, J., Burgess, S., & Moreno, A. I. (2014). Publishing research in English-language journals: Attitudes, strategies and difficulties of multilingual scholars of medicine. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 16 , 57–67. McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2011). Making meaning of diverse experiences: Constructing an identity through time. In L. McAlpine & C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral education: Research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators (pp. 173–183). Springer. Merton, R. K., & Sztompka, P. (1996). On social structure and science. University of Chicago Press. Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme, 17 (2), 141–161. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.

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Oswald, E., & Grosjean, S. (2004). Confirmation bias. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgement and memory (pp. 79–96). Psychology Press. Paltridge, B. (2015). Language, identity, and communities of practice. In D. N. Djenar, A. Mahboob, & K. Cruickshank (Eds.), Language and identity across modes of communication (pp. 15–25). Mouton de Gruyter. Paltridge. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Palgrave Macmillan. Paltridge, B. (2020). Engagement and reviewers’ reports on submissions to academic journals. Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 1, 4–27. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2016). Getting published in academic journals: Navigating the publication process. University of Michigan press. Pérez-Llantada, C. (2014). Scientific discourse and the rhetoric of globalization. Bloomsbury. Pérez-Llantada, C., Plo, R., & Ferguson, G. (2011). “You don’t say what you know, only what you can”: The perceptions and practices of senior Spanish academics regarding research dissemination in English. English for Specific Purposes, 30 (1), 18–30. Ross, J., Hill, K., Egilman, D., & Krumholz, H. (2008). Guest authorship and ghostwriting in publications related to Rofecoxib: A case study of industry documents from Rofecoxib Litigation. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 299 (15), 1800–1812. Samraj, B. (2016). Discourse structure and variation in manuscript reviews: Implications for genre categorisation. English for Specific Purposes, 42, 76–88. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press. Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Strauss, P. (2019). Shakespeare and the English poets: The influence of native speaking English reviewers on the acceptance of journal articles. Publications, 7 (1), 20. Wall, S. S. (2016). Toward a moderate autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15 (1), 1–9. Welch, A., & Li, J. (Eds.). (2021). Measuring up in higher education: How university rankings and league tables are re-shaping knowledge production in the global era. Plagrave Macmillan.

Part I Identities, Positions, Beliefs

3 Gatekeeping and Gateopening: A Narrative of Becoming Pejman Habibie

Introduction Gatekeeping is generally deemed as a prestigious position in academic discourse communities. Just like every social field, academic disciplines are socio-cultural fields of power with their own stratification structures and power distribution mechanisms which basically depend on academic and scholarly merits and possession of cultural capitals. There is no doubt that gatekeepers including academic journal editors and reviewers occupy a high position in this stratification and are considered as the custodians of disciplinary discourses and practices (Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022). In spite of this high-ranking position of gatekeepers in the academic field, research into gatekeeping has mainly focused on the being aspect of the job leaving the becoming barely touched. That is, as highlighted in P. Habibie (B) Western University, London, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_3

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the intro chapter, research into gatekeeping, at least in Applied Linguistics, has looked at the discourses and practices of editors and reviewers in their position as gatekeepers rather than tracing their transition to becoming knowledge auditors and bringing to the fore the epochs in their developmental trajectory. In response to this research gap, in this chapter, I will be looking at my becoming a founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes (JERPP). In that respect, I will draw on the analytical lens of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and Academic Identity Trajectory (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011) to make sense of my developmental process as a book reviewer, manuscript reviewer, and ultimately a journal editor. To tell my (hi)story, I will also adopt a moderate version of autoethnography which “lies between the warring factions of evocative and analytic approaches to this method” (Wall, 2016, p. 7) and combines “the power of the personal perspective with the value of analysis and theory” (p. 8). What makes my (hi)story different and noteworthy here is that I started playing this game as a junior scholar and then as an earlycareer scholar at the beginning of my academic trajectory with limited social and cultural capital. In telling my (hi)story, I follow two broad aims. First, from a research perspective, learning about the contours and ups and downs of the developmental process of individual gatekeepers sheds light on the identity (trans)formation and negotiation of people who are working in the backstage (à la Erving Goffman’s parlance) of knowledge production, adjudication, and certification machine. Examining becoming adds an insightful dimension and an extra layer to our knowledge base in the field of English for research publication purposes (ERPP) about gatekeeping practice and gatekeepers themselves and complements our understanding about being in a position of power. Second, more importantly, from a pedagogical angle, this personal (hi)story, although idiosyncratic in nature, may carry lessons and implications for other junior scholars and dearly-career scholars who are planning and strategizing to embark on the gatekeeping journey. Additionally it may raise the awareness of established members of academic communities about the pivotal role that they can play in educating and

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mentoring junior scholars and facilitating their navigation into the gatekeeping game. Before sharing my (hi)story, in the following section, I will briefly look at the theoretical lens and methodology that frame this chapter.

Theoretical and Methodological Orientations Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) as a learning process accounts for enculturation of newcomers into a social community or a community of practice (CoP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this developmental process, novice members are socialized into the practices of their desired communities through an apprenticeship-like relationship with the established/seasoned members of such communities. The fact that they are newcomers legitimizes their status as potential members of those communities. However, their participation is considered peripheral due to their novice status, scaffolded practices, and limited engagement. Learning in the form of LPP is not “merely a condition for membership, but is itself an evolving form of membership” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 51) in which newcomers move from a peripheral to a full status in terms of engagement and membership and substitute the established members eventually. The notion of apprenticeship as the cornerstone of LPP redefines learning as a collaborative process rather than an individualist cognitive one (Kirk & Kinchin, 2003). This conceptual framework informs an interpretation of the ways in which I developed gatekeeping literacies (both discursive and non-discursive aspects) within the context of the doctoral program and beyond. The concept of CoP helps a better understanding of the socio-cultural context of my apprenticeship. The notion of apprenticeship frames an analysis of the support networks, mechanisms, and strategies within my CoP, capturing the pivotal role of expert members, mentoring relationships, and mediating practices, that scaffolded my gatekeeping literacy development within and beyond the context of the doctoral program. The notion of academic identity trajectory highlights “the integration of past-present-future in the experience of academic work, and the individual’s desire to enact intentions and hopes over time” (McAlpine &

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Amundsen, 2011, p. 178). In other words, it traces the development of one’s academic identity from the past, to the present, and into the future and provides a holistic view of who one is rather than focusing on merely a specific juncture in one’s academic life or one dimension in one’s (academic) identity. Focusing on the intimate connection between learning and identity, it “emphasizes learning processes that emerge from a multitude of contexts, both past and present” (p. 178). This notion consists of three asynchronous and historical strands—intellectual, networking, and institutional—which vary in terms of length, size, and impact across individuals’ experiences and can be used as the criteria for the conceptualization and analysis of one’s identity trajectory through time. According to McAlpine and Amundsen (2011), the intellectual strand concerns one’s “past and continuing contributions to one’s disciplinary specialism or field” (p. 179). This strand includes a record of intellectual artifacts such as publications, citations, papers, course/curriculum design which are independent of the individual themselves. The networking strand deals with one’s past or continuing professional, not personal, connections with local, national, and international networks such as collaborative cross-institutional work, research, publication, and membership on editorial boards of scholarly journals and in disciplinary organizations and committees. The institutional strand represents relationships and responsibilities in one’s immediate context of presence including teaching, research, and administrative and service roles. This strand has a key role in providing access to resources and facilitating or constraining one’s networking and intellectual strands. The conceptual framework of academic identity trajectory provides me with a practical heuristic to examine and reflect on the various threads of my academic and gatekeeping experiences and make sense of the diverse experiences and incidents that shaped and transformed my learning and academic identity through time. As a multi-variant qualitative research genre with different underlying epistemological interpretations and representational manifestations, auto-ethnography “considers personal experience as an important source of knowledge in and of itself, as well as a source of insight into cultural experience” (Leavy et al., 2017, p. 254). This personal experience method “provides an opportunity to explore some aspects of our

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social lives in a deeper and more sustained manner” (Anderson, 2006, p. 390). Plus, “there are marginalized perspectives on certain topics that are given voice through autoethnography” (Wall, 2016, p. 3). In this chapter, I adopt a moderate version of auto-ethnography in order to capture the meanings and events of my gatekeeping literacy development odyssey. Settled somewhere in between evocative-to-analytic continuum (Allen-Collinson, 2013), this self-focused but analytical approach reconciles the best of the two worlds, helping me exploit “the unique value of personal experience, while maintaining the scholarly potential of autoethnography” (Wall, 2016, p. 1). The self-narrative as the medium of representation and knowledge construction helps portray my idiosyncratic learning and identity development experiences “holistically in all its complexity and richness” (Bell, 2002, p. 209) and socio-cultural entirety.

My Academic Identity Trajectory Gatekeepers, especially editors, are generally core members of their academic communities rather than peripheral (newcomer) members and possess greater symbolic capitals (in Bourdieusian sense) in their social field and the bigger field of power compared to other members. That is why they have obtained the trust and recognition of their thought collective and peers in adjudicating and certifying discipline-specific knowledge and scholarship. From an academic identity trajectory, this position of power is undergirded by (a) their intellectual strand (widely known expertise in a specific field and a good record of relevant scholarship, publications, and citations), (b) their networking strand (research and publication collaboration with local and international collaborators and membership on editorial boards and committees), and (c) institutional strand (teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities and relationships in one’s local context). Looking at my academic identity through this lens, I did not fit this general profile of gatekeepers in different respects as unlike other gatekeepers (and all of the scholars in this volume) I am a younger and early-career member of my academic community with growing cultural and symbolic capital and recognition

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and a still-expanding professional network. In what follows, I will look at the strands of my academic identity trajectory individually and in more detail to trace the ways in which my editorial identity developed.

Intellectual Strand A Safe Swim I completed my doctoral studies at a university in Canada and my research area and focus was on academic writing and scholarly publication. This part of my education was built upon an extensive collection of both educational and professional experiences in language education and administrating ESL/EFL programs in different international contexts. Although publication was not a requirement during the doctoral program, I had a few publications based on my MA research when I got into the doctorate and a couple more in the pipeline which came out in the early years of my doctoral tenure. Needless to say that, I had done those (co)publications because of the encouragement of my MA instructors. That is, as a novice scholar, I did not know or pay too much attention to the significance of academic output for one’s academic life or career. However, I was somehow familiar with the publication process thanks to my limited experience (legitimate peripheral participation) in scholarly publication and navigating the review process. My prior interest in academic writing and later inquisitiveness about knowledge production and circulation in the doctoral program inspired me to not only study and research the geopolitics of knowledge economy at a global scale but also develop a deeper understanding of the sociocultural and academic implications of scholarly publication for my and other scholars’ academic life. This interest led to my doctoral research into scholarly publication practices of novice scholars in the Canadian academic context and consequent funded international research into scholarly publication of English as an additional language (EAL) scholars in international academic contexts. This growing scholarship played a key role in orienting my scholarly trajectory and shaping my academic identity as a researcher in the field of ERPP. It also led to a couple of

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publications in ERPP. However, I think that the most important lesson from my research in ERPP was that in addition to the knowledge and expertise required for scholarly productivity, it is one’s agentive role and resilience that makes scholarly publication possible. So, this understanding as well as my developing knowledge in ERPP helped me in strategizing for my future academic and publication trajectory in general and intellectual strand in particular. On the one hand, I was a novice scholar who was exploring ERPP and on the other I was a junior academic who wanted to publish and be productive. Accordingly, I decided to start with low-stakes genres such as book reviews to both develop more expertise in the publishing game, avoid burnout and discouragement, and socialize more into high-stakes genres. I reached out to some academic journals and the Linguist List (a free online resource for linguists) and requested to review books for them. This strategy worked very well for me in a number of ways: I (a) received state of the art materials (for free) in my area which enhanced my developing knowledge of my field, (b) developed a better understanding of discursive dimensions of the book review as a new academic genre with its rhetorical contours, (c) learned how to deal and negotiate with book review editors (the gatekeepers), (d) got familiar with the role and responsibilities of the book review editor from the moment of assigning a book for review to the time it is out in print, that is, the Discourse (Gee, 2015) of book review editing (the ways of thinking, talking, and valuing), and last but not least (e) saw that my resilience and agentive approach worked which in turn raised my self-confidence as a junior scholar. Needless to say that I also gained a number of publications (although less privileged) in prestigious journals and strengthened the intellectual strand of my academic identity. Most importantly, this step prepared me for the second phase of my strategic plan.

A Deeper Dive With stronger self-confidence and an insider knowledge of the inner workings of gatekeeping, I approached local and international academic journals and expressed my interest to do manuscript reviews for them.

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I think this is a very important approach in socializing into the culture of gatekeeping which many junior scholars might not be aware of. As a less-known junior scholar you are less likely to receive an invitation to review manuscripts for academic journals, especially top-tier ones. Therefore, one should take things into their hands and have the resilience and courage to approach journals and editors in the first place. One may and will get rejections and a cold shoulder, but they should keep banging on the door until it opens. My experience was not an exception in that sense. There were some editors who did not even bother to reply to the emails, to those who politely said no, to those who thought that they could try me. My academic trajectory and background as someone who was studying ERPP and with a limited record of publications was a good asset in that respect. I knew that I had the necessary knowledge and expertise in my field and a preliminary conceptual understanding of the review process which I was garnering from my ERPP research, but I also needed someone to trust me and give me the opportunity to put my knowledge into practice. I think that I was fortunate that a few local and also international journals (not very high impact ones though) were generous enough to trust me and add me to their pool of reviewers. This was a very important epoch in my intellectual trajectory and also a challenging one. It was important because I developed a first-hand experience in the inner workings of the gatekeeping system from the time when I was invited to review a manuscript to the time when the paper got published. I developed literacies about different aspects of manuscript review process including: (a) digital literacy, the digital managerial system that academic journals use nowadays to streamline the review process, (b) socio-political literacy, my position and role in the gatekeeping field of power and in the structure of knowledge adjudication and certification, and of course (c) discursive literacy, rhetorical and formal configuration of a network of genres that constitute and materialize the discourse of reviewing including emails exchanged among gatekeepers and authors at different stages of the review process, behind the scene interactions and discussions between reviewers and editors that are occluded to authors, and most importantly the review report genre.

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Digital literacy was the least challenging of all three as most journals currently use a few editorial management systems with minor differences in terms of interface or affordances and limitations. The discursive literacy was not a big challenge either as the academic discourse was one of my research interests and are as, and I just had to pay attention to those patterned social uses of language. I struggled with the discursive aspect of the review report a bit at the beginning. However, I read the growing literature on the discourse analysis of the review report genre. I also paid attention to the review reports that the second (or third) reviewer had written on the same manuscript I had reviewed (and the editor shared with me) and used it as a template to develop my own review report. This helped me to develop a good understanding of the discursive practices and generic forms expected in this role. In other words, editors and reviewers as members of my CoP facilitated my LPP in developing the peer review literacy. Finally, socio-political literacy was (and somehow still is) the challenging part of the gatekeeping practice. In terms of socio-political literacy, I think it takes novice reviewers quite some time to learn the Discourse (valued epistemologies, methodologies, and discussions) of each individual journal for which they are peer reviewing. Because although the scope and aims of each journal are explicitly delineated on their websites and are meant to give a coherent streamlined picture of how things work, there are a lot of variations and idiosyncrasies in terms of how they are interpreted and implemented. In other words, the digital machine streamlines the review process for all the stakeholders (authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers). However, it is humans that run the machine and their individual ideologies and imaginings are an inseparable and influential part of the technical system. For me learning the culture and the value system was one of the challenges of the job. In time, I learned (and still learning) that reviewers are at the top of the power hierarchy in the knowledge certification system sometimes even higher than editors and how their verdicts can determine the fate of the submissions and their authors. As a novice scholar who was also trying to improve his own publication profile, this question always occupied my mind (and still does) that behind this blinded manuscript may be a junior scholar like me who is desperate for publishing to get a more stable job, a promotion, a salary raise, or employment. So how can I, on

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the one hand, keep the gates of my disciplinedom from so-called deviant discourses and practices and protect the journal’s mandate and on the other open the same gates for newcomers and scaffold their LPP. More importantly, how can I get the editor(s) who is my social superior in this field of power to see things as I do and do not consider me as a careless gatekeeper who is letting in the Trojan Horse? This was a very complicated situation for me. On the one hand, I was a gatekeeper with some decision-making power in the peer review process. On the other hand, I was a junior scholar and had to think about myself and my own academic trajectory first rather than how I am impacting others’ academic trajectories. So in this case, I decided to play by the book and hope that by doing my job meticulously I am both helping my discourse community (Swales, 1990) and the probable novice scholar(s) who had authored the manuscript. This aspect of my role as a reviewer has had a very important impact on my academic trajectory and my identity as an editor. Now as an editor, I think I am in a much better position and possess much more socio-cultural capital to make a change. I can both keep the gates and more importantly open them for other junior and early-career scholars, especially those who are socio-culturally disadvantaged or marginalized, and facilitate their LPP for contributing to disciplinary discussions as authors and also adjudicating those discussions as reviewers.

Networking Strand Although I am talking about different strands of my academic identity trajectory individually here, it is noteworthy that in reality those strands develop in parallel, constitute, and intersect each other. The doctoral program is usually one of the early socialization contexts in which idealistically not only writing and publishing literacies can develop (Cotterall, 2011; Paré, 2010) but also the networking strand of one’s academic trajectory shapes and extends. In other words, it is an ideal context for LPP in which novice scholars can engage in the practices of their CoP and under the supervision of their supervisors and more established peers develop both their intellectual and networking strands. Supervisor are among the first networking brokers that help junior scholars forge

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their first professional connections, find their thought collectives, and expand their networking strand. I said idealistically, because realistically, it all depends on the doctoral context, the identities of your immediate Cop (supervisor, instructors, peers), their conception and perception of their mentorship responsibilities, the institutional policies and practices in place for mandating and implementing such practices, and last but not least the novice scholar’s approach and resilience in availing themselves of such opportunities (Habibie, 2019; Habibie & Hyland, 2019). In my case, although academic publication was a requirement to get into the program, we were not expected to do any publishing or reviewing during the doctoral tenure. So, as I explained above, I took it on myself to socialize myself into both worlds and of course the area in which I was conducting research (ERPP) was an asset in that respect. I also had a very caring, responsible, and understanding supervisor with whom I am still in touch and consult on different issues. Although we have never collaborated together on any projects, she has always supported my networking strand by both introducing other scholars to me and spreading my name around. A very important thing that she did for me when I was a doctoral candidate was to get me to apply for a volunteer role as a team leader on TESOL conference’s local organizing committee (held in Toronto in 2015). The experience of working as a conference organizer and with a large group of volunteers had an important impact on my academic path afterward in different ways. I came to see conferences as not only venues for presenting scholarly works but also as LPP opportunities in which junior scholars are exposed to different discourses, academic genres, and social and behavioral norms. In other words, a different culture with its own specific etiquettes. This understanding developed more as I kept attending and presenting at different conferences internationally and paid more attention to intricacies across different conferences. More importantly, attending that conference and ensuing ones provided me with the opportunity to see in blood and flesh those scholars whose works I had read and admired (or had not), to network with like-minded people, to make friends with some of them, and expand my scholarly connections and develop my networking strand. Gradually, I almost knew everybody who was in my area of research and the research projects they were involved in.

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With that in mind, I think an important aspect of this juncture of my academic life was (and is) a growing understanding of the political and ideological landscape of my discourse community. I learned (and am learning) more and more about different epistemological and methodological (ideological) camps in my field, overt and covert camaraderies, rivalries, even hostilities among the members of my CoP. I also developed the literacy to forge those camaraderies and skills to avoid and circumvent probable rivalries and hostilities as much as possible. It helped me to understand my status in the field of power and within my disciplinary discourses, the extent of my convergence or divergence from other competing or hegemonic discourses, and their adherents. Gradually, I came to understand more who I (dis)agreed with, whose ideas and perspectives were more (dis)aligned with mine, who I like (or not) on a personal, social, or academic level, and who I would like to collaborate with (or not). One may say that you can learn those things by reading those people and your disciplinary discourses. Why would you want to spend money to go to conferences for that? My answer to them would be you gotta feel it to understand it. You learn politics by playing it not reading it. Another dimension of academic conferences for me was the book fair that includes publishers, some of whom usually sponsor academic conferences. One may think of the fair as a context to learn about the most recent academic output in one’s discipline and do some shopping. However, I think it is also a very invaluable LPP opportunity for novice and early-career scholars to learn about the areas of expertise and academic focus of individual publishers, their envisioned projects and plans, their innovations, their prestige and symbolic capital in the eye of the academic community, and of course just like academic themselves the politics and rivalries among them which one can discern from the size and location of their booth on the fair floor. Accordingly, I use(d) book fairs as an LPP process to expand my networking strand, learning about different publishers, talking to their representatives, and making more connections in my non-immediate CoP. This growing literacy of the discourses, practices, and politics of my (non)immediate academic community played a significant role in the development of my

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networking and intellectual strands as well as in my path to becoming a journal editor. Through conference networking opportunities and (presentations) and relationships that emerged from them but usually lasted much longer, I had the chance to introduce myself and mobilize my work to my peers and colleagues and co-construct my academic identity as a motivated and invested early-career scholar. The idea for initiating an academic journal emerged from my developing knowledge of the discourses of my field. In my intellectual trajectory, I saw the exigency for a dedicated scholarly venue for the emerging and fast expanding field in whose shaping and development I was also playing a role. In my networking trajectory, I shared the idea with different members of my CoP (academics and publishers), sometimes at conferences, and sought their expert opinions. My co-founding co-editor (Sue Starfield), an established and well-known member of my CoP who had attended a couple of my international conference presentations kindly supported the idea and trusted me as a newer member of her CoP. We then used the connections that we had made in our own networking trajectories to invite our editorial board members. Since the initiation of the journal, we have both worked collaboratively to network with other members of our CoP, some of them early-career scholars, to do manuscript reviews for our journal and in a way have opened the gates for others as well. In sum, conferences as only one example in one’s networking strand serve as an important LPP opportunity, especially for novice and early-career scholars, where life-long personal and academic relationships, scholarly collaborations, and unimaginable professional opportunities can be developed.

Institutional Strand The theoretical lens of academic identity trajectory highlights the significance of this strand in providing access to resources and facilitating or constraining one’s intellectual and networking strands. In my case, the privilege of studying and working in a global North academic context definitely provided me with extensive free access to state of the art

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scholarship and literature, technological innovations for searching, data mining, and data management which in turn have supported the intellectual strand of my identity development. My teaching and service responsibilities, although in the broader disciplines of Applied Linguistics and TESOL and not necessarily relevant to my area of focus (ERPP), have helped me connect with scholars in Canadian and international academic contexts and provided me with opportunities for further scholarly exchange and collaboration. This strand has also provided me with financial support (limited though) to travel to conferences, learn about new developments in my research area, and meet international scholars developing both my intellectual and networking strands. Most importantly, my research has constantly been supporting my intellectual development and connecting me to like-minded people who can help me in the capacity of authors, reviewers, co-editors in my scholarly projects and in my work as a journal editor. A cursory look at the editorial board of JERPP and my projects clearly indicates that I have been working with many scholars from different international academic contexts. From my own personal perspective and experience, the institutional strand is significant in two respects. First, as I explained above, it provides one with access to different human and material resources that can scaffold one’s academic identity development in general and intellectual and networking strand in particular. More importantly, it is the recognition that it brings to the individual scholar, especially junior scholars or earlycareer researchers. That is, it shows other members of one’s discourse community that their intellectual identity is recognized and valued in a specific academic context and among a number of like-minded people (the networking base). This is not to mean that if one is a freelance researcher with no institutional affiliation, they are not intellectually or collectively recognized or valued. It means that whether we like or not in this neoliberal academic order with its stringent ranking regimes, academics are also ranked and measured by the system (and their peers) and an important ranking criteria is the institution for which one works. This recognition has a major impact on how your intellectual work is received in your CoP and to what extent you can extend your networking strand. Therefore, it is obvious that this issue is key for novice scholars and early-career researchers and can render the course of their academic

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identity trajectory easy or difficult to navigate. In my case, I was lucky to be affiliated with a recognized academic institution as both a doctoral candidate and an early-career scholar. I think, this recognition also played a key role and facilitated my intellectual and networking development to becoming a gatekeeper and in my relationship with (non)immediate members of my CoP. One of the under-represented aspects of the academic identity trajectory framework though is one’s learning experience within their institutional trajectory and the role of their institutional policies and practices in what they have become. As a journal editor, I can say that my institutional trajectory had a dual role in that respect. On the one hand, as I explained above, it provided me with the access and recognition that I needed for becoming a journal editor. However, when I look at my trajectory during my doctoral tenure, I see a gap in terms of socialization in the Discourse of publishing and gatekeeping. In other words, my institutional strand did not prepare me for who I am now. There were no policies and practices to educate me how to write scholarly papers, and how to navigate the review process, let alone how to become a reviewer or an editor. In the absence of that kind of support, I had to take the responsibility and resort to sink or swim strategy and my own resilience to trod my trajectory. I think this is something that is missing from the identity trajectory of many gatekeepers and needs immediate attention and response in educational policies and practices. Gatekeepers are not born, they become one by education and training.

Coda This reflective account of how I became the founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes may provide a general picture of the development of my academic identity trajectory. It may also seem pretty straightforward and an American dream cliche for a privileged scholar in a global North academic context. That is, studying in a global North university, getting a doctoral degree, working at another (or the same) privileged university, and ascending the ladder of success to an editorial position. This way of looking at it, I would say, is very

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simplistic and reductionist, and prioritizes the structure (the system) over the agency (the individual i.e., I ) in my academic identity trajectory. As my story indicated, I did not underestimate the structural and systematic supports that scaffolded my becoming an editor. They definitely afforded me different opportunities for development. However, it was my motivation, resilience, perseverance, and efforts against all the intellectual, networking, and institutional odds that eventuated in who I have become. In other words, it was I who in spite of all the opportunities and limitations decided that I wanted to play this game, initiated the game, and kept playing it in the face of all challenges and difficulties along the way. My (hi)story is different and noteworthy from those of many other gatekeepers in that as a junior scholar with limited social and cultural capital I had to gain the trust and recognition of my immediate CoP (i.e., other international academics) and non-immediate CoP (publishers) and get them to see my intellectual and professional potential. Organized skepticism, “temporary suspension of judgement and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria”, (Merton & Sztompka, 1996, p. 276) is an important criterion in science and academics apply this principle in verifying, adjudicating, and certifying academic work of their peers. We also know that they apply this principle in their evaluation of other academics and their social and professional relationships with them. That is, academic and intellectual trustworthiness takes time and relentless efforts to build and it was not an easy job, especially for me as a novice and early-career researcher. What made things work for me, was not definitely my position at power stratification of my CoP. But it was, I believing in myself, my constant efforts in developing my intellectual capacity and networks of support, and seizing the opportunities that my efforts opened up for me. I hope that there is some lesson in this brief (hi)story for other junior scholars and early-career researchers and more established members of different academic communities in terms of initiation and socialization into the gatekeeping practice. More importantly, I also hope that in my current position as a journal editor, I can serve as not only a gatekeeper for my academic discourse community but also use this privileged position to (a) mobilize knowledge about this (semi)occluded social practice

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and the becoming process, and (b) serve as a gate-opener and a node in the support networks of other motivated junior scholars who would like to start playing this game and become a gatekeeper/opener in the future.

References Allen-Collinson, J. (2013). Autoethnography as the engagement of self/other, self/culture, self/politics, and selves/futures. In S. Holman Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of auto-ethnography (pp. 281–299). Left Coast Press. Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35 (4), 373–395. Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL Quarterly, 36 (2), 207–213. Cotterall, S. (2011). Doctoral students writing: Where’s the pedagogy? Teaching in Higher Education, 16 (4), 413–425. Flowerdew, J., & Habibie, P. (2022). Introducing English for research publication purposes. Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (5th ed.). Routledge. Habibie, P. (2019). To be native or not to be native: That is not the question. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 35–52). Palgrave Macmillan. Habibie, P., & Hyland, K. (Eds.). (2019). Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers. Palgrave Macmillan. Kirk, D., & Kinchin, G. (2003). Situated learning as a theoretical framework for sport education. European Physical Education Review, 9 (3), 221–235. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Leavy, P., Ellis, C., & Adams, T. E. (2017). The purposes, practices, and principles of autoethnographic research. In The Oxford handbook of qualitative research (pp. 254–276). Oxford University Press. McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2011). Making meaning of diverse experiences: Constructing an identity through time. In L. McAlpine & C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral education: Research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators (pp. 173–183). Springer.

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Merton, R. K., & Sztompka, P. (1996). On social structure and science. University of Chicago Press. Paré, A. (2010). Stop the presses: Concerns about premature publication. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler, & A. Lee (Eds.), Publishing pedagogies for the doctorate and beyond , (pp. 30–46). Routledge. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press. Wall, S. S. (2016). Toward a moderate autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15 (1), 1–9.

4 To the Inner Circle and Back Again: An Autoethnographically-Oriented Narrative of an EAL’s Identity Trajectory and Professional Development from Novice Researcher to Research Auditor Rosa M. Manchón

My Journey into Autoethnography. How This Autoethnography Came About Writing this chapter has been a rather demanding and yet a most motivating intellectual experience. The challenge has derived in part from the fact that this is the first time I have ever attempted to write an autoethnographically oriented narrative, and in part from the intrinsic difficulty of reflecting on one’s own professional development and practices intelligently. Despite these difficulties, it has been a truly enjoyable intellectual journey, one that started with my reading of the experts and the resulting full awareness of the multiple dimensions involved in attempting to produce a rigorous, effective, and ethically-sound R. M. Manchón (B) University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_4

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autoethnography. Early in my reading/writing process I learned from Ellis et al. (2011) that an autoethnography ought to be “aesthetic and evocative, engage readers, and use conventions of storytelling such as character, scene, and plot development” (p. 4). Denshire (2013) also taught me that it is not only that autoethnographers “seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience”, but also that “autoethnographic writing can be simultaneously personal and scholarly, evocative and analytical, descriptive and theoretical” (pp. 3–4). The complexity of the task increased when I realized that I could only modestly attempt to put into practice some of the writing strategies that Tedlock (2016) poses as essential in autoethnography writing, namely, personal narrative (doable, I thought, and motivating), poetic inquiry and lyric essay (both seen as unattainable from the outset), ethnodrama (far away from my capabilities, I soon concluded) and analysis (could be attempted with a certain degree of confidence although at the same time with reservations as I learned more about vulnerability considerations in autoethnographic writing, e.g. Allen-Collison, 2016). As an aside, I was motivated to attempt the personal narrative for various reasons. One is that I enjoy reading and have always learned from narratives by academics, such as the insightful bilingual experiences reported in Belcher and Connor’s (2002) book, or Ellis’s (2016a) edited collection of applied linguists’ life histories. From a different angle, I fully support the so-called “narrative turn” in Applied Linguistics research (Ellis, 2016b; Pavlenko, 2007). In my capacity as Series Editor of “Research Methods in Applied Linguistics” (RMAL, John Benjamins) my own modest contribution to this professional development has been to seek methodologically oriented, reflective narratives in the form of “authoritative accounts that foster improved understandings of the behind the scenes, inside story of the research process in Applied Linguistics” (https://benjamins.com/catalog/rmal).

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Reflection Point This might be an appropriate point to share a first reflective note on “the inner world of gatekeeping” in connection with my editorial decision to seek methodological narrative reflections for the RMAL series: Assuming editorial responsibilities allows the editor to pursue avenues s/he believes in. Being able to implement these initiatives represents a tremendous responsibility, although it undoubtedly constitutes a most creative and satisfying part of the job. It allows the editor to go beyond the (nevertheless important) routinely handling of manuscripts and proposals and pursue what s/he might consider a worthy mission for the journal or book series. Editing is thus transformed into a challenging and creative personal as well as collective project, one that is led by the editor and put into practice in collaboration with a group of committed professionals, namely, editorial board members, authors, and external reviewers. This creative and collective nature of the enterprise is a key dimension of the inner world of gatekeeping I consider worth emphasizing at this early juncture and one I will reiterate at various points throughout the chapter. Returning to my reading/self-reflection/writing process while writing this chapter, there was a point when I realized that the autoethnographically oriented narrative I thought I was expected to produce would and should be different in its format and purpose from some of those I was reading, admittedly limited in number as my reading list included only those reported in Chawla and Rawlins (2004), Sánchez-Martín and Seloni (2019) collaborative autoethnography, and Wall (2008), as well as most of the autoethnographies included in Holman-Jones et al. (2016) Handbook of Autoethnography. Thus, I did not intend to embrace autoethnography as a research approach that uses “narrative as a source of empowerment and a form of resistance to counter the domination and authority of canonical discourses” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 749, cited in Wall, 2008. See Adams et al. (2017), for a full analysis of the purposes of autoethnography). Instead, my intention was to make use of autoethnography as a means to “articulate insider knowledge of cultural experience” (Admas et al., 2017, p. 3) and as a “useful vehicle for injecting personal knowledge into a field of expert voices” (Wall, 2008, p. 50), namely, the core of expert voices in this book.

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I finally decided that the personal/insider knowledge I could attempt to inject into the book through narration and analysis would be an exploration of a dual voyage, as reflected in the title of my chapter: “To the inner circle and back again”, that is, (i) my journey as an English as an additional language (EAL), “outer-circle” scholar joining and socializing into an “inner circle” community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and (ii) the return journey to my own (inner? outer?) circle, when I would reflect on how the capital gained in and through my editorial experience and practice in the international arena was subsequently transformed and made use of in a new academic space. This approach is congruent with Mc.Alpine and Amindsen’s (2018) conception of “identity trajectory” as involving “change through time as individuals work toward their goals and learn from experience, which ultimately influence the evolution of their goals” (p. 33), an idea also echoed in Tardy’s (2016) view of identity as always being “socially situated, changing in relation to the contexts and interactions that we move among” (p. 351), hence the relevance of exploring “the social spaces of identity construction to understand it as a dynamic processes” (p. 354). This is my intention in this chapter.

Reflection Point 1. In connection with identity trajectory considerations, professional practice as an auditor of research gradually results in the development of a set of beliefs that guides not only one’s own work but also one’s own practices when accrediting the work of others. My own decisionmaking on the focus of this chapter reported above in effect reflects my attempt to find a way of contributing to the internal coherence of this volume, in my view one of the defining characteristics of a solid collective project and, hence, a key element I look for when asked to evaluate book proposals or journal special issue proposals, i.e., I expect to find a convincing articulation of the plan for an internally coherent, robust contribution to the field. Yet, ethical tensions surface at times when assessing the work of others on the basis of one’s own beliefs. In my own experience, this has been especially the case when

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evaluating early career scholars’ publication proposals, which may well constitute their first attempt to put together a publication project. To the question of where to set the gatekeeping limits in these cases, my answer (right or wrong) has always been to act in congruence with the values of my accepted role/identity as a “custodian” of research (Paltridge & Starfield, 2019, p. 253) and research quality standards. Another way of solving my own ethical dilemmas in connection with emerging researchers has been to contribute to the best of my capabilities to professional initiatives intended to help and guide less expert researchers navigate the academic world, especially with (numerous by now) publishing and professional development workshops at international conferences and at various universities in my own country any time my contribution has been requested. I have also collaborated with AAAL’s (American Association for Applied Linguistics) initiatives resulting from the association’s commitment toward putting the younger generation of applied linguists center stage, to promote initiatives intended to give voice to new comers to the field, and to facilitate their sense of becoming, being, and belonging. This is, in my view, a dimension of the inner world of gatekeeping worth emphasizing for early career scholars, part of the intended audience of this book. 2. What one learns in one’s professional practice as an auditor of research feeds back into one’s own scholarly work and practice: Service to the profession in the capacity of the auditor of the research of others has been and continues to be for me a most enriching academic (as well as personal) experience. It has constituted a key element in my professional development and it has also been instrumental when the time came to helping and guiding others in my nearest academic circle, especially the early career scholars in the research team I lead at my own university. Sharing with them what I may have learned from significant others along the way, as well as from and through my own professional practice as a “gatekeeper”, has been immensely rewarding. I suppose this pedagogic dimension is a building block incorporated into the process of my identity construction as a custodian of research.

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Considering all of the above, in what follows I offer a synthetic narration of and reflection on selected key points in my professional development, which I will approach from the dual lens advanced earlier, that is, my professional practice in the international research community, as well as in my local research context/culture. Similar to what others have reported in their own autoethnographies, I have relied on the “memories of my lived experience” (Wall, 2008, p. 45) as I decided to adopt Ellis et al.’s (2011) idea of recalling “epiphanies”, that is “remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life” (p. 2). Keeping with ethical considerations in autoethnographically oriented research (I have been especially inspired by Ellis et al. (2011); Roth, 2009; Tullis, 2016, and Wall, 2008), I asked for permission from those colleagues whose names appear in what follows, who also had the opportunity to both have an advance view of my autoethnography, and respond to it if they wished to do so.

The Outward Journey: To the Inner Circle EPIPHANY 1: Initiating the Journey Sometime after completing my PhD, I decided to submit an article based on it to a prestigious journal. This experience constitutes an epiphany due to the profound influence it has had in my subsequent professional practice in the world of gatekeeping. I should start by noting that my doctoral research training and initial disciplinary enculturation shared none of the features in Habibie’s (2019) description of enriching mentorship and literacy development as a “long enculturation process wherein junior scholars are socialized into the discourses and literacy practices of their target academic discourse communities through explicit instruction and/or in apprenticeship-like relationships with more experienced members of their community of practice” (Habibie, 2019, p. 41). At that time, people around me simply did not publish internationally and I had not established any kind of

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links with professional or research networks beyond those of my own department and the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics. Nevertheless, I eventually decided to attempt to publish what I thought was worth sharing with the experts: a position paper on the research methodology implications of the work on communication strategies that I had conducted for my PhD. I am led to think that I intuitively realized these methodological considerations constituted the real contribution of my PhD, although I had never been explicitly made aware of “contribution to the field” being the sine qua non of a potential candidate for publication in a prestigious journal. Coincidentally, one of my most motivating professional projects at this much later stage in my career is precisely my editorship of a book series entirely devoted to research methods. I might be ending a journey initiated when I was a young researcher. The paper was submitted to a (then and now) flagship journal and was sent out for external review (I did not possess then the relevant clues to interpret what this means in the publication processes as opposed to a desk rejection). Eventually, the outcome of the review process came to me: The paper had been rejected. There were two elements in this experience related to the Editor and one of the reviewers that explain why I consider this experience constitutes an epiphany in my trajectory. Let us start with the Editor. The rejection letter I received stated that the focus of the article submitted was “topical”, adding that perhaps it was “too topical”. I could not make full sense of what that meant (but see Reflection point 3 below). Even more consequential, not long after the paper was rejected, I received with amazement an invitation from the same Editor to review submission to the journal, which I interpreted positively, i.e., as a sign that for this Editor there was some worth in the manuscript I had submitted, despite the fact that it had been rejected. I had the opportunity to meet the Editor not long after I had submitted my review and I was puzzled to hear that my review had been “very helpful”. Why and how was a mystery to me then. It was not until much later that I learned about the key role played by external reviewers in the entire publication process and in assisting editors in taking their editorial decisions as to publication.

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Despite the rejection, the experience was undoubtedly a positive one in terms of self-steam and self-confidence. There was, however, a not so positive side to this rejection. I am referring to the evaluation comments provided by one of the reviewers, whose words I can still echo: “I finished reading this paper and I asked myself what I have learned from it. And the answer is nothing”. I must admit I was discouraged from attempting to publish internationally for some time. At that time, as is still the case with many young scholars around the world, I did not have access to a research network I could share the outcome of the review process with, and, in the process, learn to navigate this kind of academic experience. This is why dissecting and analyzing critically rejection letters, and reflecting on how to deal with editors’ and reviewers’ comments, have constituted an integral part of the publishing workshops I have been involved in. Importantly, lack of access to professional/research networks and the impossibility of establishing what in the quote above Habibie refers to as “apprenticeship-like relationships with more experienced members of their community of practice” (2019, p. 41) is a dimension of the inner world of gatekeeping that, as a profession, we cannot afford to ignore. An additional element in this negative gatekeeping experience reported above was my reaction to the reviewers’ words at a more ideological/ethical level: the experience made me wonder about the power granted to reviewers. A long time passed before I could not only provide an answer to this question, but also learned about the right of editors to object to sharing with authors inappropriate reviewers’ comments that did not pay due respect to the author and/or to his/her work. This learning experience was primarily associated to my editorship of The Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW ), one of the most rewarding academic experiences in my entire career.

Reflection Point The half-positive, half-negative initial publishing experience constituted an epiphany worth reflecting on from two angles:

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1. Not long after I had joined Ilona Leki as Co-Editor of the JSLW (2008), we had to take an important editorial decision: whether or not to continue a professional debate that in our view had come to a halt. It might have been precisely then when I made full sense of what being “topical” and “too topical” really means when it comes to taking editorial decisions. Of relevance, it was an editorial decision taken entirely on scientific grounds, a clear example of the kind of editorial policies and practices adopted by Ilona Leki and Tony Silva, the two founding editors of the Journal of Second Language Writing, who I will never be able to thank enough for their example of ethics and professionalism. Our editorial decision on the error correction debate did not even contemplate impact factor considerations, an element that might have well come into the equation as anything published on the error correction debate was likely to be cited in the next potential paper on the issue. Incidentally, publishers’ initiatives to encourage journal editors to be cognizant of and responsive to impact factor considerations in their editorial practices is indeed worthy of attention and surely a controversial dimension of journal editing in the twenty-first Century. 2. The negative outcome of my first attempt to publish internationally has had a long-lasting effect in my future professional practice when accrediting academic output both as a reviewer and as a journal editor. I would like to single out the ethical tension that I always experienced when opting for in-house rejections, perhaps some of the most difficult decisions I had to take as Co-Editor of the JSLW . I suppose there was always the consideration of whether the individual person whose paper was going to be rejected without even being sent out for external review was in a similar situation to the one I was in when I first attempted to publish internationally: an early career scholar, without significant others around who could help him/her navigate the academic world. Similarly, it might also be the case that when I write my evaluation comments as a reviewer (a task that is approached wearing different hats if you have been an editor yourself ), I am somewhat mindful of my own lived experience reading that the reviewer had learned “nothing” from my paper. Needless to say the reviewer’s comments on my work do represent a truly exceptional way

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of expressing value judgments according to the scale of values guiding professional practices in the world of gatekeeping. Rather, the accrediting academic output is primarily a form of service to the profession driven by a sense of responsibility and by sincere ethical and ideological commitment, as I can attest I have witnessed countless times at editors’ gatherings and editorial board meetings.

EPIPHANY 2: Traveling Further. Joining and Socializing into the “Inner Circle” The second epiphany I would like to report comprises a set of lived experiences and professional opportunities that collectively constitute my full socialization into the “inner circle” community of practice. Chronologically, there was a turning point in my research trajectory when I started my team work with my dear colleagues and friends Liz Murphy and Julio Roca de Larios. As a research team (the seed of what now is a group of more than 20 researchers, very importantly including young, most dedicated, and eager to learn PhD students), Julio, Liz, and I made our way into the “inner circle”, which for us was an “outer circle”: We ventured to present our work at international conferences and to publish internationally. We gradually gained confidence not only in our capabilities but also in our potential contribution as researchers to the L2 writing community, partly due to the international recognition our research gained. This socialization into the “inner circle” community of practice eventually led to frequent invitations to review for prestigious journals and, very importantly, to Ilona Leki and Tony Silva’s invitation, first, to join the Editorial Board of the JSLW (2000) and, later, to serve as Co-Editor (2008–2014, first with Ilona Leki and later with Christine Tardy). As I mentioned earlier, I consider my editorship of the JSLW one of the greatest honors in my academic career. My activities in the world of gatekeeping have also included my service in various editorial boards of book series and journals, as well as the activities associated with my elected position as AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) Publications Coordinator,

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which entailed editing a journal, AILA Review, and a book series, the AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS). As is common in the academic world, attending requests to act as an external reviewer for conference proposals, submissions to journals, and book proposals/full book manuscripts for publishers constitute a substantial part of my routinely professional activities. I would like to single out two dimensions of my professional practice and resulting identity construction in all these capacities: The first refers to relevant changes in my identity trajectory, and the second one to the role of significant others along the way. Norton (2013) defines identity as “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (p. 45). In this respect, when I accepted the invitation to coedit the Journal of Second Language Writing, I perceived my relationship with the world of gatekeeping and the L2 writing community as that of someone coming from a dual outer circle: I viewed myself as an EAL (hence, non-native) user of English and gatekeeper, with a second language acquisition oriented, foreign language writing academic background (which did not coincide with mainstream L2 writing scholarship then). Interestingly, I perceived these two elements as constituting both affordances and potential limitations. Yet, one of the most important changes in my identity trajectory and my understanding of those possibilities for the future mentioned in Norton’s definition of identity has been that the vision of myself as an “EAL” research auditor/journal editor/reviewer just vanished with the passing of time (not that of being an EAL user, though). Together with this, I have come to perceive who I am, what I believe in, and what I do as a researcher as capital, as affordances. From a different but related angle, my identity trajectory has been greatly influenced by the collective synergies created in the collective practices that are (or, at least, I perceive as being) so integral to the inner world of gatekeeping: The effect significant others have had on my professional development and identity construction cannot be overstated. I am grateful to the encouragement received from significant others, a numerous group of much respected colleagues and by now

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many of them also friends who I will always be indebted for their tremendous support, care, and attention over the years. The collective synergies mentioned above also include the tremendous benefits I have obtained from the evaluation comments provided by external reviewers and journal editors on my/our own work when submitted for publication. Additionally, sharing co-reviewers’ comments with everyone involved in the review process of a given submission is a common and most useful practice in the world of gatekeeping that has constituted and still constitutes a continuous source of learning for me. I also feel extremely privileged to have been able to work with and learned so much from highly respected colleagues who I have had the fortune of working in close collaboration with. This includes my co-editors of the JSLW , the hundreds of reviewers who have generously assisted me during my editorship of journals and book series, and colleagues in editorial boards I have been or am part of. They have served as a continuous source of inspiration and learning.

Reflection Point The reflections I could add here would simply reiterate the truly collaborative nature of professional gatekeeping practices. This explains why, following Tardy’s (2016), identity construction as a custodian of research happens in multiple interactions with multiple social constellations. As a result, the role and influence of significant others in the development of one’s own identity as a legitimate agent in the world of gatekeeping is of paramount importance. My own experience has been a rich one in which I gradually gained cultural capital through participation in collective practices happening in diverse social constellations, practices that, as I learned from significant others along the way, ought to be guided by ethics, genuine commitment, and professionalism. As a result, joining and socializing into the inner world of gatekeeping has resulted in a two-way process in which the time and energy put into it has been significantly outweighed by the rewards obtained and the immense and invaluable capital gained.

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The Return Journey: Back to the Outer Circle EPIPHANY 3: Taking a New Route Soon after I stepped down as Co-Editor of the JSLW the opportunity for a transnational move as a custodian of research arose: I was invited to join a totally different environment for auditing research, i.e., the Spanish ministerial office governing public funding for research. It was indeed a most prestigious invitation and one that was difficult to decline. Yet, I had other plans. Basically, I had decided to do exactly what Dwight Atkinson so aptly put it in his email to me after I finished my term as Co-Editor of the JSLW . He wrote: “My hearty congratulations to you for your great achievement and thank you also for your sacrifice as editor, making it possible for many others to do their work instead of doing your own” (my emphasis). That was exactly what I had decided to do: to focus exclusively on my own work, which at that point already entailed leading the work of a fast growing research team. Yet, after deliberating much about it, I finally accepted the invitation, a decision taken for diverse ethical and academic reasons that would be long to explain. Important for our current purposes, it was a new professional avenue that, I was convinced, I would transverse in part drawing on the cultural and social capital gained in my professional practice in the inner circle. Yet, I was also aware that this capital would need to be transformed in and for the new socially situated research setting, one that was unrelated to the publication side of gatekeeping. Instead, the position entailed playing a leading role in research auditing processes (in areas of humanities covering languages, linguistics, literature and cultural studies, and philosophy) ultimately concerned with how to spend public funding in promoting research and in attracting talent. Ahead of me was a new, challenging collective project (this was one of the attractions), once again loaded with a combination of disciplinary/academic/research-oriented as well as ethical components (this made it a motivating challenge). The ethical and ideological tensions of this new service to the profession included questions of positioning (alignment with and/or challenge of?) with respect to prevailing ideologies, understood here as “dominant

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ways of thinking that organize that stabilize societies while simultaneously determining modes of inclusion and exclusion” (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 44). Looking back, I suppose I had enforced my identity as a custodian of research sufficiently to want to face (and to perceive I had the capital to be able to face) this kind of dilemma. Crucial challenges along the way have involved leading team work being fully cognizant of (and duly respecting the idiosyncrasy of ) knowledge construction practices in the different disciplinary domains that make up the Humanities (or even subdomains within disciplines, such as, for instance, historical linguistics and applied linguistics within linguistics studies, or philosophy of science and ethics within the global field of philosophy, for instance). Another crucial challenge has entailed finding ways to mobilize collective synergies to promote transparent and fair practices in the determination of modes of inclusion or exclusion. Leading collective team decisions to find a balance between due acknowledgment and due recognition of merits of leading and strong research teams, and finding ways of opening doors to emerging research groups with potential has been another challenge worth mentioning.

Reflection Point Darvin and Norton (2015) argue that “Agents are positioned in the social space based on the volume, composition, and trajectory of their capital”, adding that “As the rules of the game vary in different fields and continuously evolve, the value of one’s capital also shifts as it travels across time and space” (p. 44). I have been contributing to the Spanish national research system for 6 years in various capacities. The cultural and social capital (Darvin & Norton, 2015, 2019) gained in the inner circle in relation to scholarly publication has profoundly assisted me in my new leading role in research auditing practices taking place in a totally different environment. Yet, I perceive relevant commonalities with the world of publication gatekeeping, especially, first, professional practices guided by service to the profession and ethical commitment (counteracting whenever necessary unprofessional ideological practices regarding gatekeeping modes of inclusion and exclusion); and, second,

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the collaborative nature of committee work and, hence, the collegial enforcement of decisions regarding the fair and ethically-sound implementation of public funding policies. Over the years I have led numerous committees, at times including auditing processes for the whole of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This means that I have worked with numerous colleagues from such diverse disciplinary fields as economy and philosophy, law and classical studies, or journalism and linguistics. As in the case of the publication gatekeeping world, the experience has been and continues to be truly enriching at a personal and professional level, but also an experience that is not free from ethical tensions and dilemmas, which constitute central dimensions of the inner world of gatekeeping across spaces and domains.

Final Remarks The above narrative reflects central tensions (crucially including ethical dilemmas) as well as the positive rewards of being an agent in the world of gatekeeping. I hope it also shows that one’s gatekeeping trajectory is shaped by one’s experience as a writer and the networks, people, and contexts one comes across and interacts with and within. That is why it is not a taught practice, it is a situated and becoming practice. The spaces of action have multiplied and diversified for me over the years. I have tried to navigate these spaces by accepting and responding to challenges, in addition to attempting to improve and at times transform these spaces (always in collaboration with and learning from significant others). I have responded to these challenges with the capital gained as a result of the spaces I have traveled, the collaborative practices I have taken part in, the significant others I have met along the way, and the resulting shifting of values as my capital traveled across time and space. In this chapter I have attempted to produce a story that can add some insider’s knowledge on the inner world of gatekeeping. Yet, I am well aware that, as noted by Adams et al (2017), “Insider knowledge does not suggest that an autoethnographer can articulate more truthful or more accurate knowledge as compared to outsiders, but rather that as authors we can tell our stories in novel ways when compared to how

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others may be able to tell them” (p. 3). More importantly and more critically, I sincerely hope I have achieved even if only minimally what I consider to be one of the most attractive features of authoethnographic story telling, which, quoting other sources, Walls (2008) describes (my emphasis) as to “allow readers to feel the dilemmas, think with a story rather than about it, join actively with the author’s decision points […], and become co-participants who engage with the story line morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually” (p. 44). I express my gratitude to the book editors for the opportunity to share my story and for the enriching intellectual journey while writing it. Gracias.

References Adams, T. E., & Ellis, E., & Holman-Jones., S. (2017). Autoethnography. In J. Matthes, C. S. Davies & R. F. Potter (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of communication research methods. John Willey. https://doi.org/10.1002/978 118901731.iecrm0011 Adams, T. E., Holman-Jones, S., & Ellis, E. (2015). Autoethnography. OUP. Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 373–395. Allen-Collison, J. (2016). Autoethnography as the engagement of self/other, self/culture, self/politics, and selves/future. In S. Holman-Jones, T. E. Adams & C. Ellis (Eds.), The handbook of autoethnography (pp. 281–299). Sage. Belcher, D., & Connor, U. (Eds.). (2002). Reflections on multiliterate lives. Multilingual Matters. Chawla, D. & Rawlins, W. K. (2004). Enabling reflexivity in a mentoring relationship. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (6), 963–978. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1077800404269420 Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2019). Identity. In J. W. Schwieter & A. Benati (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of language learning (pp. 451–473). CUP. Denshire, S. (2013). Autoethnography. Sociopedia.isa. https://doi.org/10. 11771/205684601351

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Dezin, N. (2014). Interpretive autoethnography. Sage. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Authoethnography: An overview. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1). Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733–768). Sage. Ellis, R. (Ed.). (2016a). Becoming and being an applied linguist. John Benjamins. Ellis, R. (2016b). Introduction. Background to the life stories. In R. Ellis (Ed.), Becoming and being an applied linguist (pp. 1–12). John Benjamins. Habibie, P. (2019). No be native or not to be native: That is not the question. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication. Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 35–52). Palgrave MacMillan. Holman-Jones, S., Adams, T. E., & Ellis, C. (Eds.). (2016). The handbook of autoethnography. Routledge. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. CUP. Mc.Alpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2018). Identity-trajectories of early career researchers. Unpacking the post-PhD experience. Palgrave Macmillan. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Multilingual Matters. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication. Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28, 163–188. Roth, W.C. M. (2009). Auto/ethnography and the question of ethics. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10 (1). https://www.qualitative-research. net/index.php/fqs/rt/printerFriendly/1213/2645 Sánchez-Martín, C., & Seloni, L. (2019). Transdisciplinary becoming as a gendered activity: A reflexive study of dissertation mentoring. Journal of Second Language Writing, 43, 24–35. Tardy, C. (2016). Voice and identity. In R. M. Manchón & P. K. Matsuda (Eds.), The handbook of second and foreign language writing (pp. 349–363). de Gruyter Mouton. Tedlock, B. (2016). Introduction: Braiding evocative with analytic autoethnography. In S. Holman-Jones, T. E. Adams & C. Ellis (Eds.), The handbook of autoethnography (pp. 358–362). Sage.

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Tullis, J. A. (2016). Self and others: Ethics in autoethnographic research. In S. Holman-Jones, T. E. Adams & C. Ellis (Eds.), The handbook of autoethnography (pp. 244–261). Sage. Wall, S. (2008). Easier said than done: Writing an autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 7 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/160940 690800700103

5 On Becoming a Bilingual Gatekeeper: The Journey of a Francophone Editor for an English-Language Journal Guillaume Gentil

On November 21, 2013, I received an invitation from Rosa Manchón and Christine Tardy, the journal’s co-editors at the time, to replace Rosa as co-editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) at the end of her term in July 2014. Emotions came racing through my body and mind. It was unexpected, exciting, tempting, and daunting. I served in that role for three years. It was a turning point in my career, giving me unique insight into the inner world of academic publishing. In this autobiographic narrative I reflect on the contexts, opportunities, and interactions that helped me learn to review research submissions for publication in both English and French up to and during this turning point. Drawing on research into multilingual genre learning (Gentil, 2011; Tardy et al., 2020), I trace the development of my knowledge of the peer review genre to antecedent genres I was exposed to in secondary G. Gentil (B) Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_5

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school and during my postsecondary studies in biology while in France. I then recount how I expanded on this knowledge base while transitioning into new disciplinary and linguistic contexts during my graduate studies and early academic career in second language education in Canadian English-medium universities. While I have been extremely fortunate to have benefited from contexts that enabled me to grow as a bilingual scholar, serving as a co-editor of a top-tier English-medium international journal has made me keenly aware of the challenges and systemic barriers scholars from outside the Anglophone centre face in the current Englishdominated regime of knowledge production. Even as a journal editor, I felt powerless in redressing these inequities. Despite my successes, I still experience linguistic insecurities in both English and French but for different reasons. Nonetheless, after revisiting claims that linguistic injustice in academic publishing is a myth (Hyland, 2016), I try to close on a more optimistic note by drawing implications of my academic trajectory for novice reviewers in suggesting ways in which explicit instruction and mentoring might help them acquire the genre knowledge they need. While Ricoeur (1990) believes in the power of narratives to make sense of one’s life, Bourdieu (1994) questions the coherence of retrospective life narratives as a biographic illusion. The account I offer here is selective and ignores the myriad conditions and vicissitudes of my experience. Luckily, I was able to triangulate my malleable memories against the corpus of reviews I have written and received since July 2004, when I was hired as an Assistant Professor, as I have kept most of them from that time. Tardy et al.’s (2020) theoretical framework of genre knowledge and Paltridge’s (2017) multipronged study of the peer review genre also guided my introspection.

Early Academic Discourse Socialization in France I first encountered the peer review genre in France in early to mid-1990s when completing a DEA (master’s) program in plant pathology. A regular exercise was to assess published research articles, with a focus on the research methodology, the empirical backing of the findings, and the

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validity of the authors’ claims. Then one day a professor shared with the class a manuscript he had been asked to review for a journal prior to publication. With hindsight, the ethics of it was dubious, especially when it became clear that our professor viewed the authors as a competitive team he disagreed with. That was a memorable learning experience, however. Although I specialized in plant pathology, a sub-field within biology which itself interrelates with various specialisms (e.g., bacteriology, epidemiology, virology), this disciplinary induction served as a broader introduction to academic discourse and genres. My learning to peer review research articles is inseparable from learning to read, assess, conduct, and write up research. One cannot write a good peer review without a good grasp of research methodology, and that comes with formal training and research practice. The first eight months of the program were coursework; the last four were devoted to the master’s thesis project. One common challenge to both parts: reading research articles almost exclusively written in English. That year was my first intense exposure to academic English. I did not mind it because I liked English; in fact, having to read research in English even motivated me to tackle dense prose, but it was challenging, nonetheless. In the previous years, I had witnessed the anxiety that English caused among some of my classmates, which led to avoidance strategies such as not choosing a research-focused specialty like plant pathology because of the inescapability of English in science. A professor reassured those of us in the plant pathology program who did not selfselect out: “after a few years, you’ll get over that hump and English (for biology) will become easier.” Writing the thesis was challenging too, even though it was in French— the hardest writing experience I had ever had. There was the difficulty of writing from predominantly English sources. We had received no instruction on how to do this, but luckily, I was helped by the standardized, largely Graeco-Latinate terminology in biology and a few texts I found in French related to my topic, a popularized article for a science magazine, and a grant application. The most difficult part, however, was to figure out the thesis genre. I was not aware of genre theory at the time, so I could not have articulated my experience through a genre lens then, but I do remember the lab director, who supervised my thesis

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supervisor, crossing out and rewriting nearly all my abstract, explaining that an abstract is not the same as an introduction. She did the same with the results and the discussion sections. She also shortened many of my sentences, slashing out all flourishes. It did not help that I was my supervisor’s first supervisee. The lab director ended up rewriting most of my thesis days before it was due. But I developed a better understanding of the abstract-introduction-methods-results-discussion structure and concise science writing. The hard way. I wonder whether my antecedent genre knowledge for writing peer reviews could go even further back and be part of an uninterrupted web of learning that has begun with my early literacy experiences. I do not remember those very well, but I do remember recurrent writing exercises in secondary school and at the college level which may well have served as foundations for peer reviews. The commentaire composé was a type of literary analysis that taught me to analyze texts from multiple angles, not unlike peer reviews that require assessing a manuscript from multiple dimensions (e.g., framing, methodology, significance, organization, style). The dissertation was a pervasive argumentative genre across the curriculum (French, philosophy, history, and even biology) that helped me attend to logical reasoning and the backing of claims, another essential component of assessing research articles. I have never made explicit connections between these school genres and the peer review of research articles until now, and it is unclear how and how much I have made them unconsciously. What is clear is that I had much writing experience to draw on when I was first faced with a research article to review, including an understanding of how to engage with texts and arguments that developed from years of textual practice.

Crossing the Pond, Changing Disciplines There were both continuities and changes in my later academic discourse socialization when I relocated to North America, first to work as a research intern in a plant pathology laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994–1996) and then to undertake graduate studies in second language education at McGill University, Montréal

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(1996–2002). Transitioning from biology to applied linguistics was a major disciplinary shift, but from the perspective of my academic writing development, I believe that it expanded, rather than clashed with, the repertoire of disciplinary and genre knowledge I had been building up. In my second language acquisition course, with Nina Spada, we would weekly dissect empirical research articles and their research methodologies, an exercise which was essentially the same as what I had practised in my plant pathology courses and which continued to provide excellent training for the writing of peer reviews. The experimental research designs were also similar, but I learned new research designs (e.g., quasi-experimental design, survey designs, case studies) as well as new ways to collect and analyze language data with human participants. A course in ethnographic and qualitative research methods, with Mary Maguire, who would then become my MA thesis and PhD dissertation supervisor, further opened a whole new world of research, making me aware of options and tensions among epistemologies and paradigms in both the natural and human sciences. Writing my MA thesis also built on and expanded the genre knowledge I had gained in writing my M.Sc. thesis. Like my first thesis, my second thesis followed the Introduction-Methods-Result-Discussion organization, but in disguise and more loosely, with adaptations. For example, only the methodology chapter was explicitly labelled as such, the results and discussion were combined in one chapter, and the thesis was framed by a “prologue” and an “epilogue” of a more personal, self-reflective nature. I believe that by learning new disciplinary ways I have developed flexibility in my genre knowledge as well as an appreciation for options in conducting and reporting research, both of which inform how I engage in peer reviewing submissions for publication today.

Earlier Manuscript Review Experiences According to my CV, the first review I wrote was for a Special Issue of the Canadian Modern Language Review (CMLR) in 2002, when I was finishing my doctoral studies, but I have lost this review and all recollections of it. My second review, which I still have, was also for

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CMLR. It dates from 2005, a time when I began reviewing regularly, first mostly for Canadian journals (most often for CMLR but also the TESL Canada Journal and the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics), and then a few years later quickly branching out to about 15 journals in applied linguistics, TESL, and writing studies (e.g., Applied Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, JSLW, Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, Written Communication). From 2005 onward, I also became a regular reviewer of conference paper proposals for the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics and American Association for Applied Linguistics, a regular examiner of MA theses, and an occasional external assessor of research grants. I thus quickly gained experience as a reviewer in several contexts, but I remember groping for ways to write manuscript reviews for a few years. At first, I had very few examples to draw on, in part because I received more requests for reviews than I had submitted manuscripts for publication myself. My first major publication was with Written Communication in 2005, but the reviews I had received were short and unhelpful. What proved to be most helpful was the letter from the editor, Christina Haas, who, in about a page, identified my main difficulty in reframing a 480page dissertation for a 50-page journal article and gave me both an opportunity and clear guidance for a complete rewrite in a month. I rewrote the manuscript from scratch, the newer version was accepted with minor language edits upon resubmission, and I shall forever remain indebted for the feedback and chance Haas gave me. Unfortunately, in my later experience as a journal editor, I have seen too many authors revise their submissions only superficially when the reviewers and I had endeavoured to offer guidance for major revisions. With no good review examples to draw on when writing my peer review for CMLR in 2005, the strategy I used was to follow the criteria given by the journal, and I stated this explicitly in my preview: “I organized my assessment according to the criteria suggested by the CMLR’s editorial board.” I wrote one to four paragraphs about each criterion, identified with numbered headings, and concluded with an overall recommendation. I later discovered that the other review had adopted the same structure and reached a similar recommendation, which must have reassured me as an inexperienced reviewer. It was slightly longer

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than mine (3.5 pages vs. 2.5 pages). It did not have an explicit text preview but included 12 sources to consult with full references (when I had only identified authors and dates). It also identified each criterion being assessed with a section heading but without numbering the headings. This analysis illustrates another strategy that I have been using to learn how to write reviews: I always read the other reviews for the manuscript that I review, whenever the journal editors make them available (which I think they should). I do this not only out of curiosity, to see how much we have agreed and what I may have missed, and thus to sharpen my peer-reviewing skills, but also to learn more about how others engage with the occluded peer review genre, paying attention to organization, tone, and phraseology, among other rhetorical and interpersonal features. If I were to write the same review now, I might include my main recommendation to the author and editor in the first paragraph, rather than postponing it until the end as both I and the other reviewer did. In his analysis of the structure of reviewers’ reports, Paltridge (2017) finds some variation in the rhetorical units or “moves” identified and their order, particularly with move 4, the recommendation for or against publication often coming first in positive reviews but coming either first or last in unfavourable reviews. It is interesting that my reviews follow the overall move patterns described by Paltridge, including variation in the position of move 4, even though I had never read a move analysis of reviewers’ reports on manuscript submissions prior to reading his book. Somehow common and variable move patterns must be called for by the exigence of the rhetorical situation, an observation I will return to later when drawing implications for reviewer training. Reading my earlier reviews further reveals some interesting variations, as if I were experimenting with this unfamiliar genre. For example, another review I wrote for CMLR a year later, in 2006, also in French, is structured exactly as the 2005 CMLR review, which suggests that I used the earlier review as a template. However, this time I provided the full references of the sources I cited for the authors’ benefit (likely taking my cue from the 2005 reviewer). When I later reviewed a revised version of the same manuscript, I continued to organize my review around the CMLR assessment criteria, but I did so more implicitly, without

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signalling the criteria by headings or in my text preview, just mentioning the aspect under focus at the beginning of each paragraph (e.g., “in the discussion,” “with regard to form”). In later reviews for CMRL, I no longer used the CMLR criteria as an organization template. Instead, in a 2007 review, I recommended a reject by stating this recommendation clearly and then providing two main reasons. In a 2008 review, I recommended publication with revisions, but my review had only two main subheadings: Organization (with six numbered paragraphs) and “Specific comments on text” (with 16 numbered comments following the text sequence). I must have felt that organization was the main aspect that needed revision. It seems that as I was increasingly exposed to variation in the manuscript review genre, I began to structure my own reviews more freely but with lingering uncertainty. I suspect the instructions provided by the journals also played a role, with some journals being more specific than others. For example, as early as 2005, I wrote a review for Alternate Routes: A Journal for Critical Social Research which also departed from the organizational template I had used the same year for CMLR. Instead of slavishly following the journal’s assessment criteria, it adopted the overall organization described by Paltridge (2017): article summary (move 2 in Paltridge’s scheme), relevance of the article for the target journal (move 1), suggestions and comments (move 3), and final recommendation (move 4). In yet another review, in 2007, for the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, I completed, as requested, the detailed rubric and recommendation form I was provided, along with “a one or two page evaluation expand[ing] on [my] judgment with respect to each of the points in the detailed guide.” While the earlier reviews I received as an author had not been good examples for me to draw on as a developing reviewer, later reviews proved more helpful. As I was still struggling with the rhetorical problem of how to best organize my assessments, I received, in 2013, a review on a manuscript I had submitted to the Journal of English for Academic Purposes which provided a breakthrough: Below are my comments on the article. I very much hope to be of help with these comments. Please note that my comments will progress from

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the introduction to the conclusion section, following the organization of the article instead of being divided into ’global’ and ’specific’ comments (the latter including stylistic issues). So, my comments on content issues are given together with comments on stylistic issues. I believe this organization (following the organization of the paper) will be more useful for the authors.

This metadiscursive comment stayed with me, first because I appreciated the reviewer’s effort to find ways to be most helpful, and second because it drew explicit attention to organization. The review was indeed helpful. However, even though comments followed the manuscript sequence, the introductory paragraphs also made it clear that the discussion was the main section that needed strengthening. Therefore, the review still managed to distinguish between priority higher-order concerns and more secondary concerns. This review crystallized for me the emergent and hitherto largely tacit insight that my own reviews would benefit from being structured along two axes: from most to least important and by following the organization of the article. Within these two guiding principles, it also became increasingly clear that reviews are best structured in whatever ways best meet the need of the manuscript at hand. However, I do not think I had these insights clearly formulated in my mind until the opportunity arose to reflect on my reviewing practices as I am writing this chapter. As I was learning to review by reading reviewers and reviewer guidelines and writing reviews for an increasing number of journals, there was also trial and error. One strategy that did not work well was to provide in-text comments inserted in the MS Word document. When I had first tried it in 2005 for Alternate Routes, the editor did not react to it, so I tried again in 2008, this time for CMLR. The handling editor disliked it and dissuaded me from doing it again. When I became co-editor of JSLW, however, I discovered that some editorial board members routinely provide in-text comments, and that such contextualized feedback could be helpful for both editors and authors, especially when online submission systems do not automatically add line numbers for ease of reference. Because making specific references can be fastidious, I sometimes omit

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the more minor comments such as suggestions for clearer formulations, even though they could be of benefit. In short, assessing research for a variety of journals and contexts (e.g., conference abstracts, grant proposals) exposed me to a range of reviewer guidelines, giving me increasing latitude to adapt the review genre as I saw fit, and yet made me aware of commonalities emerging from this apparent diversity. Despite variations in the details, reviewing an empirical research report invariably seems to boil down to assessing the significance of the research questions and findings for specialist readers and other stakeholders, which itself hinges on the quality of the framing within ongoing disciplinary conversations, the strength of the research methodology, and the clarity of the report.

Becoming a Journal Editor Joining the editorial board of JSLW in 2010 was an honour. Rosa Manchón and Christine Tardy’s invitation to replace Rosa as co-editor of JSLW came as a complete surprise. It was both tempting and daunting and would prove to be an incredible foray into the behind-the-scenes world of academic gatekeeping. However, before I could accept there were important arrangements to make with the publisher, Elsevier, and my university. I was aware of the time demands the co-editorship would require, and I needed at least one course release to make it happen. The contractual and financial negotiations among publishers, editors, and universities are rarely discussed, and yet central to academic publishing. After several months of negotiation, it became clear that neither the publisher nor my university would be willing to contract a course buyout, leaving me to negotiate with both parties a more complex and less favourable arrangement whereby I would use Elsevier’s honorarium to partly cover the invoice the university would charge me for a course buyout annually. Securing funds to hire a graduate student as an editorial assistant proved difficult each year as well. Notorious profit margins did not help to endear Elsevier to my dean or chair. In the end, my three-year term as JSLW co-editor resulted in a major workload increase with less pay. I was able to afford such a high level of underpaid service

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to the profession because of my government-subsidized tenured faculty salary. From Bourdieu’s social theory perspective, I had economic capital (money) to invest to acquire symbolic and cultural capital: the status and knowledge associated with the co-editorship. As I began to realize how academic publishers charged the public and publicly funded institutions for research work and volunteer reviewer labour they had paid for, I became an uneasy participant in the diversion of public funds for private and corporate interests. But I was already locked in. When I was negotiating my contract, I only saw a wonderful learning opportunity—and I learned so much—and looked for ways to make it happen. I never got to see financial statements showing the journal’s expenses and revenue. The publisher did provide, however, annual reports with detailed statistics about submissions, downloads, acceptance and rejection, and indicators of editors’ productivity such as the number of articles handled and time taken from submission to final disposition, increasing the pressure to work faster. Once my contract was finalized (four months after the invitation email), I began shadowing Rosa and Chris, weighing in on submissions and reading correspondence with authors and Elsevier’s managerial assistant and journal manager. I benefited enormously from this period of “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and even after replacing Rosa as co-editor, I continued to learn from working closely with Chris for two years. I remain extremely grateful to Rosa and Chris for their mentorship. I read all their correspondence with authors carefully, attending to form, content, organization, voice, and phraseology. I became aware of the delicate situations journal editors sometimes find themselves in case of disagreements among reviewers, authors, and editors. As JSLW founding co-editor Ilona Leki (2003) observed, a journal editor is “more like a door (wo)man than a gatekeeper,” orchestrating and arbitrating among authors, reviewers, and readers and occasionally feeling discomfort in this arbitrator role (p. 126). Members of the JSLW editorial board could be counted on for their excellent reviews given their familiarity with the field of second language writing and their inclination to help authors as writing specialists. But they did not always agree. It was also often necessary to invite reviewers with expertise in the topic of the submission but from outside the editorial

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board. Their reviews were less predictable, especially when they were first-time reviewers for JSLW. Part of the difficulty in finding reviewers was related to a relentless flow of submissions. Even as we tried to increase desk rejections, more submissions inevitably resulted in a greater need for reviewers, when they themselves became more solicited by other journals. The number of submissions received by JSLW increased from 40 in 2007 to 175 in 2010 and 285 in 2015 (and it has kept increasing since). However, the editorial team had remained the same since the inception of the journal in 1992, with two co-editors at the helm. What became quickly evident to me was that the editorial capacity had not kept pace with the submission volume, making some of the journal’s former practices less sustainable, such as co-editors working closely with each other, authors, and guest editors of special issues. One of my contributions to the journal has been to help convince Elsevier to increase the editorial capacity to two co-editors and two associate editors, with a rotating model allowing more time for the new members of the editorial team to be mentored with a reduced load as associate editors before they become co-editors.

My Current Bilingual Peer Reviewing Practices Reading hundreds of submission reviews during my co-editorship consolidated my understanding of commonalities and variations in this genre. When I review now, I let myself be guided by this goal: What could be the best way to help journal editors with their decision and to help authors with their submission, whether it will be published this time round or not, bearing in mind current disciplinary conversations and target readers’ interests and expectations? How can I help as I would want to be helped? While I tend to follow the overall organization principles that I described earlier (most important first, then from beginning to end of the manuscript), I also allow each review to emerge as a response to what I see as the unique demands of the submission. Based on a survey, one of reviewers’ greatest challenges is to find ways to be both critical and constructive (Paltridge, 2017). While I can relate to this difficulty, an even greater challenge for me is to express in

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words, as clearly and economically as possible, intuitions about why and how certain aspects of the submission could benefit from improvements, especially when I see authors struggle to showcase a research study with good potential. The challenge lies not only in making explicit intuitive and tacit knowledge about research writing but also in the realization that research writing, like other forms of writing, is solving ill-defined writing problems with more than one possible solution. The trick then is to suggest possible avenues, for example, for reframing, restructuring, or engaging in ongoing disciplinary conversations, without imposing a route that may not work for authors or that they are not inclined to take. A related challenge is to find faster ways of completing reviews. I still count a minimum of two half days for a review, generally spread among two days. Clear rejects or accepts can take less time, but most commonly when a submission has been vetted by a journal editor for external review, it has potential for revision. I suppose I could still read a manuscript and write a review in half a day, but one reason that it takes longer is that I often take the review as a learning opportunity to refresh, update, or deepen my knowledge of the research area(s) and disciplinary conversation(s) in focus in the submission. I routinely read one or two of the key studies cited by the authors and search the databases for related references. It requires some time but allows for a more confident assessment of the submission’s potential contribution to the field. These readings can generate guesses about the authors’ identities, especially when authors have left obvious traces behind (such as listing submitted publications in online CVs). I am unsure to what extent article submissions can be fully anonymized in today’s online age, but this may not be as essential as protecting the reviewers’ identity. From a multilingual genre learning perspective, although my first reviews were in French, I ended up writing and reading reviews almost exclusively in English. This imbalance reflects the dominance of English as a language of publication in Canada and internationally. My sense is that I do not approach article reviews differently in English or French, but this may be an outcome of my academic socialization trajectory. Had I stayed in France and practised the submission review genre with francophone European journals before reviewing for anglophone journals, I

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may have felt a need to adapt my practices. The basic rhetorical exigence and communicative purpose of article reviews remain the same regardless of language, and I did not notice any striking peculiarities in tenor, form, or content from the few reviews I have read in French beyond individual variation, but a more systematic analysis of a bigger corpus may reveal more subtle differences. Interestingly, however, the few times I wrote French reviews after my co-editorship ended, I found myself looking for French equivalents of useful phraseology I had picked up in English such as “my sense is that…” “my understanding is that…” or “I feel that….”

Revisiting the Myth of Linguistic Injustice During my co-editorship, JSLW published an article by Ken Hyland (2016) questioning the myth of linguistic injustice in academic publishing—the idea that non-Anglophone scholars are unfairly disadvantaged relative to Anglophone scholars when seeking to publish in an English-dominant research world. This article generated some debate and empirical research (see, e.g., Politzer-Ahles et al., 2020, for a recent study with an up-to-date review). The random distribution of submissions was such that I was not the handling editor. I refrained from commenting on Hyland’s piece to maintain a neutral editorial position. The argument had to be aired. On the one hand, I observed in the submissions to JSLW the same general trends that Hyland (2016) identified for high profile journals, namely a high number of submissions from China and Iran and an increase in publications from lead authors with geographic affiliations outside the English inner centre. At the same time, I was also alarmed by the glaring gap in rejection rates between submissions from English-speaking centre countries and the rest of the world, resulting in several underrepresented contexts of research. Concerned over possibly playing a role in contributing to inequitable conditions of academic publishing, Christine Tardy and I tried to examine both lessons from successful submissions from underrepresented countries (they often included co-authors in English centre countries or lead authors who completed PhDs in English centre countries) and reasons for our desk rejections (Gentil & Tardy, 2015). While

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the demands of our co-editorship prevented us from conducting more systematic analyses on a bigger corpus, our preliminary findings based on a sample of 71 desk rejection letters revealed that the main reason given for rejection was a lack of “a significant contribution to current understandings of central issues in second and foreign language writing and writing instruction,” which itself was often justified with reference to problems with the research methodology and/or issues of not adequately framing, motivating, or situating the study and its findings within current academic conversations of interest to the JSLW target readership. We categorized this latter broad set of issues as “positioning” or “fit with journal.” The main causes of rejection then were either related to the “end pieces” (the introduction, literature review, and discussion) or the methodology and the substantiation of research claims, sometimes both. In less than 10% of the letters, additional justifications were provided such as lack of clarity or clear focus, length, organization, or the excessive extent of revision that would be required to meet reviewer and reader expectations (despite a topic or study of potential interest). Our findings thus confirmed those reported by Hyland (2016) and several other studies (reviewed in Paltridge, 2017) that language is not given as the main cause of rejection. Clearly, factors other than language are at play, such as the financial resources available for education and research in the national and socio-economic context of upbringing. In examining the JSLW submission statistics more closely, it became clear that successful authors who were not from outside the English-centre were based in richer countries like Japan, Hong Kong, or Western Europe rather than South Asia, Latin America, Africa, Iran, or mainland China, irrespective of language background. Engaging with disciplinary conversations to establish common ground with a journal’s readership and showcase the contribution of one’s study to scholarship is the most common challenge I have seen authors struggle with. It has become challenging for all authors given the acceleration and globalization of knowledge production. At the same time, I can imagine the frustration of resource-strapped scholars who are unable to access much of the scholarship in their field because it is behind unaffordable paywalls. One cannot participate in out-of-reach conversations. Canagarajah (1996) was among the first to draw attention to the material conditions of

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academic publishing, noting how even mailing costs could be prohibitive for some scholars. The democratization of the internet has facilitated the submission of manuscripts. Reputable journals do not charge for submission, but they charge for content. Could this help explain the conspicuous gap between submission and acceptance based on country of origin? My own case as a bilingual scholar who became co-editor of a top-tier English-medium international journal is evidence that non-Anglophone scholars can be successful in an English research world given the right conditions. At the same time, I would be hesitant to go as far as to claim that linguistic injustice is a myth, for such a strongly worded claim seems to downplay the linguistic advantage, or privilege, of Anglophone scholars. As a bilingual scholar, I can attest to the additional burden of working in English as an additional language despite my successes with it. I agree with Hyland (2016) that “academic English is no one’s first language” (p. 61). Nor is it everyone’s second language. Rather, it is a register, but not just a register either. It is a register of English, “a kind of English,” “English with special probabilities attached,” like “scientific Chinese is a kind of Chinese” (Halliday & Martin, 1993, p. 4). Assuredly, academic writing is challenging in any language and even for experienced scholars, but developing control over a specialized register remains more demanding when one must also acquire the linguistic resources that enable it. My experience is that developing and maintaining academic literacies in English and French has made my academic writing both richer and harder. Not only do I still spend more time wordsmithing and grammar checking in English than in French, but also the more I read and write in English, the less secure I become in French. This dual linguistic insecurity in the first and second language is not something that monolingual anglophone scholars must contend with (unless they had to acquire a socially valued dialect of English in addition to their home variety). I am fortunate that my first language, French, has close historical ties with English, and yet, after 25 years of immersive experience in English and relentless efforts, I still do not have the same confidence and fluency as an author, a reviewer, and an editor, let alone a conference speaker, in English than in French.

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Importantly, as a language, English is not a mere conduit for knowledge production, but a “meaning potential” (Halliday & Martin, 1993, p. 22), the stuff of which knowledge is made, the enabler of the disciplinary conversations, especially but not exclusively in the social sciences and in more interpretive, qualitative research. As a journal editor, I have witnessed both the small role and the major role that language seems to play in a manuscript’s success. Small because glaringly nonstandard grammar is rare, and reviewers tend to overlook unusual wordings. Major because I have seen too many authors fail to exploit the potential of their research because of the framing and positioning challenges I have described earlier—challenges which I suspect in many cases have been exacerbated by the authors’ struggles to achieve, in English, the depth, nuance, and precision of understanding and conceptualizing they might have demonstrated in their primary language of schooling.

How Much of Peer Review Writing is Teachable Genre Knowledge? In closing, I would like to suggest possible implications for reviewer and editor training. As I reflected on how I learned the genre of article reviews, Tardy et al.’s (2020) framework of genre knowledge and Paltridge’s (2017) multipronged analysis of the discourse of peer reviews helped me consider the multiple dimensions of my genre learning. Two observations struck me from reading Paltridge. First, the similarities between the learning strategies reported by the reviewers in Paltridge’s study (Chapter 6) and my own strategies. Like the respondents to Paltridge’s study, I learned to do peer reviews by doing reviews, by trial and error, by reading reviews on my own submissions, by reading the other assessments of the manuscripts I reviewed, by analyzing the generic and discourse features of peer reviews, by using journal guidelines for reviewers, and by practising reviews in graduate courses, with the added benefit of intensive exposure to peer reviews during my co-editorship. Second, I was also struck by the similarities between Paltridge’s description of the peer review genre based on his corpus of 97 exemplars for English for Specific Purposes and features I could see in my own

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reviews, regardless of the dimension: rhetorical (move) structure and content (Chapter 3), speech acts realized (Chapter 4), politeness strategies (Chapter 5), and stance and evaluative language (Chapter 6). These similarities are noteworthy because I had never given as much explicitly attention to several of the features described, and yet I had learned them. This raised the question: Since I learned to do reviews prior to the publication of Paltridge’s book, would I have benefited from reading it earlier or receiving explicit instruction in the multifaceted aspects of the genre? Did the learning strategies I happened upon not suffice? Recollecting my experience from the lens of scholarship on genre learning, my sense is that I learned to write peer reviews through reflective practice. Explicit awareness would not have been sufficient without genre practice, but my bent to analyze my practice and the texts I encounter as a writing researcher steeped in genre theory facilitated my learning, and learning about the features of peer reviews before or as I discovered them through exposure and practice would likely have accelerated my learning to do peer reviews. Tardy et al.’s (2020) framework underscores the interplay among genre use, metacognition, genre awareness, and genre-specific knowledge in the development of genre knowledge. Being a bilingual reader and writer of peer reviews and a genre analyst has allowed me to develop my genre knowledge by drawing on understandings emerging synergistically from genre use and reflecting on genre use. The reviewer training approach described by Paltridge and, more broadly, the genre-based teaching approach proposed by Cheng (2018) capitalize on a similar synergy and for this reason are likely to be helpful for novice and even more experienced reviewers. At the same time, Tardy’s framework also identifies subject-matter knowledge as a main component of genre knowledge. Learning and teaching research methodologies in applied linguistics and discourse studies and developing familiarity with disciplinary conversations have also been essential to my learning to review research within my fields of expertise, so peer review training would probably benefit from collaboration between discipline and writing specialists.

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References Bourdieu, P. (1994). Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Seuil. Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). “Nondiscursive” requirements in academic publishing, material resources of periphery scholars, and the politics of knowledge production. Written Communication, 13(4), 435–472. Cheng, A. (2018). Genre and graduate-level research writing. University of Michigan Press. Gentil, G. (2011). A biliteracy agenda for genre research. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20 (1), 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2010.12.006 Gentil, G., & Tardy, C. (2015). A geopolitics of second language writing: Updating the map, broadening the landscape. Paper Presented at the Symposium on Second Language Writing, Auckland, New Zealand. Halliday, M. A. K., & Martin, J. R. (1993). Writing science: Literacy and discursive power. University of Pittsburgh Press. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jslw.2016.01.005 Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press Leki, I. (2003). Tangled webs: Complexities of professional writing. In C. P. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication: Behind the scenes in language education. Taylor & Francis. Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Palgrave Macmillan UK . https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1137-48736-0 Politzer-Ahles, S., Girolamo, T., & Ghali, S. (2020). Preliminary evidence of linguistic bias in academic reviewing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 47 , 100895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2020.100895 Ricoeur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre [Oneself as another]. Seuil. Tardy, C. M., Sommer-Farias, B., & Gevers, J. (2020). Teaching and researching genre knowledge: Toward an enhanced theoretical framework. Written Communication, 37 (3), 287–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/074108 8320916554

6 Opening the Gates for the Next Generation of Scholars Peter I De Costa

Much has happened in the world and in my own professional life in the past year. The US has been rocked by a wave of anti-Asian sentiment due in part to the framing of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “China virus” by Right wing, anti-immigrant and racist quarters. And within my own professional life, I have added a new portfolio, namely, that of First Vice-President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). I wear this new hat along with my other professional hat, that of being the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly. However, these two events have not evolved in an unrelated manner. The emergence of Asian racism is part of a longer narrative of racism against people of colour in the US, the country where I currently reside, and it comes in light of the Black Lives Movement (BLM). Parallel to the BLM effort has P. I. De Costa (B) Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_6

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been a deliberate attempt by AAAL to embrace diversity, equity, inclusion and access (DEIA) and to further incorporate DEIA within the organizational structure as well as the policies and practices of AAAL. Needless to say, I am equally delighted with this positive development as I am with the joint virtual special issue of TESOL Quarterly and TESOL Journal on the topic of race, identity and English language teaching that was published in June 2020. As a critical applied linguist who examines social inequities issues, this spotlighting of race and other aspects of social injustice by AAAL and TESOL Quarterly is long overdue. In addition, as I will explain in this chapter, these inequities extend to writing for scholarly publication.

Situating Myself in the Field of Applied Linguistics I am a tenured associate professor who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University (USA). Straddling two departments located in two different colleges—the College of Arts & Letters and the College of Education—my research interests reside in three broad areas of second language acquisition, second language teacher education and language policy. More specifically, I have an enduring commitment to investigating power inequalities that exist in school and society. One area of interest that has grown in recent years is the lack of access to resources that students and faculty have in higher education. In alignment with this research interest, I have demonstrated elsewhere (Li, W., & De Costa, P. I. 2021) that the unrelenting demands to publish or perish remain unabated as institutions continue to fixate on metrics and big data in order to raise their own rankings. Within the publishing world, academic linguistics journals are ranked, much to the delight of some and the chagrin of others. In my own professional life and through my interactions with novice and seasoned applied linguists, I have experienced first-hand these unrelenting publishing pressures. Yet the process of getting one’s work into the ostensible top-tier journals remains relatively opaque. Such opacity can be attributed in

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part to the lack of resources to which writers have access. In particular, I want to emphasize that, sadly, not all applied linguists have equal access to publish in top-tier journals. Nor for that matter do they have equal opportunity to present at leading applied linguistics conferences. Minoritized colleagues in the Global South for whom English is an additional language, in particular, are saddled with this enduring predicament.1 By all accounts, and given the sociopolitical challenges described in the preceding paragraph, as a Singapore-born biracial (I am of ChinesePortuguese ancestry) scholar, who currently works at a Midwestern U.S. research university (Michigan State University, as stated earlier), my path to becoming TESOL Quarterly co-editor and AAAL Second VicePresident2 should have been thwarted. How then was I able to apparently beat the odds? Specifically, and given the publication focus of this book, I would like to emphasize from the outset that one does not become a journal editor or a reviewer overnight. At the same time, I would like to add that being and becoming an editor and reviewer needs to be explored in relation to the larger academic context, specifically in conjunction with an individual’s academic discourse socialization (De Costa et al., forthcoming; Kobayashi et al., 2017). Such socialization is further made possible through networking at leading applied linguistics conferences. In other words, and as I will explain, conference participation and one’s growth as editor and reviewer move in tandem with each other. In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe how being a book reviewer, a chapter and journal article reviewer, a book proposal reviewer and a book manuscript reviewer laid the groundwork for becoming the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly, the flagship journal for TESOL International. But before I proceed any further, I want to credit the immense support that I have received from my professors, colleagues and students, 1

The Global South is not merely a geographic definition. As I have explained elsewhere (Heugh et al., 2021), the Global South can also exist in the Global North. For example, linguistic minorities such as immigrants and refugees in the US also constitute the Global South because of the social marginalization they encounter. I would also like to thank one of the reviewers for pointing out that the pressures to publish in English are also real for (1) Global North scholars for whom English is an additional language, and (2) colleagues who come from some countries in the Global North (e.g., Eastern Europe), and who are thus comparatively disadvantaged in the world of publishing. 2 I assume the AAAL presidency in March 2024.

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all of whom have played a pivotal role in helping me establish my career. I will name some of these individuals in this chapter as I trace my trajectory.

Being and Becoming an Auditor of Academic Discourse As noted, one does not become a journal editor or reviewer overnight. I begin my story in 2006, when I was doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to starting my doctoral programme, I had taught at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. And in the summer of 2006, during my home visit to Singapore, a former colleague invited me to review a book for her journal. I remember going to her office where she had several books placed on her book shelf. These books were complimentary copies sent to her by the publishers in the hope by the latter that their books would be reviewed in Language and Education. She turned to me and said, “Pick one of these books to review.” I skimmed them and selected Maintaining a minority language: A case study of Hispanic teenagers. A year later my review was published (De Costa, 2007). It is hard to articulate one’s elation in seeing your first publication come out. But this book review marked my first foray into journal publishing. Since then, I have written 15 other book reviews and will start work on my 16th book review this summer. I have always only reviewed books that interest me, and being a book reviewer has enabled me to engage in a broader conversation with like-minded peers. I applaud my faculty colleagues who make completing a book review a course assignment because this is one sure way of orienting students to a journal (usually of their choice) and having them become familiar with the journal’s readership. Also, in becoming a book reviewer, your name is subsequently entered into the journal’s reviewer database. And this is a very crucial first step for me because it ensured that I was on journal editors’ radar and was subsequently called upon by them to review full length articles. I am often asked how one becomes a manuscript reviewer for a journal. One way to initiate the process is to contact the journal editors

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and send them your CV. I recall doing this with several journals as a doctoral student. To some extent it was a stab in the dark; some editors replied positively, others never at all. But no one who replied declined my offer to serve as a reviewer because every journal editor relies on the goodwill of qualified volunteer reviewers. In reviewing journal articles, I became more familiar with the audience of different journals which, in turn, allowed me to better frame manuscripts that I subsequently submitted to them to consider for publication. The amazing thing about reviewing for a journal like TESOL Quarterly is that once one round of a manuscript review is completed, all reviewers get to see each other’s comments. To me, this is the primary reward of serving as a reviewer because you learn about how your peers interpreted and critiqued the same piece that you read; their insights are generative and consequently help you become a better reviewer and writer in the long run. Earlier, I noted that conference experience needs to be seen in congruence with writing experience. While reviewing conference proposals constitutes an entirely different professional practice from reviewing a journal manuscript, it also does bring with it multiple complementary benefits. As a doctoral student, I had the good fortune of working with Jane Zuengler, my dissertation chair, who at the time was also the coeditor of Applied Linguistics and the president of AAAL. While Jane began tapping me as a reviewer for her journal early in her editor tenure, it was in 2011, when I was an advanced doctoral student and had several single-authored articles published under my belt that I first began serving as a AAAL conference strand reviewer. At the time, and because Jane was the conference organizer for AAAL 2012, I expressed my interest in being a proposal reviewer. I was subsequently assigned to review for the Bilingual, Immersion, Heritage and Minority Education (BIH) strand and as a result learned a lot about the conference proposal review process. More significantly, my name as a reviewer was now included in the reviewer pool and since then, I have reviewed for multiple strands—not just the BIH strand—for AAAL. You can probably detect a pattern here. Once you get your foot in the proverbial door, you are invited to serve as a reviewer, be it of a journal manuscript or a conference proposal. It was not until several years later in 2015 that I was invited to become the Second Language Acquisition, Language Acquisition and Attrition

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(SLA) strand coordinator for AAAL, a responsibility that I subsequently held for three consecutive years before stepping down due to other work commitments.

The Synergistic Interface Between Conference Presentation and Writing for Publication Thus far, I have stated more than once that my growth as a reviewer and editor took place in sync with my deepening involvement in conferences. Being the AAAL SLA strand coordinator for three years put me in touch with key SLA researchers whose names, which appeared on an evolving reviewer list, were rolled over with each passing year. In other words, when I stepped into the role of strand coordinator, I had inherited a healthy bank of reviewers that had been built by my strand coordinator predecessors over time. This turned out to be a fortuitous development for me because on many occasions, I turned to colleagues on the conference reviewer list to help assist in reviewing manuscripts that I ended up editing (more about editing shortly). Let me reiterate that reviewing is a volunteer enterprise; everyone who steps up to serve as a volunteer does so out of goodwill. And all conference strand coordinators, and editors, including myself, are indebted to our generous colleagues who are willing to give up their time not only to help us but also to advance the field in meaningful and purposeful ways. I turn next to my entrée into editing. In May 2011, when I returned to Madison to defend my dissertation (I had started a visiting assistant professor position in Monterey, California, the previous year), Jane (Zuengler) asked me if I would like to edit a book with her. The acquisitions editor at Routledge (Taylor & Francis) had approached her to see if Jane had an idea for a book.3 Given my interest at the time, I suggested to Jane the topic of ethics in applied linguistics. In the months that followed, Jane and I assembled a proposal on my suggested topic 3 For those of you who are new to book publishing, it is not uncommon for acquisitions editors from commercial and university presses to invite establish applied linguists to pitch ideas for a book.

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and submitted it to the publisher. The book project went on a brief hiatus between 2011 and 2013, however. Due to medical reasons, Jane withdrew from the project, but she assured me that even though I was a newly minted tenure-track assistant professor in 2013 (I had taken up a new position at Michigan State University, my current employer), she had the strongest confidence that I would be able to pull off this book project on my own. Full disclosure: I was nervous at first because nearly all the contributing authors Jane and I had secured for the edited volume had far more experience than me. And at least half of them were former or current journal editors at the time. Fortunately, the book series editors also threw their support behind me. To cut a long story short, in Spring 2016, I received five complimentary copies of the newly published edited volume (De Costa, 2016). So grateful was I in publishing this book that I purchased, out of my own pocket, additional copies of the book and mailed them to colleagues who had helped me review individual chapters. I tell this anecdote to remind readers about how invaluable the input of our peers is. Edited work is only stronger when constructive blind peer feedback, a cornerstone of the academic mentoring process, is taken up by authors during the manuscript revision process.

Working Collaboratively As a general practice, I often aim to convert conference colloquium panels into an edited volume or a special journal issue. Having taken the effort to prepare for and present a colloquium paper, most of the colloquium panelists with whom I have worked are often more than happy to put in the additional work to develop a full paper for publication in an edited volume or a special issue. In other words, one needs to start with a vision, and then translate that vision into reality through a multi-step process that includes inviting colleagues who buy into that shared vision. Needless to say, editing a publication is a discursive process as one needs to work with one’s collaborators to better shape that vision. And this is often done through providing constructive feedback to authors, while also taking into consideration how contributing authors elect to accept, reject or modify that feedback. And over time (months if not years in

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some cases), the idea that may have begun as a proposal for a collection of conference presentations is subsequently transformed into an edited set of papers as a result of colloquium discussant comments, manuscript reviewer comments and executive decisions made by the editor. In short, a substantial amount of peer mentoring takes place for the different parties involved in the edited book or special issue project. That said, I have also done things in reverse, that is, curated an edited book or a special issue first, and then had my contributors present their work at a conference when their research was in production at the publisher. In this latter case, the conference colloquium becomes a strategic way to promote the upcoming published collection. These are things that one learns as an apprenticing editor. And I had to the good fortune earlier in my career to work with established and esteemed colleagues such as Suresh Canagarajah (see De Costa & Canagarajah, 2016) and Bonny Norton (see De Costa & Norton, 2017). Working with senior colleagues such as Suresh and Bonny was undoubtedly intimidating at first. Having been a long time fan of their work, I do not exaggerate when I say that partnering them for guest editing journal special issues was a dream come true for me. From Suresh, himself a former editor of TESOL Quarterly, I learned how to delicately manage external reviewer comments when conveying them to the contributing authors of our special issue. He taught me that an editor needs to interpret reviewer comments and communicate these comments to authors in ways that would make the revision process less daunting, while also steering them towards a coherent vision for the special issue. And from Bonny, I learned how to secure external reviewers ahead of time, and to give these reviewers a heads up as to when they should expect the manuscript to be delivered for review. Because of the tight deadlines of special journal issues (as opposed to the slightly more elastic deadlines of edited book volumes), reviewers need to be lined up in advance so that they can hit the ground running the moment authors submit the first drafts of their manuscript. Keeping to a strict schedule, another valuable thing I learned from Bonny, is vitally important in order for the entire special issue manuscript to be handed over in time to the journal editors.

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It is these priceless lessons that I have passed on to my own doctoral students, many of whom I have collaborated with in recent years to guest edit journal special issues on study abroad (De Costa et al., 2017), language teacher emotions (De Costa et al., 2018) and English medium of instruction (EMI) in transnational higher education (GreenEneix et al., 2021a, 2021b). I am particularly pleased that a number of my guest co-editors (Li, Rawal, Zaykovskaya) are themselves emerging scholars whose first language is not English. I have also made a deliberate choice to work with emerging and established colleagues from the “periphery”, as my co-editors have included individuals from Singapore (De Costa et al., 2021d), Iran (Mirhosseini & De Costa, 2020) and Turkey (De Costa & Ustuk, in preparation). A key part of this collaborative process has been modelling how prospective contributing authors are approached, and subsequently managing the correspondence process. This process often includes checking in with the authors regularly to see how their work is progressing. My student collaborators, who are always carbon copied (cc-ed) in email correspondences, also often start by shadowing me as I communicate with manuscript reviewers. But as we move further into the editing process, they gradually take over subsequent communications with both authors and reviewers so that they eventually become more comfortable in the editor role. In addition, when providing feedback to authors, I always make sure that my co-editors and I insert our editorial comments on the same manuscript. That way each of us gets to see the others’ comments, and are thus able to craft a coherent and aligned message to authors who will be asked to revise their work. Finally, I want to be clear that working with my student colleagues has been a mutually beneficial enterprise. All my collaborators have been instrumental in widening my own intellectual field of vision and have helped me grow professionally as a result of our exchange of ideas during the editing process.

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Serendipity Matters I have to concede that I have been enormously lucky in terms of having been able to work with leading scholars in my relatively brief academic career. Coming from a developed country like Singapore certainly afforded me the capital to attend leading universities in Singapore (the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University for my bachelor’s and master’s degree, respectively) and the US (Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a second master’s degree and a doctorate, respectively). But more importantly, being able to attend the “right” schools allowed me to come into contact with the aforementioned leading applied linguists, who themselves had much editing experience which was shared with me. Being at a public research university (MSU) has also been hugely rewarding for me. As a tenured faculty member with a joint appointment in two colleges— the College of Arts & Letters (my primary academic home) and the College of Education (my secondary academic home), I have access to doctoral students who provide me with the valuable intellectual stimulation that I cherish. My university not only provides my TESOL Quarterly co-editor colleague, Charlene Polio, and me a full-time research assistant (RA), who serves as our journal editorial assistant, but I have also been granted a course release each academic year to perform my journal editorial duties. In addition, over the last eight years that I have been at MSU, the institution has generously supported my conference travel which, in turn, has allowed me to network with many leading applied linguists and publishers at these conferences. I personally have thus been able to reap the subsequent rewards that accompany such networking. These “invisible” rewards have taken the form of receiving invitations to review book proposals and entire book manuscripts, as well as to contribute to journal special issues and book volumes that my peers have edited. Being able to participate in such “inner circle” exchanges and activities and to keep abreast with the latest developments in our field have helped me become a more effective editor and reviewer. For example, it is through interacting with colleagues at conferences and subsequently following them professionally through social media that I have become aware of their

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latest research projects—information that is of vital importance to an editor. It is equally imperative to know who these colleagues collaborate with and with whom they have longstanding intellectual debates and disagreements (see Seidlhofer, 2003 for details). Knowledge of the latter has guided me when assigning reviewers in order to avoid an impasse because it is highly likely that two conflicting scholars would ever see eye to eye on a similar topic. Assigning one conflicting individual to review the work of the other, and vice versa, would not only be counterproductive, but it could also even exacerbate an already fraught situation. More significantly, however, not publishing opposing perspectives would only stifle the field and dampen intellectual diversity. As an editor, I have always tried to set aside my own biases and to let all the epistemological and ontological flowers bloom (Lantolf, 1996) in our field in order to make applied linguistics more robust. And that essentially means not favouring one stance of an established colleague over another, as long as each is able to produce a compelling argument and back it up with strong empirical data.

Spreading the Wealth All things considered, I am abundantly aware that these many privileges that I have enjoyed probably do not extend or apply to many of my colleagues, especially those in the Global South. That a Shibboleth or gatekeeping practice exists in our field is undeniable. Admittedly, that some applied linguists (myself included) have had more access to resources cannot be disputed. But as I (re)position myself for the next, exciting phase of my career, I have decided to take more deliberate measures to widen the gates so that underrepresented segments of our applied linguistics community will be able to earn a seat at the proverbial table. For a start, and together with my co-editor, (Charlene Polio) at TESOL Quarterly, we have begun to diversify the constitution of our editorial board by inviting more minoritized applied linguists from the Global South to join our board. They, along with an expanded pool of reviewers from the Global South, have enabled the journal to extend its coverage on non-mainstream approaches (e.g., critical autoethnography)

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as evidenced in the growing body of work on racism, translanguaging and queer theory that have been published in TESOL Quarterly. Charlene and I have also consciously sought and guided authors from the Global South whose work can advance the field in productive ways by introducing our readership to a wider range of epistemologies and methodologies. In that respect, we join other journals that have in recent years taken deliberate steps to support under-resourced colleagues. One case in point is the applied linguistics journal, System, which seeks to support scholars in under-represented countries (i.e., most countries in Africa, Central/Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central/ South/ Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean) by pairing its editors or Editorial Advisory Board members with authors of promising submissions that might otherwise be rejected because of presentation of ideas, results and/or analysis.4 And in the spirit of mentoring, since 2018, TESOL Quarterly has appointed two junior editorial advisory board members who are advanced doctoral students and scaffolded their development as reviewers for our journal. Charlene and I mentor these two junior colleagues by giving them feedback on reviews of manuscripts submitted to our journal. Relatedly, as a member of the AAAL leadership team, I chaired the AAAL Conference Connections event that pairs emerging applied linguists (graduate students and early-career colleagues) with senior applied linguists. While the former were free to decide which areas they would like to be mentored in, the request for guidance on how to get their work published from the latter was not an uncommon request. Moving forward, and to build on the excellent educational justice work of my AAAL leadership colleagues and the mentoring infrastructure they have created, I aim to address the resource gap encountered by minoritized colleagues through creating more opportunities to facilitate their professional development in general and their academic socialization as future reviewers and editors in particular.

4 Details of System’s commendable mentoring editorial policy, EMURAS (Editor Mentorship for Under-Represented Authors Scheme), can be found at: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/sys tem/announcements/emuras-system-guidelines-for-editor-mentored-co-authorship.

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On my end, I have also conducted workshops on how to get one’s work published in peer-reviewed applied linguistics journals. I generally walk my workshop participants through TESOL Quarterly’s review process and make transparent the steps involved in publication. Fortunately, TESOL Quarterly has produced two helpful articles—Chapelle and Duff (2003) and Mahboob et al. (2016)—that provide guidelines on publishing. The latter article, in particular, comprehensively explains the criteria that the editors and reviewers use to determine if a manuscript is suitable for publication. I also often direct them to an updated version that resides on the journal’s website. One additional piece of advice I provide is that submitters to a journal need to acquaint themselves with the journal’s editorial board. If they do not recognize any of the editorial board members, I exhort them to look for an alternate journal whose board members they recognize as that would be a sound indicator of manuscript fit for the journal. I also generally encourage submitters to the journal to write a clear cover letter that explains to the editors the significance of their work when they submit their first draft. And if the authors are invited to revise and resubmit their manuscript, my advice to them is to explain clearly to the editors which reviewer comments they acted upon as they revised their work and which comments they elected to ignore and why. In providing such guidance, I seek to better prepare them for journal publication and to address any myths and misconceptions surrounding the review process. More recently, I have started directing my workshop participants to my book chapter entitled, “Making the most of your applied linguistics conference experience” (De Costa, 2020). I recommend that this chapter be read alongside the TESOL Quarterly guideline-oriented article (Mahboob et al., 2016) mentioned earlier, given that publishing and conference participation are inextricably linked. Over time, I have also met many colleagues around the world who do not have library access to published work. To rectify this problem in my own small way, I upload my work (pre-print versions of my accepted manuscripts) on two online platforms—academic.edu and ResearchGate—so that my publications are freely available to them. It is my hope and wish that more colleagues will do the same, and thus provide easy accessibility to their work, especially if they have written about how to become effective reviewers and

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editors. Importantly, this practice of making our research more readily available to others is part of a growing movement towards creating open access opportunities within the academy. I applaud this move as it is a deliberate and concerted attempt to level the playing field.

Closing Thoughts I would like to reiterate that I stand on the shoulders of my pathbreaking predecessors—particularly eminent scholars of colour—who have paved the way for me to become a leader in applied linguistics. For one, I am not the first editor of colour of TESOL Quarterly. I have the privilege of walking in the shadows of Suresh Canagarajah (2005–2009) and Ahmar Mahboob (2014–2018) who came before me. In a similar vein, Braj Kachru (1984–1985), Suresh Canagarajah (2011–2012) and Paul Kei Matsuda (2015–2016) constitute role models for me as previous AAAL presidents. Inspired by inroads created by my peers, I have come to reframe my editor role as one of custodian, as opposed to that of a gatekeeper (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019). Indeed, as a field, applied linguistics has made great strides in gradually opening up more journal publication and conference presentation opportunities for emerging scholars. In many ways, I have been the timely recipient of this serendipitous assemblage of events. But we cannot rest on our laurels. Concerted efforts need to be made by editors and other organizational leaders alike to foster greater diversity, equity, inclusion and access (De Costa, 2018; see also De Costa et al., 2021) in our field. At the same time, however, emerging applied linguists also need to take a pro-active stance in learning to advocate for themselves, lest they are wanting of senior colleagues to sponsor them. One way for them to take matters into their own hands is to start volunteering to review for journals, as I have explained in this chapter. Another way is to start writing book reviews in order to get onto the radar of colleagues in our field. Finally, whether we embrace or frown upon it, we need to come to terms with the contemporary reality that some degree of self promotion is necessary. Social media and online publication platforms enable this possibility. We should not hesitate to mobilize these

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affordances to get our work out there and create buzz around it. In sum, each of us needs some degree of luck, support and due diligence to succeed in an increasingly competitive but equally rewarding field.

References Chapelle, C., & Duff, P. (2003). Some guidelines for conducting quantitative and qualitative research in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 37 (1), 157–178. De Costa, P. I. (2007). Review of Maintaining a minority language: A case study of Hispanic teenagers. Language and Education, 21, 361–364. De Costa, P. I. (Ed.) (2016). Ethics in applied linguistics research: Language researcher narratives. Routledge. De Costa, P. I. (2020). Making the most of your applied linguistics conference experience. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Professional development in applied linguistics: A guide to success for graduate students and early career faculty (pp. 41–48). John Benjamins. De Costa, P. I., & Canagarajah, S. (Guest Eds.) (2016). Special issue of Linguistics and Education, 34, “Scalar approaches to language teaching and learning.” De Costa, P. I., Green-Eneix, C., & Li, W. (2021). Embracing diversity, inclusion, equity and access in EMI-TNHE: Towards a social justice-centered reframing of ELT. RELC Journal, 52(2) 227–235. De Costa, P. I., Park, J. S. -Y., & Wee, L. (Guest Eds.) (2021d). Special issue of Multilingua, 40 (2), “Multilingualism, Language Education, and Linguistic Entrepreneurship: Critical Perspectives.” De Costa, P. I., Lee, J., & Li, W. (Eds.) (2022). International students’ multilingual literacy practices: An asset-based approach to using semiotic resources. Multilingual Matters. De Costa, P. I., Li, W., & Rawal, H. (Guest Eds.) (2017). Special issue of Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 41(4), “Broadening the second language teacher education agenda: International perspectives on teacher emotions.” De Costa, P. I., & Norton, B. (Guest Eds.) (2017). Special issue of Modern Language Journal , 101-S, “Transdisciplinarity and language teacher identity.”

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De Costa, P. I., Rawal, H., & Zaykovskaya, I. (Guest Eds.) (2017). Special issue of System, 71(6), “Study abroad in contemporary times: Toward greater methodological diversity and innovation.” De Costa, P. I., & Ustuk, O. (Eds.) (in preparation). A sociopolitical agenda for TESOL teacher education. Bloomsbury. Green-Eneix, C., De Costa, P. I., & Li, W. (2021a). Special issue of Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44 (2), “Language policy and practice in EMI and transnational higher education: International perspectives.” Green-Eneix, C., De Costa, P. I., & Li, W. (Guest Eds.) (2021b). Special issue of RELC Journal, 52(2) “English as a medium of instruction in transnational higher education (EMI-TNHE).” Heugh, K., Stroud, C., Taylor-Leech, K., & De Costa, P. I. (Eds.) (2021). A sociolinguistics of the south. Routledge. Kobayashi, M., Zappa-Hollman, S., & Duff, P. (2017). Academic discourse socialization. In P. Duff & S. May (Eds.), Language socialization (pp. 239– 254). Encyclopedia of language and education (3rd ed.). Springer. Lantolf, J. P. (1996). SLA theory building: “Letting all the flowers bloom!” Language Learning, 46 (4), 713–749. Li, W., & De Costa, P. I. (2021). Problematizing enterprise culture in global academic publishing: Linguistic entrepreneurship through the lens of two Chinese visiting scholars in a U.S. university. Multilingua, 40 (2), 225–250. Mahboob, A., Paltridge, B., Phakiti, A., Wagner, E., Starfield, S., Burns, A., Jones, R. H., & De Costa, P. I. (2016). TESOL Quarterly research guidelines. TESOL Quarterly, 50 (1), 42–65. Mirhosseini, S.-A., & De Costa, P. I. (Eds.) (2020). The sociopolitics of English language testing. Bloomsbury. Seidlhofer, B. (2003). Controversies in applied linguistics. Oxford University Press. Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan.

Part II Discourses, Norms, Values

7 Polycentric Peer Reviewing: Navigating Authority and Expertise Maria Kuteeva

Introduction Academic genres have evolved to reflect the rhetorical norms of research communities and can be viewed as representing highly regulated language uses and writing conventions through standard, “unitary language” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 270) par excellence. Yet, behind the façade of these seemingly normative genres is a process involving dialogue and negotiation whose primary purpose is to advance knowledge in a research field. Journal reviewers and editors play a key role in this dialogic process, and their comments reflect disciplinary, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political contexts in which they operate. In this chapter, I critically reflect on my own trajectory as a reviewer and editor in somewhat different but related sub-fields of applied linguistics: English for Academic/Specific/Research Publication Purposes M. Kuteeva (B) Department of English, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_7

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(EAP/ESP/ERPP), English-medium instruction (EMI), and language planning and policy (LPP). This reflection contemplates my professional experience of working with colleagues based in different parts of the world. I attempt to examine my discursive strategies as a reviewer from a broader perspective, which departs from but also goes beyond the analysis of generic and lexicogrammatical features of peer review. In order to bring some new perspectives into the scholarly debate surrounding writing for publication and English for Research Publication Purposes, my chapter draws on sociolinguistic concepts inspired by the work of Bakhtin (e.g. 1981, 1986) and his view of language as inherently dialogic. More specifically, I employ Blommaert’s (2007) notions of orders of indexicalities and polycentricity and Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle in connection to peer reviewing practices of specific research communities. I examine 50 of my own peer reviews written over the last decade in response to manuscripts submitted to 15 academic journals in order to trace register features used in stance acts involving the reviewer, the author, the journal editor, and the journal readership more broadly. I show how variation in such register features is associated with different reviewer roles, and how this variation shapes an order of indexicality surrounding the journal as a real and perceived centre of authority and expertise. I also argue that the dichotomy juxtaposing the anglophone centre versus the non-anglophone (semi)periphery does not reflect the complexity of knowledge production in applied linguistics. The main implication of my study is that peer reviewers have a key role to play in not only maintaining but also challenging the authority of academic journals as centres of knowledge production.

Study Background: Writing and Reviewing for Publication In the spirit of researcher reflexivity, a few remarks are in order about my positioning as a transnational academic. My professional trajectory has undoubtedly influenced both my linguistic repertoire (e.g. Busch, 2017) and my editorial and reviewing practices in various ways. As my focus in this chapter is on the recent decade, I am writing here largely from

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the perspective of a tenured senior academic based in an English department of a well-resourced, international university in the global North. Admittedly, this is a comfortable and privileged position to be in. At the same time, although English has been my dominant language for nearly 30 years, it was not the first language I learned as a child. The period of my undergraduate university studies coincided with major geopolitical changes, which made it possible for me to study English language and linguistics through the medium of English and to undertake my postgraduate studies at one of the top universities in the UK. Being part of a vibrant research community shaped my experience of writing and reviewing for publication, e.g. through my engagement with a graduate journal. Since the completion of my PhD to this day, I have experienced working at universities in different parts of Europe, including universities based in the European South. That period was crucial for me to develop a professional and research interest in ESP/EAP and to forge many fruitful collaborations, for example, through my involvement with the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes (AELFE). It also reminded me of the importance of the socio-economic factors that shape our research and professional practices (e.g. Hultgren, 2020). This experience of transnational mobility across European east and west, south and north, has helped me gain insight into the importance of professional dialogue, which I have been trying to foster through my publication activity, for example, by guest editing special issues of Ibérica (2011), Nordic Journal of English Studies (2012), and Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2014) on topics concerned with the use of English in multilingual university contexts, Discourse, Context, and Media (2018) on digital academic discourse, as well as three edited volumes. Transnational mobility and international collaboration also fostered my research interest in multilingualism and the role played by English across university settings. As a result, my research over the last decade has focused on questions related to academic uses of English in education and research, including EAP/ESP/ERPP, EMI, and LPP. These are also three main research areas in which I would locate my editorial and peer reviewing practices, as reflected in the data set I analyse in this chapter. Figure 7.1 provides information about the number of reviews per journal in my data set. It illustrates some degree of “polycentricity”

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Number of reviews by journal (n=50) Multilingua LinEdu JoP HE System SHE NJES JMMD IJBEB DCM JSLW JERPP ESPj AL JEAP 0

5

9

14

18

Fig. 7.1 Peer reviews included in the present study (n = 50) were submitted to the following journals: Applied Linguistics, Discourse, Context and Media, English for Specific Purposes, Higher Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, Multilingua, Nordic Journal of English Studies, Studies in Higher Education, System

in my reviewing practices but also the prominence of peer reviewing for EAP/ESP/ERPP-related journals and Applied Linguistics, largely due to my affiliations with their editorial boards, which is the longest for JEAP. It is these affiliations that have largely impacted my acceptance of reviewer assignments over the past years, as I tend to decline invitations from other influential journals due to time constraints. The current data set omits several reviews for Ibérica because they were not written in free prose. Thus, the data set for my analysis below comprises 50 reviews for 15 journals submitted over the last decade, totalling 34,686 words, i.e. 694 words per review, which is similar to the data set used in Paltridge’s studies (e.g. 2013, 2017). The data are different from those used in

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previous ERPP research (e.g. Paltridge, 2017; Samraj, 2021) in the sense that they include a broader range of journals in applied linguistics, despite an idiosyncratic nature of the selection. My data largely include the more detailed reviews, mainly on first-time submissions but also 2 resubmissions. Recommendations range from (mostly) major revisions or revise and resubmit, to minor revisions, and a few rejects. The proportions of these are unimportant for the kind of analysis I aim to conduct here because, unlike the above-mentioned previous studies, I do not focus on the connection between specific register features and reviewer’s recommendations. Details of the reviews (e.g. journals, dates) and recommendations are also omitted from the analysis in an attempt to ensure anonymity and not to reveal details of the journal submissions.

Indexicality, Polycentricity, and Dialogism in Peer Review The analytical framework for this chapter is largely inspired by Blommaert’s (2007) seminal article, in which he argues that discourse analysis gains from employing two sociolinguistic concepts: order of indexicality and polycentricity. Although Blommaert’s main focus is on the study of sociolinguistic variation in late modern diasporic environments, I find his argument highly relevant to study the discourse of peer review, which— despite being written in fairly standard English—is by its very nature highly dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). The dialogism of peer reviewing brings together the voices of the author, the reviewer, the journal editor, as well as other members of a respective research community. During the reviewing and revision process, this dialogue can take different forms, ranging from direct address (e.g. “please provide further details of data analysis”) to intertextuality, e.g. through the use of citations to the manuscript under review and to other relevant sources. According to Blommaert (2007, pp. 116–117), indexicality is ordered in two ways: (1) on the lower level of “indexical order” and (2) on a higher plane of a stratified general repertoire, in which indexical orders relate to each other (e.g. higher/lower, better/worse) in “orders of indexicality”. As shown below, both levels are applicable to the

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discourse of peer review. Although Blommaert’s terminology to describe these two concepts is similar, the two levels of indexicality are distinct: a lower plane of “indexical order” concerns clusters and patterns in language use, whereas a higher plane involving “orders of indexicality” concerns systemic patterns of authority, control, and evaluation, which can lead towards inclusion or exclusion. More specifically, “indexical order” describes how indexical meanings usually occur in patterns, as in the case of a specific “register”, in which “clustered and patterned language forms (…) index specific social personae and roles” (Blommaert, 2007, p. 117). Previous research on registers used in academic discourse supports this notion of language patterning with solid empirical evidence-based corpus linguistic studies (e.g. Biber, 2006). Studies in the field of ERPP have also identified various characteristics of peer review register, e.g. stance expressions, directives, and so forth (Paltridge, 2017; Samraj, 2021). Moreover, resorting to a particular register indexes belonging to a particular group with its own repertoire of voices, e.g. the reviewer as an evaluator or expert in the field. Indexical orders can have long and complex histories, as in the case of “standard language”, which is usually used as a benchmark in writing for publication and has long been seen as a proficiency target in research and teaching in the field of ESP/EAP/ERPP. Yet, indexical orders are also subject to variability and change. Over the last few years, the question of what counts as “good” and “acceptable” language has generated a great deal of debate in applied linguistics research community (e.g. Hyland, 2016; Hynninen & Kuteeva, 2017; McKinley & Rose, 2018), usually in connection with a growing number of authors and reviewers who do not have English as their L1 and a perceived need to adapt language standards to a broader international audience. This debate can be seen as an illustration that the indexical order associated with writing for publication is undergoing change as a result of external pressures (a growing number of writers who do not have English as L1, evaluation regimes encouraging publication, etc.). Secondly, a higher plane involving orders of indexicality concerns systemic patterns of authority, control, and evaluation. Thus, a specific register can have its own politics of access, and this is certainly true in writing for publication, which has developed an elaborate gate-keeping

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mechanism. Blommaert (2007) sees orders of indexicality as a concept that draws our attention to aspects of power and inequality of access in a specific field of semiosis. Stratified orders of indexicality may systematically work towards inclusion or exclusion. For example, according to some studies, indexicality surrounding the use of standard English is one mode of semiosis that can be perceived as indexing higher value in writing for publication (e.g. Politzer-Ahles et al., 2016). This is where the concept of polycentricity comes into play. Blommaert (2007) suggests that authority emanates from “real and perceived ‘centres’”, to which we orient our utterances. In the literature on writing for publication, such “centres” have long been associated with the anglophone research community and publishing industry. In this conceptualisation, the rest of the world is perceived as “periphery” (e.g. Canagarajah, 2002) and “semiperiphery” (Bennett, 2014). Although some critical voices have been raised against this di/trichotomy (e.g. Kuteeva & Mauranen, 2014), the anglophone centre versus nonanglophone periphery metaphor still informs a great deal of research on writing for publication. My discussion below shows that the dynamics of access in writing for publication is more complex. Blommaert’s notion of “polycentricity” underscores the communicative dimension of the “centre”, in line with Bakhtin’s (1986) concept of “superaddresee”. According to Bakhtin (1986, p. 126), each utterance is shaped according to three variables: the object of discourse, the immediate addressee, and a “superaddressee”, a metaphor used to describe complexes of norms, a larger social body of authority, such as individuals (e.g. journal readers), collectives (e.g. the ESP/EAP/ERPP research community), or abstract entities and ideals (e.g. research ethics, language standards). For example, the peer reviewer usually has the author(s) of a submitted manuscript as their immediate addressee but shapes their utterance with reference to a higher evaluating authority of a perceived “centre”, i.e. the editorial team or readership of the journal. The authority of centres can manifest itself in the mastery of certain thematic domains and registers. Even within a relatively narrow context of this occluded genre, the reviewer may shift roles and communicate differently, as an expert in a specific domain, an evaluator, or a friendly

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peer (e.g. Englander & López-Bonilla, 2011), indexing their membership to a group through the use of specific register features. In the following section, I explore how orders of indexicality and polycentricity are manifested in the dialogue between the peer reviewer, the author(s), the journal editor(s), and a wider readership.

Polycentric Peer Reviewing Indexical Orders and Orders of Indexicality: Shifting Register in Stance Acts In order to gain insight into the register features used in my own peer reviews, I ran my data set through AntConc to identify some key lexicogrammatical features. Due to a very idiosyncratic nature of the data set, which only contains my own reviews, no quantitative analyses were made. However, this initial corpus-assisted register analysis made it possible for me to identify some interesting features that would be hard to detect even with a very close reading. For example, the word list indicating frequency ranking has shown that, in addition to numerous function words, the most commonly used content words in my peer reviews were research (#8), study (#14), English (#21), author (#23) or authors (#28), and the most frequent personal pronoun was I (#17). The prominence of English in the data set is little surprising considering that it is the main object of study in most submissions and also features in several journal names (see caption to Fig. 7.1). What is particularly interesting for my analysis here is the salience of word types referring to the reviewer (I ), the author (s), and research or study. Whereas the word type research often features in collocations that are used to refer to different aspects of the research reported in the manuscript and its contextualization in the field (e.g. previous research, research questions, research methodology, EAP research, research field , research article, research community, etc.), the word type study is used overwhelmingly to refer to specific studies reported in journal submissions.

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Next, I looked at the most frequent lexical bundles in my peer review data set. I was particularly interested in 4-word bundles because they are more common in academic writing than 5-word bundles and tend to have a clear range of structures and functions, which can be used as a basis to characterise a specific kind of discourse (Hyland, 2008). The top five 4-word bundles in my peer reviews concerned the journal submission under review, i.e. the study reported in the manuscript (reported in the manuscript, the study reported in, and study reported in the) and more specifically its current version (as it stands the), followed by a reviewer’s stance expression I believe that the (Table 7.1). In line with my initial observations based on the word frequency list, this ranking of lexical bundles points towards the salience of the study reported in the journal submission and the reviewer’s (i.e. my own) stance towards it. Following up on expressions of the reviewer’s stance, it turned out that the bi-gram I believe occurs in the data set 49 times, i.e. at least once in 27 out of 50 reviews. The personal pronoun I occurs 231 times, mostly accompanied by stance verbs (e.g. I agree, I (cannot) recommend , I find , I (don’t) think, I suggest, I wonder ). These register features and the prominence of the word types and bundles referring to the reviewer in the first person pronoun, the author(s), and the study reported in the manuscript confirms the centrality of stance (e.g. Gray & Biber, 2012; Hyland, 2005)—particularly evaluative and attitudinal stance—in my data set. This finding is in line with previous studies of peer reviews in the field of ESP (e.g. Paltridge, 2017). An overwhelming use of I believe can be interpreted as underscoring the positionality of the reviewer in the process of evaluating the journal submission, simultaneously indicating a personal nature of the adopted stance and exercising a hedging function Table 7.1 Five most frequent 4-word lexical bundles in the peer review data set (n = 50) Rank

Freq

Range

4-gram

1 2 3 4 5

22 22 20 18 18

16 17 15 16 14

reported in the manuscript the study reported in study reported in the as it stands the I believe that the

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in relation to the recommendation (e.g. I believe that the article requires revisions versus The article requires revisions). The centrality of evaluative and attitudinal stance is also indicative of the specific indexical order of peer review, which is characterised by “clustered and patterned language forms” which “index specific social personae and roles” (Blommaert, 2007, p. 117). Resorting to a particular register indexes belonging to a particular group with its own repertoire of voices. The brief register analysis above indicates that the key actors involved in the stance acts in my peer reviews include the reviewer, the author(s), and their study, thereby creating a stance triangle (Du Bois’ 2007): the evaluator (subject 1), the object of evaluation (in this case, the study reported in the journal submission), and the audience (subject 2) (see Fig. 7.2). Although the object of stance-taking (a journal manuscript submission or a specific aspect thereof ) remains the same in most instances found in my peer review data set, the reviewer roles change, shifting from an evaluator who issues an official recommendation to expert, advisor, peer, or (proof )reader. As the reviewer changes these hats, so does their audience: while the author of the journal submission remains, directly or indirectly, the main addressee of the reviewer’s utterance, the audience may expand to include the journal editor(s), the journal readership, or the research community more broadly, which is the dimension in which the audience approximates what Bakhtin (1986) describes as “superaddressee” and also resonates with Bell’s (1984) idea of the audience design and overhearer. The shifts between different roles and audiences are accompanied by different degrees of alignment or disalignment in the attitude towards, or the evaluation of, the stance object, i.e. the submitted manuscript. It must be pointed out, however, that neither Bell’s (1984) audience design nor Du Bois (2007) stance triangle can be applied to peer review writing without modification because they are largely based on the analysis of online spoken interaction. Writing for publication and associated peer reviewing are asynchronous activities which take place in different spaces so there are no immediate utterances to align or disalign with. At the same time, these activities are performed in the context of a particular research field and involve intersubjectivity between the author, the reviewer, the editor, and other possible actors. Therefore, the dialogic

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Fig. 7.2 Reviewer roles and (dis)alignments in stance-taking towards a journal manuscript submission, inspired by the stance triangle by Du Bois (2007)

perspective is equally relevant here as “no stance stands alone” and each “act of stance is performed in the public space of dialogic interaction (…) both influencing and being influenced by the co-actions of others” (Du Bois, 2007, pp. 172–173). What I propose here is that, in peer review, direct and indirect (dis)alignments between the reviewer (subject 1) and the audience (subject 2) are manifested through shifts in register. These (dis)alignments can be realised, for example, along the continuum of proximity between the writer and the reader (e.g. Hyland, 2010) and reader engagement (Hyland, 2005), as illustrated in the examples provided in Table 7.2. Thus, different indexical orders are associated with different reviewer roles (e.g. evaluator, expert, advisor, etc.) and the use of specific register features. In the case of the reviewer as evaluator, the

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Table 7.2 Examples illustrating reviewer roles and (dis)alignments in the data set of 50 peer reviews Reviewer role

Reviewer’s (dis)alignment

Evaluator

Author (1) I could not see much improvement compared to the previous version … (2) I found this section surprisingly short and lacking important details concerning… Journal (editor, reviewers) (3) I cannot recommend this article for publication in [journal name] for several reasons (4) I agree with Reviewer 2 that part of the literature review reads like … Journal readership, research community (5) I believe it requires revisions in order to be of interest to the wide readership of … Author (6) I certainly agree with the need to conduct further studies in this field Journal (editor) (7) I believe that the article has potential to offer new insights into … Journal readership, research community (8) I believe the [journal name] readership would benefit from a debate on … Author: (9) I suggest swapping the order of the subsections (10) I also believe that this section should contextualise the findings in relation to … (11) I believe that the study will benefit from narrowing down the research question … Journal (editor, readership) (12) I also suggest that the author presents the results in a more reader-friendly fashion (13) I recommend that the authors review some more recent literature on related topics Author: (14) I believe you focus much more … than on … (15) I think it would be better to contextualise your work in Europe… (16) I would either elaborate or delete this part Journal (editor): (17) I am not sure whether the authors should be encouraged to revise the article (18) I strongly encourage the authors to revise the manuscript and hope to see it published

Expert

Advisor

Peer

(continued)

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Table 7.2 (continued) Reviewer role

Reviewer’s (dis)alignment

(Proof)reader

Author: (19) I wonder if there is a more elegant way of describing the multilingual researcher Journal (editor): (20) I have found the manuscript lacking a clear focus and difficult to read

registers used can range from a conventional “reviewer speak” aligning with the journal editor, as in (3) I cannot recommend this article for publication, to evaluations which indirectly indicate to the author how the manuscript can be improved, e.g. through the use of boosters (underlined), as in (2) I found this section surprisingly short and lacking important details. The reviewer can also engage with peers through the use of a more informal or neutral register, e.g. (4) I agree with Reviewer 2, or relate the submission to the aims and scope of the journal in a more formal manner, e.g. (5) in order to be of interest to the wide readership of [journal name]. The expert role involves knowing the research field and showing whether the journal submission contributes to the field with new knowledge. The reviewer can align with the author, e.g. by showing support for their study: (6) I certainly agree with the need to conduct further studies, or align with the journal indicating what contribution the submission can make to the research field, e.g. (7) the article has potential to offer new insights into …. The reviewer can also place the study within a broader context, aligning with the journal readership or respective research community, as in (8) the [journal name] readership would benefit from a debate…. In their role as advisor, the reviewer is most likely to be addressing the author and may choose to do so directly, e.g. (9) I suggest swapping the order of the subsections, or through alignment with the journal editor or readership by making the author(s) the subject of a dependent that-clause, as in examples (12) and (13). The reviewer role as peer is somewhat similar to that of the advisor but it implies more proximity, both in the case of aligning with the author(s) by directly addressing them as you (14) or referring to their work as your (15), or by putting

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themselves in the author(s)’ shoes by using a conditional, as in (16) I would either elaborate or delete this part.1 Likewise, the reviewer can align with the journal editor(s) as peers, e.g. by expressing their doubts (17) or hopes (18) in connection with the future of the journal submission (I am not sure whether the authors should be encouraged to revise the article versus I strongly encourage the authors to revise the manuscript and hope to see it published ). Finally, I used parentheses in the reviewer role as (proof )reader because I did not find any instances of stance expressions in connection to the actual proofreading of the journal submission (e.g. for typos or language infelicities). While I encountered a couple of proofreading recommendations (e.g. the manuscript should be thoroughly proofread ), these did not match the stance triangle involving the reviewer, author(s), and the journal submission in the way that is of interest to my discussion here. I did, however, find instances of stance-taking in connection to the reader reception of the manuscript. The boundary between aligning with the author(s) versus the journal editor(s) is particularly blurred here, and I listed an utterance (19) as aligning with the author in order to attract attention to the need for rewriting a specific part of the text (e.g. I wonder if there is a more elegant way of describing…) and a more detached and formal evaluation (20) as an instance of alignment with the journal editor: I have found the manuscript lacking a clear focus and difficult to read . Thus, different indexical orders can be detected in the register features used for writing peer reviews. These indexical orders are associated with different reviewer roles and are characterised by different degrees of (dis)alignment with the author and the journal editor or readership. If we relate these indexical orders to each other, they produce an order of indexicality in which comments indicating alignment with the journal editor or readership are on a higher plane, as they display more authority and are meant to sustain the gate-keeping mechanism. The indexical orders indicating alignment with the author are on a somewhat lower 1

It should be noted that I found relatively few instances of you and your in connection to stance-taking because this way of addressing the author was mainly used in my data set for providing comments on the more specific parts of manuscript submissions, e.g. p. 5—what do you mean by X ; p. 8—please clarify Y.

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plane, despite the fact that the register used in such stance acts is meant to provide constructive feedback in a friendly, peer-oriented manner. This order of indexicality indicates that, oftentimes, the success of an academic publication implies that the author needs to be able to navigate through different indexical orders and to detect cues in the reviewers’ comments even when they are directly addressed to the author.

Polycentricity: Navigating Authority and Expertise How can we account for this order of indexicality? Unsurprisingly, authority in writing for publication resides with the journal editors who make their decisions with the help of reviewers’ recommendations. In this context, in order to present a convincing recommendation, the reviewer is more likely to resort to register features that index their proximity to the perceived centre of authority than to the author as a peer. Of course, my claim here is based entirely on the analysis of the 50 reviews included in my data set and cannot be generalised; nor does this finding reflect my beliefs about what an ideal review should be like. In a vast majority of cases, my discursive strategies achieved the desired outcome, as the journal editors went against my recommendations in only two cases. At the same time, this finding indicates that the concept of “peer review” is a bit of an oxymoron: it is, in fact, a highly hierarchical and structured activity oriented towards perceived centres of authority and expertise rather than our research peers. Thus, the journal—its editors as concrete representatives and gate-keepers and its complex of norms and ideals as “superaddresee”—functions as the main centre of authority in the order of indexicality associated with peer reviewing. At the same time, despite their strong authority and established gatekeeping mechanisms, academic journals—including those that publish research in different branches of applied linguistics—may not be without their limitations. As these journals represent both real and perceived centres, there is a danger that their practices may become too centripetal and inward-looking. Based on the literature and my own experience as a peer reviewer and editorial board member, there are two main limitations. The first one concerns what can be broadly described as

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anglo-centricity. Canagarajah’s (2002) work started addressing this limitation by drawing attention to the challenges faced by non-anglophone researchers in getting their research published in English-medium journals (see also e.g. Lillis & Curry, 2010). More recently, this perceived anglo-centricity has been discussed and challenged in ERPP and second language writing research in connection to the use of standard varieties of English in writing for publication (e.g. Habibie & Hyland, 2019; Hyland, 2016; McKinley & Rose, 2018). While important issues have been raised, this debate only begins to scratch the surface of the more subtle and serious biases. For example, Hultgren’s research (e.g. 2019, 2020) demonstrates how the controversies surrounding the dominance of English overlook the key role played by the socio-economic factors in shaping language uses in academic settings and in writing for publication. In 2020, Applied Linguistics hosted a debate about knowledge production in our research field, including questions of representation and the dominance of certain modes of enquiry through discussions about epistemological racism and the need to decolonise scholarly knowledge. I have labelled the second perceived limitation “disciplinary navelgazing” because it is meant to describe a lack of dialogue between different branches of applied linguistics (e.g. Kuteeva, 2020) and a trend to (re)produce the same kind of knowledge (e.g. Swales, 2019 on the future of EAP). Academic journals have a key role to play in maintaining this status quo, as the authors are encouraged to cite the publications that appeared in these same journals. The logic of bibliometrics also makes it easier for already highly-cited authors to have their work accepted in leading journals because it is likely to attract more citations and increase the journal impact factor. The two perceived limitations—anglocentricity and disciplinary navel-gazing—may ultimately be intertwined, particularly in research fields that have the teaching and learning of English as their main object of study. This entanglement can be due to an historical connection with the worldwide English Language Teaching and publishing industry (e.g. Pennycook, 2020) or a long tradition of favouring the native speaker as a model for language acquisition (e.g.

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Ortega, 2019). At the same time, it is still unclear what viable alternatives exist to an established mode of scientific enquiry based on empirical evidence, and how these can be adopted in applied linguistic research. What is the role of the peer reviewer in the context of academic knowledge production? The analysis of my data set suggests that it can be possible for a peer reviewer to challenge the authority of the perceived centre without showing disalignment with the journal. This kind of challenge involves a balancing act between, on the one hand, aligning with the journal as an established centre of authority in a given field of research while questioning aspects of research associated with the two above-mentioned limitations. One fairly simple and straightforward strategy is to alert the authors and editors of journal submissions to cutting-edge research carried out in non-anglophone contexts and to encourage them to engage with it more thoroughly. For example, I have resorted to this strategy in various reviews concerned with submissions dealing with different aspects of English-medium instruction (EMI) around the globe. Just like its object of study, this area of research originated somewhat spontaneously across Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, but has only recently gained momentum in the anglophone research world (e.g. through the establishment of the EMI research group at the University of Oxford, thematic special journal issues and panels at major conferences, and the launch of a specialised journal dedicated to EMI in 2020). In order to keep the dialogue open to voices from diverse research communities, it is therefore crucial for this field of research not to succumb to the centripetal trend and lose touch with its original base in the non-anglophone research communities. Another strategy concerns questioning pedagogical recommendations which may lead to a continued reinforcement of standardised knowledge production and dissemination, e.g. through suggesting how scholars who write in English as an additional language can be taught to approximate the standards set by L1 English writers. Such recommendations sometimes appear in journal submissions dealing with writing for publication in English, despite a general agreement in the EAP/ERPP research community that good academic writing does not equal writing by L1 users of English.

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Next, it is not unusual for authors working in an anglophone context to assume that their readers would share a great deal of background knowledge about their research context, whereas the same cannot be said for authors from non-anglophone contexts. As mentioned above, this kind of assumptions can be limiting. I have found examples of encouraging the authors to take a more reflective approach and discuss the limitations of the English-speaking context and their own positionings in conducting research. Along similar lines, non-anglophone authors—even those who adopt a critical stance towards the dominance of English— may believe that they are required to benchmark contextual factors in their research environments, e.g. the material factors which impact writing for publication, against those in anglophone settings. While a majority of readers in various parts of the globe might share this knowledge, this kind of benchmark appears to be questionable. Last but not least, I usually encourage the authors of journal submissions to be specific when resorting to ideological labels such as “periphery” and “semiperiphery”. It is not always clear which countries or parts of the world belong to which category, and what this distinction adds to the discussion of the research findings. Overall, the main purpose of the above-listed strategies is to overcome limitations of the perceived centres and to move the research field forward.

Conclusion Based on the analysis of my own peer review comments, this chapter has sought to provide a glimpse into the dynamics of authority and expertise in writing for publication. Combining the findings of previous research in ERPP with Blommaert’s (2007) concepts of orders of indexicality and polycentricity and Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle has proven useful in this undertaking. Different indexical orders associated with reviewer roles have been detected in the register features and stance acts used in writing peer reviews for major international journals. When combined and related to each other, these indexical orders have produced an order of indexicality in which reviewer comments indicating alignment with the journal editor or readership are on a higher plane, whereas reviewer

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comments indicating alignment with the author are on a somewhat lower plane. Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, the journal and the complex of norms surrounding its activities function as the main centre of authority in writing for publication. In this context, peer reviewing is a hierarchical and structured activity, geared more towards academic journals as real and perceived centres than our research peers. However, the authority of these centres also comes with its own limitations, as strong centripetal trends in the practices surrounding research production and publication can be counterproductive to moving the research field forward. By navigating authority and expertise and mediating the dialogue between the author and the journal, peer reviewers have a key role to play in both maintaining and challenging the authority of academic journals as centres of knowledge production. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the book editors and Kathrin Kaufhold for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Ed., V. McGee, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145–204. Bennett, K. (Ed.). (2014). The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities and practices. Palgrave Macmillan. Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Benjamin. Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: Orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2(2), 115–130. Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherlerleben—The lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340–358.

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Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. Du Bois, J. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. John Benjamins. Englander, K., & López-Bonilla, G. (2011). Acknowledging or denying membership: Reviewers’ response to non-anglophone scientists’ manuscripts. Discourse Studies, 13(4), 395–416. Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current conceptions of stance. In K. Hyland & C. Sancho-Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres. Palgrave Macmillan. Habibie, P., & Hyland, K. (Eds.). (2019). Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers. Palgrave Macmillan. Hultgren, K. (2019). English as the language for academic publication: On equity, disadvantage and “non-nativeness” as a red herring. Publications, 7 (2), 31. Hultgren, K. (2020). Global English: From “Tyrannosaurus rex” to “red herring.” Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19 (3), 10–34. Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7, 173–192. Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27 , 4–21. Hyland, K. (2010). Constructing proximity: Relating to readers in popular and professional science. English for Specific Purposes, 9 (2), 116–127. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58–69. Hynninen, N., & Kuteeva, M. (2017). “Good” and “acceptable” English in L2 research writing: Ideals and realities in history and computer science. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 30, 53–65. Kuteeva, M., & Mauranen, A. (2014). Writing for international publication in multilingual contexts: An introduction to the special issue. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 13, 1–4. Kuteeva, M. (2020). Whose English? Whose diversity? Towards a more holistic understanding of Global English. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19 (3), 81–100. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context. The politics and practices of publishing in English. Routledge. McKinley, J., & Rose, H. (2018). Conceptualizations of language errors, standards, norms and nativeness in English for research publication purposes:

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An analysis of journal submission guidelines. Journal of Second Language Writing, 42, 1–11. Ortega, L. (2019). SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism. The Modern Language Journal, 103(Supplement 2019), 23–38. Paltridge, B. (2013). Referees’ comments on submission to peer-reviewed journals: When is a suggestion not a suggestion? Studies in Higher Education, 40 (1), 106–122. Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Palgrave. Pennycook, A. (2020). Translingual Entanglements of English. World Englishes, 39 (2), 222–235. Politzer-Ahles, S., Holliday, J., Girolamod, T., Spychalskae, M., & Harper Berkson, K. (2016). Is linguistic injustice a myth? A response to Hyland. Journal of Second Language Writing, 34, 3–8. Samraj, B. (2021). Variation in interpersonal relations in manuscript reviews with different recommendations. English for Specific Purposes, 62, 70–83. Swales, J. M. (2019). The futures of EAP genre studies: A personal viewpoint. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 38, 75–82.

8 The Rise and Fall of an Editor-In-Chief: A Field-Theoretic Autoethnography Márton Demeter

Introduction In this chapter I offer an autoethnographic description and fieldtheoretic interpretation of the editor-in-chief ’s power position in the field of academic knowledge production in an Eastern European, more closely, in a Hungarian context. As a scholar with both international and Eastern European identities, I will also refer to some important differences between Eastern European and international norms and habitus that members of the academic communities, both on the international and regional fields, apply. For a cultural interpretation, I will use Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to show how the so-called academic norms form the academic habitus of journal editors and scholars, and how this gatekeeping role relates to other constituents of the world-system of knowledge production (Wallerstein, 2004), as it can be experienced by a M. Demeter (B) University of Public Service in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_8

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scholar who walked all the stairs up to the editor-in-chief position, and serves as an associate editor and editorial board member in a dozen of international journals. The chapter contributes to a growing literature on how the so-called international academic norms serve to maintain global hegemonies in knowledge production by showing two main tendencies that are both detrimental to the development of a well-functioning international academia. The first is the tendency of central academic agents, in our case, the editors of international journals, to assess the quality of paper submissions on the basis of Western academic norms (language, research methodologies, academic writing, etc.). This is a significant burden to the real internationalization of academic knowledge as this practice excludes a legion of potential authors from the periphery that hold different academic cultures, epistemics, or languages. The second tendency is related to the habitus of peripheral agents, in our case, some Hungarian authors by which they, instead of alignment, try to circumvent existing academic norms. This chapter argues that both a more inclusive stance of central academic agents and the internationally more committed attitude of peripheral scholars is much needed if the aim is to develop a balanced global academia that is both diverse and high quality.

An Autoethnographic Perspective on the Field Since in this chapter, I will use both the methodological considerations of autoethnography and the field-theoretic perspective of Pierre Bourdieu and his school, I briefly argue here in favor of this dual approach. While it is not usual to directly relate Bourdieu to autoethnography, Deborah Reed-Danahay argued in several articles that the Bourdieusian field theory can be applied in autoethnographic research (ReedDanahay, 1997, 2005). Reed-Danahay relates Bourdieu to autoethnography through Bourdieu’s notion of reflexive sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) by which social scientists should both reflect on their social positions and to recognize that these positions are social constructs. By this, social scientists do not strive to demarcate subjectivity (the

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Fig. 8.1 The relations of the concepts of norms, habitus, and the agent. My own representation

individual) and objectivity (the societal) but to understand how the individual and the societal are, on an abstract level of the analysis, the very same. What follows is that, for Bourdieu (2003), there is neither absolute objectivity, nor absolute subjectivity, so, autoethnography is part of every research endeavor, even when researchers strive to be fully “objective”. Among a legion of analyses on different social fields, Bourdieu (1988, 1996, 2004) dedicated a special importance to the academic field, and his later followers dedicated an enormous amount of research to the analysis of the academia (among others, Bauder, 2015; Bauder et al., 2017; Gouanvic, 2005; Grenfell, 2008). What is characteristic for each subfield is its special relation to power, and for editorial boards and editors, this institutional power lies in their role as gatekeepers of knowledge communication and dissemination (Demeter, 2018). The concept of habitus refers to some durable and transposable tendencies or dispositions social agents have in order to be active during social actions (Grenfell, 2008), while norms prescribe the rules of proper

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conduct in a given field (Rothenberger et al., 2017). To put it in a straightforward way, I offer a simple model on how I will use the aforementioned Bourdieusian terms in my subsequent autoethnographic analysis (Fig. 8.1).

Editors’ Role on the Field of Forces In the field of knowledge production, the individual agents strive to get better and better positions in the field. There is constant struggle for better positions, and each societal subfield has its own norms that govern the struggle. In academia, the so-called international norms are defined by the American and Western European academic cultures, and, if we relate it to editors, there are several norms originated from the Anglo-Saxon world such as the alleged meritocracy, the peer review system, selectivity and also international prestige that editors should, at the minimum, maintain but ideally enhance. In the Western world, editors both follow these norms and reflect on them. For example, there are several openly accessible formal documents that define editorial policies such as those descriptions that can be found online under the For Authors sections. Moreover, there are formal norms that are shared across different journals and publishers, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) that has a specific document on ethical editorship (COPE, 2019). Both specific and more general documents emphasize that editors are, in an important sense, on the top of the publication hierarchy so they should be familiar with all processes that relate to scholarly publication. Norms that govern the operation of editors should cover the whole peer review process; editors should be familiar with potential frauds and misconducts; and, of course, editors cannot just maintain but also change the focus and scope of the journals (Fig. 8.2). Besides the editors, editorial board members have significant power as well, since, except nominal members that are usually not active but give some prestige to the journal, editorial board members are required to review a few papers annually. Reviewers follow editorial board members in the hierarchy, with considerable power in the gatekeeping process. While the editorial and the publication process might vary across

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Fig. 8.2 Overlapping hierarchies in the field of scholarly publication with growing institutional power. My own representation

different disciplines and journals, typically, editors-in-chief act as the immediate gatekeepers as they can decide if submissions are sent out for external peer review at all. In other words, an editor-in-chief can kill a manuscript without peer review. Moreover, the editor-in-chief might have the final word in deciding if a paper is accepted or rejected although reviewers’ comments and evaluation may have significant effect on the final decision. Notwithstanding, in my experience, reviewers’ evaluation are typically overvalued by the authors which is somehow naïve: it is, in most cases, the editor, and not reviewers that decide if a paper will be further considered for publication. While the ratio depends on the discipline, most reviews suggest revise and resubmit (Schultz, 2010), and it is up to the journal editor as to how to interpret the evaluation of the reviewers, not to mention the fact that it is uncommon to have the original and intact review report, most typically, the editor shares an edited version in a single email. Finally, authors have the least power on the field, because, especially in the most prestigious journals, the number of

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submitted papers are many times higher than the number of the accepted papers, so authors are typically defenceless against reviewers, and even more defenceless against editors. Unlike norms that can be formalized, habitus can be learned by only direct experience, thus, even if someone is familiar with the norms that (allegedly) govern editorial practices, she will not be necessarily familiar with the habitus or, in other words, with what editors actually do. This is a very important difference between norms and habitus, because in societies where formal rules have considerable respect and the usual behavior is to follow formal norms, habitus is typically based on the norms. Historically, Western academia developed in a way that formality became the most accepted norm (Böröcz, 2000). Thus, Western scholarship (and the international field that is determined by Western norms) mostly operate with predetermined, professionally written, explicit and transparent, and publicly available rules such as the research assessment frameworks applied by universities, research institutions, and research funding bodies. Both institutions and individual scholars must adapt to these formal norms and regulations, and academics must incorporate them into their habitus (Bourdieu, 1988) through education, scholarly collaboration, various forms of academic training, and mentorship. In contrast with the characteristics of Western societies, informality (often labeled as such derogatory attributes as “corruption” or “patronclient system”) can be so widespread in some of the non-Western regions that it can be very hard to engage in any undertaking without encountering it (Böröcz, 2000; Havas & Fáber, 2020). The informal behavior of both individual citizens and institutions constitutes a social field where activities can be conducted without reference to any formal criteria or, in cases when there are existing formal norms, citizens systematically try to avoid or circumvent them. In informal societies, accomplishments are mediated through informal decisions and networks, and not by meritocratic, competitive, and transparent evaluation. The distinction between formal and informal societies is of crucial importance for my discussion since I have an extensive experience in working as an editor within both context (see Fig. 8.3).

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Publish or Perish in the Context of the Global Academia In reflexive sociology in general (Bourdieu, 2004) and in autoethnography in particular, the author should fix and declare his or her position (Fig. 8.3). My double identity as a scholar means that I share multiple norms and I am able to apply plural habitus, as it was introduced by Hadas (2019). On the one hand, I am part of the Eastern European academic culture that is significantly different from the so-called international academic field, that is determined by Western academic norms. On the other

Fig. 8.3 My culture-gram represented on the basis of Chang’s (2008) recommendations. My own representation

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hand, I decided to go international, thus, especially in the recent five years, most of my scholarly activities happen on the international field: I publish in international (Western) journals, attend international conferences, participate on the editorial boards of international journals, serve as a reviewer, associate editor, and guest editor in various international journals, and I am also a founder and editor-in-chief of an international journal (KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry). With these two, radically different positions, I found myself in a matrix (Fig. 8.4) where different cultural norms and scholarly habitus should be managed in radically different ways. On the matrix above, there are two simple and two problematic positions. When international scholars meet international norms and when peripheral scholars meet peripheral norms then everything is fine (except when non-mainstream scholars criticize the existing system, both on the international and the peripheral fields). But there are two complicated encounters. The first is when international scholars meet peripheral

Fig. 8.4 The matrix of norms and agents from my perspective as a scholar with double identity. My own representation

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norms and habitus. For international editors, or those peripheral editors that want to meet international norms, facing with peripheral norms can be strange, even startling. Likewise, when peripheral scholars meet international norms and habitus, the result can be disastrous. In the following paragraphs of the present chapter, I will discuss these two complicated situations through my personal editorial experiences as they are related to the perceived norms and habitus of the field.

Global Norms vs. Local Practices As someone that has done all his education in an Eastern European country, namely Hungary, I learned the academic norms of my region. This is due to the fact that academic norms—just like habitus—are acquired through education and peer relations, consequently a scholar’s “original habitus” reflects both their educational background and social network. More recently, I conducted an extensive research on the academic culture of 18 Eastern European countries and the results testify that, more or less, the post-Soviet region share a very similar academic field that can be characterized by the lack of transparency and open competition, the rule of informalities, and a limited extent of meritocracy. Indeed, during my Ph.D. education, most of our endeavors to publish or to get positions were mediated by powerful figures like editors and department chairs. This phenomenon has become the ruling norm of academic recruitment, thus Hungarian, and, as far as my research suggests: most Central and Eastern European scholars tend to develop a rather nepotistic habitus. This habitus and the underlying norms are somehow the opposite of the international norms and practices of transparent, public, competitive, and open calls. When junior (or even a senior) Hungarian scholars aim to get an academic job, they typically won’t check for open calls but ask around if some of their friends, mentors, or colleagues have enough power to create a position, directly for them. For example, when I sent my first job application for an “open call”, all my senior colleagues were laughing because in Hungary and most parts of Eastern Europe, it is almost impossible to get a job that way (actually, I know no one in Hungary who acquired an academic job by

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applying to an open call). This is a typical situation when formal norms are in a direct contrast with how things actually go: if you want to have a job, you have to be in a good relationship with someone who is in a position to recruit faculty members. Only after you have a deal, should you apply for an “open call” that, in fact, has been advertised directly for you. Since in Hungary, most scholarly positions are financed by public fund, it is mandatory to openly advertise them and make them competitive. But in most cases, positions are already fulfilled when the department starts to advertise the call. Again, I have been appointed by eight different higher education institutions in the last ten years, and the process was always like this. As a consequence, as early as their Ph.D. studies, doctoral students are taught to build networks and to connect with power figures, and not to develop an outstanding publication record or to enhance their CVs by other scholarly achievements. During the years of my doctoral studies, I was never encouraged to publish in international journals, or to apply for international conferences. When I wanted to publish something—because doctoral students must build some publication list—I had to find possibilities where my paper will be certainly published. In this context of informalities and nepotism, journal editors may notice that authors follow the norms learned during their training. As an editor, I found myself in a power position with an attributed total control over publishing. Authors thought that all they need is to ask me to publish their papers, and in many cases, professional norms were taught to be secondary for them. On a daily basis, I receive phone calls in which familiar or unknown colleagues ask me to publish their works. These calls reflect the Hungarian habitus which has been learned during education and academic socialization: they either refer to those professors or common acquaintances who directed them to me or tell me how important to them is to publish something in my journal. There is less talk about the article in question—just like in the case of a job application where the name of the professor who recommends you is much more important than your curriculum vitae. But as an editor, whether I want to or not, I am part of this context and I cannot avoid the consequences of the local academic norms when I try to refer to international norms. If as an editor, I reject a paper on the basis of its professional imperfection, I have to face severe consequences in terms of

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social network: not just the author, but also their introducers might note it as a personal offence, and not as a legitimate editorial decision in an international sense. This situation is more severe in cases when submissions come from a more senior colleague. As an editor, I face considerable generation gap in that junior scholars rather tend to be more adjusted to international norms compared to their senior colleagues. However, in my experience, it does not mean that Hungarian academic norms will be easily substituted by international norms as time goes on, since habitus is inherited from senior professors by junior scholars. For example, we still acquire a legion of papers for publication from junior scholars, supplemented by cover letters in which they include recommendations from their supervisors or mentors that is totally unusual in an international context. When peripheral scholars, in this case, a young Hungarian researcher that I was ten years ago, meets international norms, the result can be very confusing. Still, with one of my colleagues and friends, we decided to establish the first Hungarian journal in our field, communication and media studies, and apply international norms such as open access, double-blind peer review process and put together an international editorial board. Moreover, as against the local norms, we decided not to send the submitted papers exclusively to Hungarian scholars for review, but we always tried to reach out to at least one international scholar from the field of the submitted paper. One of the reasons behind this decision was, again, that we felt that local nepotism would be a burden to professional quality. I can still remember what one of my senior colleagues once told me (in a Hungarian context): if you don’t know who your reviewer (or tender evaluator) will be, then you are unsuitable for an academic career. Here, local academic norms expressly contradict with the international norm of impartiality that the double-blind peer review aims to support. Personal sympathies or belonging to the same research community might be more important factors in peer review for Hungarian scholars than the actual quality of papers. For this reason, we insisted that our critics, as far as possible, come from outside the Hungarian context. As our journal became more and more popular and after Scopus and the Web of Science indexed it, we started to receive legions of papers. We immediately experienced that there is a pressure on scholars

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from (semi)peripheral regions to publish in international journals that publish in English, thus they try to find ways for publishing their research in indexed scholarly periodicals. However, the standard of most of the submitted papers—in terms of language, research quality and academic style—was not appropriate for an international journal, although we decided not to favor Western scholars and to try to support non-Westerners by any possible means. Many submissions from the periphery—from Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and Eastern Europe—were inappropriate for a journal publication by various reasons. Many papers were subject of severe plagiarism, without appropriate referencing. While most international journals, if not all of them, reject those papers with poor English, we decided not to devaluate papers based on their level of English, because this practice develops a severe bias against those scholars from non-native English countries. Thus, we directly asked our reviewers not to consider linguistic issues and to focus on content only. Notwithstanding, we received a myriad of papers with poor quality English, and, in these cases, we had to reject the submissions. As an editor, my general feeling was that most scholars from nonWestern geographies did not have an inner urge or scholarly motivation to publish internationally, but they were pressured by their institutions to do so, thus, without appropriate training and institutional support, they sent “try and error” submissions. I have to say that this can not be blamed on these authors alone since this phenomenon shows the biased nature of the system of global knowledge production. The global system does not care about differences in epistemologies, languages, and cultures that have a significant impact on publishing possibilities, thus even those scholars without institutional support, appropriate academic training, and financial resources must try to publish their research in journals with high international standards. In this scenario, journal editors, especially those that do not automatically reject submissions from the periphery, must deal with a legion of submissions with desperate quality.

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International vs. Regional Norms When we established our journal and managed to be indexed in international databases like Scopus or the Web of Science, we always wanted to build a diverse authorship that might correspond to a really diverse readership. For this sake, we extensively advertised our call for papers at various international mailing lists, and we started to receive submissions from both non-Western regions such as Asia, the Middle East, LatinAmerica and Africa, and from Western scholars as well. However, in many cases, we had to face the fact that, being an emerging journal from the periphery, many Westerners thought that we would gladly publish anything if we can show that scholars from the US or from the United Kingdom (not to mention Harvard or Oxford) are willing to publish with us. Eventually, these papers did not share those problems that emerged in the works of peripheral scholars such as poor English, plagiarism, or the absence of any meaningful structure. On the contrary, these papers were well-written, and they followed those international norms that are generally accepted by refereed journals. Still, most submissions from the West, especially in the first few years of our journal, suffered from one of the following three deficiencies. First, in many cases, in terms of novelty and empirical basis, the submitted papers were essentially weak, and the real contribution of these articles was questionable. In several instances, when we sent the paper to external peer review, the reviewers responded that they had already reviewed these papers for another journals and suggested to reject them. So, we can rightly assume that some of the Western scholars supposed that we will publish those papers that many established journals rejected before, because we want to use their reputation or the name of their institution. Second, in other cases, the submissions from Western countries relied on old data and the literature review that were also outdated. In these cases, we can assume that they wanted to publish their old manuscripts that were either rejected from other outlets or were never submitted before because of the lack of originality. Finally, we encountered a lot of papers that were the perfect examples of academic salami slicing or the so-called smallestpublishing-unit strategy. In these cases, Western authors tried to publish the less valuable parts of their research projects with us; typically, they

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published big data results in one of the leading journals, some theoretical considerations in another classical outlet, and the rest of the results, they thought, would be perfect for an emerging Eastern European journal. Both the desperate efforts of peripheral authors that were pressured by their institutions to publish in international journals, and the lofty attempt of Westerners to publish their second-class research in emerging journals point to the ineptitude of the publish or perish system. As an editor, I always had to experience that many, if not most, authors do not submit their papers because they want to communicate their findings to the scientific communities. On the contrary, one can feel the publication pressure behind many submissions that sooner or later makes scholars from all around the world to submit their papers to international journals. While as an editor-in-chief, both receiving second-class papers from Western scholars and reading low quality submissions from peripheral or emerging scholars is equally disappointing, the hardest thing is when you face psychological terror from the side of your closest colleagues. The global academia is growingly connected, and different world regions—including Eastern Europe—strive to participate in the worldsystem of academic knowledge production. Accordingly, many universities and research institutions at peripheral world regions demand their faculty members to publish in refereed international journals. Moreover, it is not just research institutions, but also doctoral schools that have started to make it a norm for Ph.D. students to publish one or two papers in refereed international journals by the time of the thesis defence. This process causes severe generational clashes in research institutions, universities, and doctoral schools. Since the requirement for publishing in international journals cannot be made mandatory retrospectively, senior researchers, department chairs, or the directors of research institutions might have not published research in selective international journals, yet they expect their junior colleagues to do so. In more and more countries beyond the Western center, including Hungary, one of the main conditions of the appointment of a full professor is to have publications in refereed international journals (Kohoutek, 2009; Sasvári & Urbanovics, 2019; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010). However, most panel members that are senior professors have never published

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anything in these journals. Thus, again, they expect something that they have never accomplished themselves. The situation is even more desperate in doctoral schools. In Hungary, as in many other parts of the world, a full professor should supervise Ph.D. students, so the struggle for getting a doctoral student can be tense. Therefore, Ph.D. students are typically assigned to those senior scholars who strive to be a full professor, or for those who want to maintain their power position within the doctoral school. Notwithstanding, as I have already mentioned, being a senior professor or being in power positions do not necessarily imply to know how to conduct internationally acceptable research or to have a good publication record in refereed journals. As a consequence, despite the fact that doctoral students are required to publish in international journals, they neither have appropriate training in the graduate program, nor have they appropriate mentoring from their supervisors. The norm of international publication was introduced artificially, without appropriate strategy that resulted in a hybrid system in which scholars seek to seemingly fulfill the conditions without too much effort and international competition. This experience is totally consistent with the observations of others (Böröcz, 2000; Havas & Fáber, 2020), where there is a trend in Eastern European habitus by which many academics try to circumvent existing rules. In Hungary, many members of the scholarly community—at least in my research field that is social sciences in general, and communication and media studies in particular—are continuously looking for possibilities by which the publication requirements can be fulfilled without the enormous efforts that are needed when peripheral scholars want to publish their research in refereed international journals. While a few years before, publishing in predatory or semi-predatory journals was an option, nowadays both universities and research institutions are aware of this phenomenon, so accepted publications are restricted to those papers that are published in indexed journals, typically those that are included in either Scopus or the Web of Science. As mentioned before, my journal KOME was, and still is, the only one Scopus indexed communication journal in Hungary, and it is listed in the Q1–Q2 quartiles that means that publications in KOME are highly valued in Hungarian academia. It was a very hard and lengthy work to have our journal indexed in Scopus,

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especially in the higher quartiles. For this, the journal should have international authorship, it should be selective thus we can publish only a limited number of papers, and the published papers should be cited: in short, the standards should be high. These standards are in line with those of the international scientific community, but they diverge from our local norms by which one can achieve anything by good connections. As editor-in-chief, another important challenge was to face with the everyday inquiries of my own colleagues and their doctoral students. We had to deal with Hungarian submissions of low quality whose authors thought that, since we are their colleagues, we will publish their papers. It was very common that scholars directly asked us to publish their work because they need it for their promotion, and without this, they wouldn’t be appointed as professors. Similarly, before doctoral thesis defence, legions of doctoral students, either personally or through the mediation of their supervisors, asked us to publish their papers because without this, they wouldn’t be able to get their Ph.D.’s and their career was in our hands. All these phenomena clearly show that being the editor-in-chief of an international journal that is published in a peripheral world region with different academic norms creates a severely worrisome situation in which I had to decide if I wanted to keep international norms and refuse the requests of my colleagues or publish their papers and diverge from international standards. For an international scholar who is not familiar with our norms, the decision might seem easy to be made, since on the international field, those scholars that ask for benefits are, at least openly, subjects of contempt—but not in Hungary, where using the informal network is the diamond standard, and one can be proud of having so good connections that they can publish in an international journal without developing competitive submissions. While on the international field, you might be considered as professional and unbiased when you refuse to provide benefits to your friends or colleagues, you might be considered as cruel, insensitive, or even arrogant in Hungary when you are not considering the requests of your fellow scholars. For me, it was impossible to adapt to the informalities of my regional academic field since I fight nepotism both as an ordinary citizen and as a scholar, and we worked a lot for the international recognition of our journal. At the

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same time, it was also very uncomfortable to say no to those colleagues who were in a very hard situation: they were requested to publish in international journals without appropriate training, mentoring, and institutional support. Being unable to choose what is best in this complex situation, I decided to resign as an editor-in-chief, and my co-founder has become the sole editor-in-chief who is, being only a part-time academic, less dependent on the Hungarian academic context so he can say “no” much easier than me. I have come a long way from a Hungarian author, who had learned the norms of the Hungarian academia, to an internationally recognized scholar that is included on a dozen of editorial boards and who had the opportunity to be editor-in-chief of an international journal. I could never accept Hungarian norms of informalities, and I tried to introduce international academic standards in our editorship in the belief that we can change the habitus of Hungarian researchers by the implementation of international norms. My double identity as an editor made it possible to look at both the international and national editorial policies, and we tried to implement a hybrid system that sets the bar high but does not put non-western scholars at a disadvantage. However, norms and habitus cannot be changed in a day: most of my colleagues and doctoral students wanted to use our acquittance to get undeserved benefits, and after a few years of constant struggling, I had to resign as an editor-in-chief. Ultimately, the moral of my story is that academic norms and the corresponding habitus change incredibly hard, and the commensurability of different norms can be extremely painful.

Concluding Remarks What I have learned over the years as an editor is that we are just as dependent on the norms of our respective field as authors, and our gatekeeping habits are almost fully determined by the field’s norms. In this respect, editors are individual agents only in a limited sense: we are in the focus of various vectors, defined by the expectations of our academic community. However, these expectations are not culturally uniform and, even if we try hard, applying inappropriate standards will eventually end

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up in failure. In an international context, authors—and, even more, their institutions—want to be published in top-ranked journals. As a consequence, we receive a legion of submissions and only a few of them can be published, that means that most of them will be eventually rejected. Because of the great number of submissions, international editors work under high pressure. Currently, I am working on two special issues, both in refereed international journals. There are weeks when I receive two or even three dozen of submissions, that means—considering 50 percent desk reject—I have to find 30–40 reviewers per week. In this context, I have to find those papers that are supported by the reviewers and have the best fit to the journal’s profile or the profile of the special issue. In this context, it is totally pointless to ask me to publish this or that paper on the basis of personal acquaintance or because a given author needs this publication for tenure. Still, it always happens when my Hungarian colleagues find out that I am an editor of a special issue of a recognized journal, and it is very hard to tell them that their usual habitus won’t work this case. On the other hand, it is equally hard to maintain international editorial standards in a Hungarian context as many of my local colleagues are used to Hungarian academic norms by which social networks might be more important than professional values. The main point of my argument is that these norms are very hard to be changed, if not impossible, by a journal editor. We are gatekeepers, but we are keeping only those gates that have been built by the academic community with its specific norms and the applied habitus of its agents.

References Bauder, H. (2015). The international migration of academics: A labour market perspective. International Migration, 53, 83–96. Bauder, H., Hannah, C. A., & Lujan, U. (2017). International experience in the academic field: Knowledge production, symbolic capital, and mobility fetishism. Population, Space and Place, 23, 1–13. Böröcz, J. (2000). Informality rules. East European Politics and Societies, 14 (2), 348–380.

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Bourdieu, P. (1988 [1984]). Homo academicus. (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996 [1989]). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. (L. C. Clough, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2003). Participant-objectivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9, 281–294. Bourdieu, P. (2004). Science of science and reflexivity. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. University of Chicago Press. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method . Routledge. COPE. (2019). A short guide to ethical editing for new editors. Retrieved from https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_G_A4_SG_Ethical_Edit ing_May19_SCREEN_AW-website.pdf Demeter, M. (2018). Theorizing international inequalities in communication and media studies. A field theory approach. KOME–An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 6 (2), 92–110. Gouanvic, J. M. (2005). A bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances. The Translator, 11(2), 147–166. Grenfell, M. (2008). Pierre Bourdieu. Key concepts. Acumen Publishing. Hadas, M. (2019). A transzformáció elvei. Bevezetés egy kés˝o bourdieuziánus habituselméletbe. [The principles of transformation. Introduction to a late Bourdieusian habitus theory]. Erdélyi Társadalom, 17 (2), 193–211. Havas, Á., & Fáber, Á. (2020). The rise of heteronomous academia on the EU’s borderlands. LeftEast, August 19, 2020. Retrieved from https://www. criticatac.ro/lefteast/heteronomous-academia-eu-borderlands/#_edn14 Kohoutek, J. (Ed.). (2009). Quality assurance in higher education: A contentious yet intriguing policy issue. CEPES. Reed-Danahay, D. (1997). Auto/Ethnography. Berg. Reed-Danahay, D. (2005). Locating Bourdieu. Indiana University Press. Rothenberger, L. T., Auer, C., & Pratt, C. B. (2017). Theoretical approaches to normativity in communication research. Communication Theory, 27 , 176– 201. Sasvári, P., & Urbanovics, A. (2019). Merre tovább egyetemi tanárok, avagy az új publikációs minimum aspektusai a társadalomtudományban. [Where to go next, university professors? The aspects of the new publication minimum in the social sciences] In: Újítások és újdonságok. Sozial und Wirtschafts Forschungsgruppe, Grosspetersdorf, pp. 5–30.

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Schultz, D. M. (2010). Are three heads better than two? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior affect the rejection rate. Scientometrics, 84, 277–299. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press. Wodak, R., & Fairclough, N. (2010). Recontextualizing European higher education policies: The cases of Austria and Romania. Critical Discourse Studies, 7 (1), 19–40.

9 Rhetorical Structure and Types of Comments in My Manuscript Reviews Ling Shi

Introduction This chapter presents an analysis and reflection on the rhetorical structure and evaluative commentary types in my reviews of manuscripts submitted to academic journals. The purpose is to shed light on information much-needed for manuscript authors about how review judgments are made. Peer review is a common practice to select manuscripts for publication in academic journals. Refereed journals typically require reviewers to provide evaluative commentary, indicating a recommendation of either Accept, Minor revisions, Major revisions, or Reject. Such reviews play a key role in helping editors make difficult decisions and, in a sense, are real gatekeepers (Leki, 2003; Starfield & Paltridge, 2019). The review comments also help authors revise and improve the manuscripts for publication. Although bias exists (e.g., Hyland, 2016), L. Shi (B) University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_9

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peer review provides some quality control and, as Goldbeck-Wood (1999, p. 44) puts it, “confers legitimacy not only on scientific journals and the papers they publish but on the people who publish them.” Reviewers also get some credit by including the service in their CV. Peer review reports for journal manuscripts, being confidential and sometimes sensitive, are not only highly conventionalized (Fortanet, 2008) but also an “occluded” genre (Swales, 1996). To ensure unbiased reviews, the process is often double blind as both the reviewer and author are anonymous to each other. Since I became a faculty member in the 90s, reviewing manuscripts for journals has become part of my academic life. I consider it an essential service because my own submissions also need reviews done by others. In addition to this “sense of obligation and commitment” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019, p. 257), I also find reviewing submissions a chance to keep me updated with new research in the field. As a reviewer for a number of journals for over 20 years, I have learnt how to write a review report, like other reviewers in Paltridge (2017), by writing and by modeling it after reviews of my own journal submissions. I remember taking mental notes about how I benefit from certain specific comments that help me improve my paper. Sometimes I receive conflicting comments from the reviewers, which makes me more cautious about my own reviews. In writing article reviews, I always try to imagine how the author might be able to follow my comments in revision. I would revise and delete certain comments that I think others might disagree. In addition, it is a learning experience reading other reviewers’ comments on the same manuscripts that I have reviewed when they are shared by journal editors. Over the years, I seem to have developed a rhetorical structure and a focus on certain types of comments in my review reports. Review reports are not public documents, so they are mostly researched by journal editors and reviewers who have access to the data and people involved (e.g., Belcher, 2007; Coniam, 2012; Paltridge, 2017). Along the same line, this chapter reports an analysis of my own review reports in the past ten years (2010–2019) on 82 manuscripts submitted to 14 journals in the area of applied linguistics. By analyzing my own comments, I aim to shed light on the review process from

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an autoethnographic perspective. To contextualize my study, I will first review literature on the rhetorical structure and types of comments in article reviews in applied linguistics.

Literature Review Swales (1990, p. 58) defines genre as “a class of communication events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes.” Research on the genre or rhetorical structure of academic writing was first proposed by Swales (1981) who identified a discourse structure to create a research space (known as the CARS model) in the introduction of a research article comprising four moves: (1) establishing the field, (2) summarizing previous research, (3) preparing for the present research, and (4) introducing the present research. Such a move analysis has been applied to illustrate how a written text moves rhetorically from one organizational stage to another to achieve a particular function. Following Swales’ definition of genre, manuscript review reports for journal submissions are a genre with the purpose of providing evaluative commentary and recommendations of whether the submissions are suitable for publication by domain-specific scholars. Journal article reviews seem to share certain features in terms of their rhetorical structure and language use. For example, Fortanet (2008) analyzed 25 article reviews related to applied linguistics on submissions to 10 journals and identified a four-move structure: (1) Summarizing judgment regarding suitability for publication, (2) Outlining the article, (3) Points of criticism, and (4) Conclusion and recommendation. Of these moves, Move 3 (Points of criticism) was present in all reports while other moves might be absent. A similar three-move structure was then reported by Samraj (2016) based on analyses of 50 reviews (25 major revisions and 25 rejects) for the journal English for Specific Purposes: (1) Introduction, (2) Main section with points of criticism, and (3) Conclusion. The introductory move combined the first two moves in Fortanet (2008) to provide some positive and negative evaluations of the manuscripts, a summary of the study, and a recommendation. The main section with points of criticism was typically itemized and ordered

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according to the importance of the topic, page numbers, or sections in the paper. The conclusion move, like that in Fortanet (2008), was optional and only occurred in a small portion of the data to repeat the recommendation and to summarize the evaluative commentary. Also analyzing the move structures of review reports on submissions to the journal English for Specific Purposes, Paltridge (2017) analyzed 97 review reports with the four moves described in Fortanet (2008). Results indicate that Move 3 (Points of criticism) occurred in all reviews, whereas Move 1 (Summarizing judgment regarding suitability for publication) was only obligatory in accept reviews. These moves, as Paltridge noted, did not always occur in the same sequence and could be repeated in different combinations. A small number of researchers also explored the content and types of review commentary on submissions to applied linguistics journals. Among them, Coniam (2012) analyzed his own comments in 122 article reviews for the journal System. He identified four broad types matching the journal’s guidelines for reviewers: (1) Previous research, (2) Originality, (3) Research methodology, and (4) Language and structure. The majority of these comments (about 90%) were negative, focusing on acceptability of claims, appropriate methodology, and appropriate nature of data. Three other studies analyzed article reviews on submissions to the journal English for Specific Purposes. One was conducted by Hewings (2004) who examined 228 reviews. The frequencies of different types of comments suggest that reviewers were mostly concerned about the paper and its contribution to the field (22%), followed by how the research is expressed and presented (20%), the validity of the claim based on the findings (19%), and the quality of analysis (18%). The reviewers were found to follow a pattern by saying something positive in general and then moving on with detailed criticism. This pattern of “good news” followed by “bad news” was also found in Belcher’s (2007) examination of 29 article reviews on submissions by off-network scholars outside major English-speaking countries such as the US, UK, and Australia. Belcher found that comments on “Topic” were mostly positive (72%) whereas comments on “Language use” were mostly negative (90%). Similarly, Paltridge (2017) analyzed 97 article reviews and found “Topic”

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the most positively commented on feature. Compared with Belcher’s observation of a language barrier for off-network scholars in publication, Paltridge noted that “Language use” was negatively mentioned mostly in reviews other than reject reviews, which suggests that a language problem was not a major reason to reject a manuscript. Some of the above researchers also went beyond the literal meaning of the evaluative language from the perspective of Speech Acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) to understand how reviewers request changes. For example, Fortanet (2008) identified three evaluative acts: Criticism, Recommendation, and Requests/Questions. Criticism was found to appear less frequently than the other two acts. In comparison, Paltridge (2015, 2017) observed speech acts of Directions, Suggestions, Clarification requests, and Recommendations which were performed either directly or indirectly. For example, directions asking for changes in the form of an imperative (e. g., Rewrite this sentence) is direct compared with a statement (e.g., This sentence is a bit confusing), which is indirect. Authors, however, were expected to also follow the indirect requests. Reviewers were also found to use hedges such as “quite,” seem,” “might,” “perhaps.” Such lexicogrammatical features were often associated with negative evaluations (Samraj, 2016) and used as a strategy for reviewers “to strike a good balance between being strict and being kind” (Paltridge, 2017, p. 82). Previous research on article reviews for applied linguistics journals suggests common moves of the genre (Summarizing judgment regarding suitability for publication, Outlining the article, Points of criticism, and Recommendation). These moves do not occur in a particular linear order and some may occur more than others in relation to the types of recommendations the reviewers make on the submission. In making their comments, reviewers are found to focus on certain textural features related to the sections of the article (Literature review, Methods, Results, Discussion, Pedagogical implications), the overall quality of the paper (Topic, Audience, Purpose, Clarity), and presentation (Language use). There is also a tendency for reviewers to present their requests for change indirectly and use hedges to soften the tone of their negative comments. These findings are crucial to help authors, especially new faculty members, understand and survive the review process. Building

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on previous research, this study is a response to Paltridge’s (2017) call to further explore how reviewers make judgments on manuscripts. I analyzed my own manuscript reviews for 14 journals in applied linguistics to identify the rhetorical structure and evaluative commentary types in my review reports.

Method Of the article reviews I wrote, 82 written in the past ten years (2010– 2019) were still on file and were therefore included in the present study. Most of these reviews (n = 58) were written for two journals of which I served on the editorial board for an extended period. Each review contained an average of 380 words. Of these reviews, 65 were first reviews and 17 were subsequent reviews after the author revised the manuscript based on feedback provided by myself and/or other reviewers. Most of the reviews recommended Minor revisions (n = 44), followed by Major revisions (n = 27) and Reject (n = 9). It is rare for submissions to be accepted without revisions. Of the two submissions that I recommended Accept, only one was an initial submission, the other was a revised submission. To facilitate data analyses, I numbered all the reviews (MR1-82) and uploaded them in NVivo 12, a piece of software for qualitative data analysis. There were several procedures in data analysis. First, I read all the 82 review reports and observed an overall structure with two sections: the Recommendation section and the Specific evaluative commentary section. The former was the introductory paragraph that presented and explained the recommendation (accept, minor revisions, major revisions, or reject), whereas the latter provided a list of comments or suggestions for revision. Each with a different purpose, the two sections were typically connected at the end of the first section with a sentence such as “The following is a list of suggestions for revisions.” I then identified a four-move structure in the Recommendation section: Move 1 that outlines the article from the reviewer’s perspective; Move 2 that acknowledges revisions the author has done by following

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the feedback of the reviewers on the previous version(s) of the submission; Move 3 that summarizes the evaluative comments to explain or justify the recommendations the reviewer makes; and Move 4 that recommends whether the manuscript is suitable for publication (accept, reject), or needs minor or major revisions before publication. Move 1 (Outlining the article) and Move 4 (Making a recommendation) match those described in previous research (Fortanet, 2008; Paltridge, 2017; Samraj, 2016). Move 3 (Summarizing the evaluative commentary) is similar to the move of Points of criticism in previous research. I label it differently in the present chapter to distinguish the relevant comments from those in the Specific evaluative commentary section in the current data. Of the four moves, Move 2 that acknowledges the revisions for revised submissions has not been mentioned in previous research. Next, I analyzed types of comments by identifying and coding the analytical units or segments in the Summary of evaluative commentary and the Specific evaluative commentary. Based on the content, a sentence could be coded as one or more than one unit. For example, “The study is well designed though it could be better presented” was coded as two analytical units: a positive comment on method, and a negative comment on presentation. Five types of comments were identified in the Summary of evaluative commentary: Audience, Contribution, Literature Review, Methodology, and Presentation. Two of them, Methodology and Presentation, were further distinguished into three subcategories each for comments in the Specific evaluative commentary section. Each comment was coded as a positive and negative comment of a particular type. Like Belcher (2007), I coded any requests for change (e.g., Please revise the sentence) as negative comments. Table 9.1 presents the coding scheme: Finally, the coded data were calculated and analyzed to illustrate the rhetorical moves and types of comments in the reports. Following Paltridge (2017), I examined the moves and types of comments to identify patterns in relation to accept, minor revisions, major revisions, and reject reviews.

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Table 9.1 Types of comments Types of commentary

Definition

Audience

Whether the article attracts the readership of the journal Whether the article makes a contribution to the field Whether the study is contextualized in the existing literature

Contribution Literature review Methodology Methods Findings and discussion Tables Presentation Clarity Organization Mechanics

Whether the research is well designed and conducted Whether there are solid findings and in-depth discussion Whether the tables are used effectively for data analysis Whether there is clarity in presentation, including the quality of language/English Whether the article is well organized Whether there are typos or grammatical errors

Rhetorical Moves Table 9.2 presents moves across four categories of recommendations in the Recommendation section of the 82 reviews. As Table 9.2 illustrates, Move 4 (Making a recommendation) occurred in all reviews, whereas Move 1 (Outlining the article) and Move 3 (Summarizing evaluative commentary) occurred in most of the first reviews (51 and 60 out of Table 9.2 Moves across categories of recommendations Moves Move 1 Move 2 Move 3 Move 4

Outlining the article Acknowledging revisions Summarizing evaluative commentary Making a recommendation

Accept

Minor revisions

Major revisions

Reject

Total reviews

1

25

19

6

51

1

10

2

0

13

1

28

23

8

60

2

44

27

9

82

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65, respectively). Compared to the above moves, Move 2 occurred in 13 of the 17 reviews for revised submissions in the current data. Example 1 is from a first review which typically contains three moves. For confidential reasons, I replaced specific content with “…” for sentences and “XXX” for words and phrases, and page numbers with P# in all the examples cited in this chapter. Example 1 from MR1 recommended Major revisions Move 1. Outlining the article This paper reports a study on a group of EAP teachers’ beliefs and their use of EAP teaching materials …

Move 3. Summarizing evaluative commentary The topic and findings are of interest to the audience of the journal. However, the presentation or organization of the paper is a bit confusing. … The research questions could be more specific.

Move 4. Making a recommendation … the author could focus on some of the issues and provide a more focused data analysis and in-depth discussion of each issue.

As Example 1 shows, Move 1 (Outlining the article) is an interesting move as some authors might find it redundant for something they know by heart. I did remember deleting this move a couple of times when my outlining closely matched the author’s summary in the Abstract or Conclusion of the article. I remember trying to write a summary from my own perspective to show how I, as a reviewer, had read the manuscript carefully. In other words, I made the move to show my appreciation of the author’s work. As an author myself, I have always enjoyed reading a summary of my own article from reviewers, especially when it shows a different perspective or understanding. This suggests that, like reviewers in Paltridge (2017), I have tried to write a review in a way that I would like to see reviews of my own work.

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Example 1 also illustrates how I typically make an implicit recommendation for major revisions. Instead of saying that I recommended Major revisions, I did not use the word “major” when requesting revisions for data analysis and discussion though the nature of the revisions did suggest a substantial revision. I was aware of the emotional reaction that the author might have after all their hard work because I myself had experienced frustrations when being asked to do major revisions. As an author myself, I understood that the author of the paper being reviewed might be discouraged or overwhelmed by the major revisions recommended. Such frustrations and challenges are true even for senior or experienced authors who are not concerned about employment or tenure (Casanave, 2019). Over the years, I have talked to some senior colleagues who are so frustrated that they choose to publish only by authoring or editing books instead. The experience of submitting a manuscript for publication, as Belcher (2007, p. 2) noted, “is often fraught with frustration and disappointment” because it is closely connected to hiring, tenure, and promotion. My choice of not using the word “major” when requesting for Major revisions suggests that reviewers are not only gatekeepers but also caring human beings who are trying to help their peers to succeed. In contrast to first reviews, reviews for revised submissions often do not contain Move 1 (Outline) and Move 3 (Summary of evaluative commentary). In these reviews, Move 2 and Move 4 are a typical combination. The following is an example: Example 2 from MR23 for a revised submission Move 2. Acknowledging revisions The paper has done at least two rounds of reviews and revisions. I think the author has done a good job revising the paper based on the reviewers’ comments.

Move 4. Making a recommendation The paper is ready for publication with the following minor revisions.

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The above example shows how I included an acknowledgment in my reviews for a revised submission. Since revisions based on the feedback in the previous round(s) of reviews often require major or substantial revisions, I believe that an acknowledgment is important to show respect to authors for their willingness to take up the challenge. With such an acknowledgment, I hope that the author would move on if the manuscript is rejected or requires further revisions. I am fully aware that authors, like the doctoral student in Li (2006), need a lot of courage to survive the process by going through multiple and painstaking revisions. Unlike Example 2 where Move 3 (Summarizing commentary) was absent in the review of a revised submission, reviews for initial submissions often contained Move 3 to provide reasons for the recommendation. These reasons or comments concern (1) whether the topic would interest the readership of the journal; (2) whether the study contributes to the knowledge in the field; (3) whether the author effectively contextualizes the study in the existing literature; (4) whether the research is well designed and conducted; and (5) whether the manuscript is well presented. These categories of comments correspond to the typical criteria guiding the reviewers (Previous research, Originality, Research methodology, Language, and structure) described in Coniam (2012). Table 9.3 presents the types and frequencies of positive and negative comments in Move 3. The above table shows a balance of positive (n = 64) and negative (n = 66) comments in the Summary of evaluative commentary. Except for comments on Presentation and Audience which were both positive and negative (21 vs. 19 and 4 vs. 3 respectively), comments on Contribution were more positive than negative (22 vs. 4), and comments on Table 9.3 Summary of positive and negative commentary Types of commentary

Positive comments

Negative comments

Audience Contribution Literature review Methodology Presentation Total

4 22 6 11 21 64

3 4 16 24 19 66

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Methods and Literature review were more negative than positive (24 vs. 11, and 16 vs. 6 respectively). These findings suggest that, despite my largely positive comments on how the manuscript contributed to the field, it was my negative evaluation of the manuscript on Methods and Literature review that led to recommendations to revise or reject the manuscripts. This corresponds to Paltridge’s (2017) observation that Methods was negatively mentioned mostly in reject reviews and Literature review was negatively mentioned mostly in reviews recommending Major revisions. In examining how I presented these positive and negative comments, I observed the pattern of “good news followed by bad news” reported in previous research (Belcher, 2007; Hewings, 2004; Paltridge, 2017). I seem to have been socialized into the review practice based on reading other reviews. The following are two examples: Example 3 from MR8 The paper is well written in general though the major question I have in mind is what original contribution the study offers.

Example 4 from MR42 This paper deals with an interesting topic, which should be of great interest to readers of the journal. The review of the identity theory and rationale for research in the online spaces (…) are well presented. However, the literature review focuses on theories rather than empirical findings …

As shown in the above two examples, the “bad news” is typically introduced by adversative conjunctions of “though” and “however.” Such a pattern or strategy, as I feel, is less face threatening, as “bad news” is sugar-coated with good news. Although mixing “good and bad news” might be a little confusing (e.g., Paltridge, 2015), I hope authors are not confused by my review because I then elaborate or specify the “bad news” in the next Specific evaluative commentary section.

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Types of Specific Comments The Specific evaluative commentary section serves the purpose of providing specific feedback based on which authors are requested to revise their manuscript. Previous research has identified Points of criticism of the main or key section of the review (Fortanet, 2008; Paltridge, 2017; Samraj, 2016). This is because, as Leki (2003) noted, detailed feedback is more likely to help authors revise and publish their papers. Similar to those described in Samraj (2016), specific comments in the present data were typically numbered and listed according to either page numbers, sections of the article (Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Findings and Discussion, Conclusion, References), or areas of concern (e.g., Tables, Organization, Clarifications, Mechanics). These comments were often supported through a quote from the article for easy reference. The comments on Audience and Contribution in the Summary of evaluative commentary did not appear in the Specific evaluative commentary section. Following the summary of the negative comments on Literature review, Methods, and Presentation in the Recommendation section, the comments in the Specific commentary section provided specific feedback in the same areas. Table 9.4 illustrates the distribution of the types of comments across the four categories of recommendations: Table 9.4 Types of specific comments across categories of recommendations Types of commentary Literature review Methodology Methods Findings and discussion Tables Presentation Clarity Organization Mechanics Total

Accept

Minor revisions

Major revisions

Reject

Total of comments

0

28

23

5

56

0 0

154 42

91 30

12 2

257 74

0

28

9

1

38

0 0 0 0

61 20 31 364

22 20 23 218

11 5 11 47

94 45 65 629

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Table 9.4 shows that the majority of the specific comments were provided for submissions recommending Minor revisions (n = 364) or Major revisions (n = 218). The accept reviews contained no specific comments and the reject reviews had only 47 specific comments. This is perhaps because revisions are usually not expected for manuscripts recommended as Accept or Reject. Like previous researchers (Fortanet, 2008; Paltridge, 2015, 2017), I observed that my specific comments functioned as directives or instructions for revision often in the forms of questions, requests, suggestions, or concerns. The questions (Example 5) and clarification requests (Example 6) allowed me to sound like a naïve reader. Constructing my comments carefully in such a way was my intention to position myself as a peer trying to follow the point/paper rather than as an authoritative reviewer making an evaluative judgment. Example 5. Specific comments on “tables” from MR21 It is better to have one table listing the coding categories used in the present study. Are there XXX categories of coding used for the present study? The categories of XXX from previous studies should be dealt with in the lit review section. Please also add a column to have an example from the data for each XXX listed.

Example 6. Specific comments on “clarity” from MR1 P#. The sentence starting from Line 6 is a bit confusing. Did XXX and XXX believe XXX were better or not as good as XXX?

In addition, when a direction was expressed in the form of an imperative, I was careful to add the word “please” to make it sound courteous (Example 5). The following is another example: Example 7. Specific comments on “findings and discussion” from MR4 In discussion/conclusion, please highlight the findings that are new contributions or something that confirms previous understandings.

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Apart from using the word “please,” I also used hedges such as “would” (examples 8 and 9), “might” (examples 10 and 11), and “suggest” (Example 11). Using hedges, as commented by one reviewer in Paltridge (2015), is perhaps a good strategy to provide critical and constructive comments in a courteous or less face threatening way. I felt the same based on my understanding that articles selected by editors for review might be written by junior authors who are trying to get published or senior authors who have already established their program of research. It is common that I review manuscripts with self-citations from authors themselves. Example 8. Specific comments on “literature review” from MR43 P#. The author states that different findings from previous studies about disciplinary differences are due to the method effect. It would be helpful to specify the disciplinary differences based on previous research and whether conflicting findings refer to the same disciplinary practices.

Example 9. Specific comments on “methods” from MR6 Since the study focuses on XXX (…), it is important to illustrate how the author has chosen to focus on these XXX. The author states on P# that the XXX were selected based on XXX. It is not clear what kind of XXX it was and how these XXX were identified. It would also be helpful to define these XXX early in the paper.

Example 10. Specific comments on “organization” from MR24 There is some repetition in the section of participants and first paragraph of Data Collection. The two paragraphs might be merged.

Example 11. Specific comments on “mechanics” from MR2 P#. The word “sent” suggests that the students were sent by the XXX schools or the students’ parents. “Went” might be a better choice.

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Apart from the above, I also used words like “seem,” “perhaps,” and “wonder” to make my comments less directive. The following are some examples: Example 12 from MR6 … The two statements seem contradictory. It is not clear …

Example 13 from MR31 … Some of the examples are perhaps better to be …

Example 14 from MR78 I wonder whether there is any literature on …

Reading comments with hedges or indirectness as shown in the above examples, one gets a sense of how I was cautious and careful in making requests for revisions. I remember rereading my review to add hedges before submitting it. I also remember rereading and deleting those comments that I was not a hundred percent sure about. Based on reviews of my own submissions, I knew it was possible that reviewers sometimes had conflicting feedback on the same submission. Although the author and I, as the reviewer, were anonymous, I tried to imagine that the author knew whom I was. I would also imagine the author as either a junior colleague who was desperate to get published or a senior colleague already established in the field. Such imaginations, as Starfield and Paltridge (2019) noted, could avoid making harsh and destructive comments.

Conclusion Based on analyses of 82 review reports on submissions to 14 journals in applied linguistics, the present study identified four moves that I followed to make a recommendation of whether the manuscript was suitable for publication in the Recommendation section. Of the four moves,

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three (Outlining the article, Summarizing evaluative commentary, and Making a recommendation) had been identified in previous research, and one (Acknowledging revisions) was observed in the present study in reviews for revised submissions. In justifying the recommendations of whether the manuscript was suitable for publication, my comments on Contribution were largely positive but those on Literature review and Methods were largely negative. Following the Recommendation Section was the Specific evaluative commentary section with specific or detailed suggestions for revisions on aspects of Literature review, Methodology, and Presentation. The specific comments or requests for change were presented with hedges and indirectness. The present findings illustrate that “genres are at once shared and unique” (Devitt, 2015, p. 44). On the one hand, I share the collective experience of following the common moves and providing similar types of comments as other reviewers observed in previous research. On the other hand, as an individual with a special research interest in reviewing a particular set of manuscripts, I construct the genre by performing a move to acknowledge the author’s effort in revising the article for a revised submission. I also chose to imagine that the review was not double blind so that I would be careful when providing negative comments. My experiences illustrate how I practiced and mastered the genre of article review through doing or writing it. The way I presented the comments was closely related to my experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, of surviving the review processes to get my own work published. As Paltridge (2017) points out, the most challenging task for the reviewer is to provide supportive and constructive feedback while keeping the standard of quality publication. In completing the task, I sugar-coated my critical and negative comments with not only “good news” but also hedges and indirectness. I believe that only by knowing the pains and efforts of the author can a reviewer provide constructive feedback in a collegial manner. After all, peer review for journal submissions is meant to help or teach, not to berate, embarrass, or make authors fearful so that they turn away from publishing their work. The study is limited to the dataset involving only one reviewer so it cannot be generalized to other reviewers and reviews of journals in

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other disciplines. In addition, I would say that the present findings indicate only one possible reading of the data. Editors, authors, and other reviewers might have different understandings or interpretations of the data. However, since I wrote these review reports myself, the data were consistent and interpreted truly from the reviewer’s perspective.

References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Clarendon Press. Belcher, D. D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16 , 1–22. Casanave, C. P. (2019). Does writing for publication ever get easier? Some reflections from an experienced scholar. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 135–151). Palgrave Macmillan. Coniam, D. (2012). Exploring reviewer reactions to manuscripts submitted to academic journals. System, 40, 544–553. Devitt, A. J. (2015). Genre performances: John Swales’ genre analysis and rhetorical-linguistic genre studies. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 19, 44–51. Fortanet, I. (2008). Evaluative language in peer review referee report. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7 , 17–37. Goldbeck-Wood, S. (1999). Evidence on peer-reviews: Scientific quality control or smoke screen?. British Medical Journal, 318, 44–45. Hewings, M. (2004). An ‘important contribution’ or ‘tiresome reading’?: A study of evaluation in peer reviews of journal article submissions. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1, 247–274. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58–69. Leki, I. (2003). Tangled webs: Complexities of professional writing. In C. P. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication: Behind the scenes in language education (pp. 103–112). Erlbaum. Li, Y.-Y. (2006). A doctoral student of physics writing for publication; A sociopolitically-oriented case study. English for Specific Purposes, 25, 456–478.

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Paltridge, B. (2015). Referees’ comments on submissions to peer-reviewed journals: When is a suggestion not a suggestion? Studies in Higher Education, 40 (1), 106–122. Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Springer. Samraj, B. (2016). Discourse structure and variation in manuscript reviews: Implications for genre categorization. English for Specific Purposes, 42, 76– 88. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge University Press. Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or Custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 252–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Swales, J. M. (1981). Aspects of article introductions. The University of Michigan Press-Michigan Classics Editions, Ann Arbor (2011). Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. (1996). Occluded genres in the academy. In E. Ventola & A. Mauranen (Eds.), Academic writing (pp. 45–58). John Benjamins.

10 Certifying Knowledge Under Neoliberalism: Global Inequality and Academic Wellbeing Anna Kristina Hultgren

Academic Publishing in the Global Knowledge Economy In this chapter, I offer an auto-ethnographic account of my own knowledge certification practices, specifically that of peer reviewing. In the spirit of openness that is a hallmark of auto-ethnography, I must start out by declaring that for me such an undertaking cannot be done in a meaningful way unless through the lens of neoliberalism, the political doctrine that has dominated the world for the last 40 years and that centres on granting the market free reign (Harvey, 2007). I will argue, essentially, that the profit-chasing premise of the global publishing industry has led to system overload and exacerbated global inequalities, and I will expound on these claims in the sections that follow. Given the A. K. Hultgren (B) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_10

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largely critical stance I adopt in this chapter, it is only fair, however, to start this chapter by acknowledging some of the many benefits of peer reviewing. Peer reviewing is a central gatekeeping practice within academia, shaping knowledge production as well as academics’ careers (Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022; Hyland, 2015, 2020; Lillis & Curry, 2015). Whilst Hyland acknowledges that peer reviewing is “possibly the most contentious and secretive practice in our academic lives, reviled and tolerated in equal measure but rarely loved”, he notes that it “serves an important function for the academic community” (2020, p. 51). Reviewers serve as “custodians of knowledge” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019), making important decisions about the development and integration of new research and ensuring standards (Hyland, 2015, 2020; Johnson et al., 2018). Peer review offers authors an indication of how other researchers understand their work, and it serves as a stamp of quality for more than a million papers published each year, thus facilitating researchers’ ability to keep abreast of important developments in their field (Hyland, 2015, 2020). More widely, academic knowledge production has benefits such as stimulating thinking, disseminating knowledge and recording and advancing scientific progress (Johnson et al., 2018). I readily concede that I myself, and the work that I do, have benefited immensely from reviews from colleagues and peers. When peer review is undertaken with the diligence and care that it warrants, it has helped me sharpen my thinking, revise and deepen my understanding and acknowledge and understand the views of others. Sometimes, it has given me new ideas for projects, collaborations and research endeavours. Even in the cases where I have had to read between the lines to derive optimal value from a review, I have rarely or never received feedback that I have not found useful in one way or another. My own many positive experiences with the peer reviewing process are echoed by the academic community too. According to one survey, 90% of researchers said that peer review improved the quality of published papers, and a similar percentage said it had improved their own (Johnson et al., 2018). Mulligan, Hall and Raphael, in a study of 4000 researchers, found that most respondents saw

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peer review as “the most effective mechanism for ensuring the reliability, integrity, and consistency of the scholarly literature” (2013, p. 149). Without understating the many benefits of peer review, what I wish to draw attention to in this chapter is the wider profit-driven context within which peer reviewing takes place. I consider two specific issues. The first relates to the known question of whether it is reasonable for profit-making companies to expect academics, many of whom are paid by publicly funded institutions, to undertake peer reviews for free and with little or no acknowledgement. I highlight not only ethical issues but also consequences for research quality and scholars’ wellbeing. The second relates to the extent to which peer reviewing is biased against English as an Additional Language users, a foundational question in the field of English for Research and Publication Purposes. Here, I seek to move beyond this much debated issue, locating the problem not so much in individual reviewers’ or editors’ bias, but in structural inequalities generated and exacerbated by a profit-driven system. In accordance with an auto-ethnographic approach, I draw on my own experiences, while also considering other evidence. Theoretically, my analysis is autoethnographic in that it is informed by my political stance that it is worth continually raising questions about, and seeking alternatives to, the seemingly axiomatic idea that universities should be the drivers of a “global knowledge economy”, a distinctly neoliberalist project that has made the world “obsessed with the production of knowledge and knowledge producing bodies” (Muellerleile, 2020, p. 138) to the extent that it is no longer tenable, valuable or meaningful.

Reviewer Overload in an Exploitative System In line with other contributors to this volume, I begin with a brief account of my own reviewing and editorial background. I have been reviewing and editing scholarly texts since graduating with my DPhil in 2009, giving me just over a decade’s worth of experience. Including the volume you currently read, I have edited or co-edited four books, with a fifth on its way, and two special issue journals. In addition, I serve on the editorial board of three journals and regularly act as reviewer for

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some 30 journals, reviewing on average one-two manuscript per month. In more recent years, I’ve begun to also review book proposals and full book manuscripts for publishers, amounting to around two manuscripts per year. Unlike journal reviewing, book reviewing tends to be paid, most often in the form of books from the commissioning publisher’s catalogue but occasionally a financial reimbursement is offered. In addition to this, I also serve as a reviewer for various funding bodies across the world, in the public, private and third sector, and receive a number of review requests per year. As for book reviews, this work is also often acknowledged with a symbolic honorarium. Added to this are the odd bits of reviewing abstracts and proposals for conferences and events, notably through involvement in my professional association. The most enjoyable kind of reviewing for me is the informal type I do for students and colleagues whether this is grant proposals, journal manuscripts or job applications as this entails a mentoring aspect that reminds me to veer towards “the kind” in the eternal challenge any reviewer faces: “to strike a good balance between being strict and being kind” (Paltridge, 2017, p. 82). My research expertise is broadly in the area of the sociolinguistics of globalization, and I mention this because it has influenced, or perhaps rather reinforced, my existing ideological and political outlook and made me highly sensitized to the “governance by numbers” approach that underpins private but increasingly also public institutions (Supiot, 2015). Enabled by advances in information and communication technologies, “governance by numbers” is an approach that relies on making extensive use of quantitative data to inform decision making. Underpinned by a neoliberalist belief in the superiority of market competition, it rests on a normative ideal that institutions and individuals should enhance their performance, be more efficient and more productive. In my doctoral research, I studied how virtually every move by agents in call centres is subject to intense scrutiny, monitoring and evaluation: from the duration of their calls and the amount of time it takes for them to answer, to the words they use and the number of times they take a toilet break. Often the outcomes of such monitoring and evaluation have consequences for career progression and remuneration. In

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similar ways, academics and higher education institutions are increasingly also assessed and evaluated, including on the quantity and quality of the output they produce. The UK, Australia and other countries allocate public funding to universities on a competitive basis in accordance with the quality and quantity of the output produced. Academics themselves are frequently assessed on their publications and their citations, whether for grant capture, job security, promotion or esteem. The most influential university ranking lists, Times Higher Education, QS and the Shanghai Ranking (Academic Ranking of World Universities), also all use publications as one of their criteria for ranking universities. The ubiquity of evaluation regimes based on publications led the sociologist Andrew Abbot to the sad conclusion that “the majority of scholarly publication in the social sciences and humanities today serves no purpose other than providing grist for evaluation” (Abbot, 2015, p. 4). I suggest that knowledge certification, and peer reviewing as an example hereof, needs to be considered within a wider political and economic context, particularly the mutually dependent relationship between state-endorsed academic evaluation regimes and profit-chasing publishing companies in the private sector. There is no doubt that publishing companies benefit substantially from contemporary evaluation regimes. In recent years, Elsevier, the world’s largest publishing company, has had a profit margin of 37 percent,1 which is higher than that of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola (Buranyi, 2017; Muellerleile, 2020; Ware & Mabe, 2015). It is a well-known but surprisingly well-tolerated fact that one key reason why publishers are able to generate such huge profits is that, unlike in most other business arrangements, academics are quite happy to work for free. Authors and reviewers do not get paid (other than, of course, indirectly through the salaries they receive from their institution), and journal editors may receive a modest remuneration. Having benefited from this free labour, publishers subsequently charge research institutions extortionate sums for subscribing to their journals, institutions that have already paid indirectly for the outputs through 1

The 37% profit margin is from the 2015 STM report authored by Ware and Mabe (2015); profit margins were not disclosed in the 2018 report, authored by Johnson et al. (2018), which instead underscored the many costs associated with journal production.

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the salaries of their academic employees. This free-riding off academics’ workloads while afterwards charging the institutions for accessing the work they themselves have produced has been described as “double appropriating” (Beverungen et al., 2012). As Muellerleile puts it: “First, [the publishers] claim intellectual (copy)rights over knowledge they have played almost no role in producing, and second, they sell this knowledge back to universities at inflated prices” (2020, p. 133). It is a hallmark example of how private businesses usurp and undermine the public sector (here universities), gradually making it increasingly unsustainable and eventually vulnerable to a wholescale takeover by private sector actors. Publishers themselves would likely argue that they too have expenses, and that profit is limited by the small audiences that many highly specialised journals attract. However, anyone in doubt of the profit-making capacities of publishers need to look no further than to their profit margins. In the UK, publishers’ income from scholarly journals has grown year on year since 2013, with an over £2 billion income in the most recent year for which data is available (2019) (Watson, 2021). Notwithstanding a growing sense of unease from providing free services for profit-making companies and government evaluation regimes that I have never voted for, I, like other contributors to this volume, still consider reviewing an essential service to the profession, underscoring the ambivalent attitude many academics feel towards the system. Driven by an apparently prevalent “sense of obligation and commitment” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019, p. 257), my principle is to review as many manuscripts as I submit. In practice, however, I end up reviewing significantly more than I publish, probably on a ratio of 5 to 1. Despite this, I increasingly find myself having to turn down requests to review on the grounds of non-existing time. Lately, I probably decline around 1 in 2 requests for review. The feeling that requests for reviews are becoming exponentially frequent is not just an impression but evidenced in numbers. In 2018, there were about 33,100 active scholarly peerreviewed English-language journals, plus a further 9400 non-Englishlanguage journals, collectively publishing over 3 million articles a year (Johnson et al., 2018). Both articles and journals have grown steadily year on year for over two centuries, by about 3 and 3.5% per year respectively, particularly in recent years where the growth has accelerated to

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4% per year for articles and over 5% for journals (ibid.). Whilst the increase in journals and articles is driven by several factors, including an increase in research and development expenditure, a rise in the number of researchers and a rapid growth in outputs from emerging economies (ibid.), it clearly also testifies to the profitability of the industry as does the emergence of more shady endeavours such as predatory journals and parasite publishers (Soler & Cooper, 2017). Given this exponential increase in journals and articles, it is not surprising that reviewers find themselves having to turn down requests to review. In May 2021, a discussion took place on twitter, prompted by a post made by a journal editor in an unnamed field: As a journal editor, I have just checked the stats for 10 papers I am handling. 68 review invites sent 13 accepted 32 declined 23 no response. Finding reviewers is getting harder and harder, and peer review needs everyone to engage for it to work.

To date, this tweet has earned 2.3K likes, 583 retweets and 418 replies. Among the replies were many who dutifully reported that they were trying to keep up while others were more critical: Can you tell me any other industry who makes huge profits off free qualified labor? This business model is unsustainable and broken IMO. Unsustainable model. Had to reject six requests this week. Why is one person being invited by six different journals? I am probably reviewing 2-3 papers at any given time and rejecting about 6-8 more requests to review each week. I try to provide alternate reviewers, the whole process is just sometimes exhausting. The model for publishing and peer review is not sustainable and there’s no reason why reviewers need to do this free work. As a reviewer there is no way to accept even 20% of invitations. On average, I get 6/week. I received 3 YESTERDAY. If I even want a hope of publishing my own work, I have to say no the majority of time.

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These tweets, although selectively chosen to illustrate a point, indicate a growing sense of frustration with the current system among academics. Hyland, too, notes that Reviewing is done without reward or credit, and so time for it suffers as universities demand more teaching, more admin, more outreach, more research and more everything else. Given these competing pressures, many academics feel that the compensation offered for reviewing, such as journal acknowledgments, positions on editorial boards, free journal access, etc. is just not worth it. (2020, p. 54)

For the manuscripts I do take on to review, I can choose to consider it as an opportunity to keep up to date with new research in the field, while making myself useful at the same time. However, over the course of my career, I have found myself able to spend less and less time on each manuscript. Where in the beginning of my career, perhaps partly as a reflection of being less experienced, I could spend several days reviewing one manuscript. Nowadays, although I would like to, I can rarely afford to spend more than half a day unless I want to fall behind on other commitments. This is roughly in line with most reviewers, with the typical reviewer spending five hours per review (Johnson et al., 2018). Judging from my own experience, it is questionable if this amount of time is sufficient to be able to provide an in-depth review in which the underlying research and the conclusions drawn are properly scrutinized. In order to offer a high-quality review, I find myself needing to read a manuscript several times, usually a good reading first to get an overview before going into detail with each section and examining the claims made. Bearing in mind that reviewing constitutes only a minuscule fraction of the multiple tasks academics are expected to juggle in a highly time-compressed workload of teaching, research and administration, there are serious questions to be raised about the extent to which peer review actually serves as a reliable and effective certifier of knowledge: An assembly line of papers is not conducive to careful evaluation and serious reflection over the myriad issues that arise from any research

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project. Stopping to think is something we do less and less, but something either we or our readers (in our stead) need to do more and more, especially with publications coming out faster and often conclusions inviting logical leaps. (Anderson, 2014)

In addition to potential corner cutting and compromised quality, there are concerns over academics’ mental wellbeing in the contemporary pressure to publish environment. The levels of psychological distress among academics are reportedly higher than those of front-line police and staff in hospital accident units (Grove, 2018). So what can be done about reviewer overload? Hyland (2020), noting that publishers save over £1.9 billion a year in free reviews, suggests that they should start transferring some of their profits to reviewers, which some minor publishers have begun to do. However, the major companies in the industry appear more interested in finding ways to maintain the current system, which provides them with a free workforce. The recent creation of Publons, for example, a commercial website owned by Clarivate Analytics (which also owns Web of Science, EndNote, and ScholarOne) now provides a free service for academics to track, verify, and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions. It also offers a “Publons Peer Review Award” to recognize top peer reviewers and editors. The declared intention is to ensure that reviewers and editors get credit for the (unpaid) work they undertake, which on the surface seems honorable enough. However, such initiatives clearly also work in favour of the publishing industry by upholding the current system of exploitation. It thus does little more than to exacerbate the underlying problem. Hyland (2020) also points out that in order to be effective, credit for reviewing and editorial work needs to be incorporated into universities’ reward systems for promotion, awards and career progression. However, there is also reason to be cautious about providing yet more grist for institutional and national evaluation regimes. Evaluation regimes rest upon and reinforce a normative ideal that individuals and institutions must continually seek to improve themselves, enhance their performance, become more efficient, and compete against themselves and others. This is built into the fabric of the neoliberal system, whether or not it is overtly recognized or intended. There are serious

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risks that the neoliberalist underpinning of contemporary evaluation regimes inevitably end up prioritizing the quick and dirty over quality and substance and this in turn is likely to have considerable human cost on health and wellbeing.

Inequality and Disadvantage in a Profit-Driven System A foundational question in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) is the extent to which researchers who have English as an Additional Language (EAL) are disadvantaged by demands to publish academic outputs in English. Inequalities have been researched both from the perspective of manuscript authors, on the one hand, and reviewers, editors and other gatekeepers on the other (see review in Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022; Demeter, 2020; Corcoran, 2019; Lillis & Curry, 2015). In combination, such studies have yielded important insights into how systemic inequality is experienced (in the case of the author) and knowingly or unknowingly exercised (in the case of the gatekeeper) at the level of the individual. Alongside accounts foregrounding the individual, there is generally agreement of the importance to scrutinize the system itself, whose neoliberal premise arguably serves as a key source of inequality and disadvantage. Such recognition comes both from within the specific field of English for Research Publication Purposes (Lillis & Curry, 2010) and from Applied Linguistics more generally (see Gal, 1989; McGill, 2013; McElhinny, 2015; Block, 2017). In other words, in order to truly understand the rise of Global English and its purported disadvantages, linguists need to turn their analytic attention to the political economy. This chapter is therefore an attempt to broaden out from the perspective of individual authors, reviewers and editors to the politico-economic system itself (see also Hultgren, 2019). This is a system, I have suggested, that is driven by an insatiable appetite for profitmaking and an unfettered obsession with knowledge production and evaluation regimes. Before turning my attention to the system itself, I’ll start by considering my own reviewing, editorial and authorial practices. As reviewer

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and editor, I cannot recall knowingly having judged what I thought or knew to be an EAL scholar more severely nor have I experienced, from the point of view of an author, that this has played a decisive role in the outcome of my manuscript. This, of course, is not to dispute the authenticity of reports from authors who perceive having experienced either overt bias or additional challenges because of their EAL status (see sources in Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022). Having said this, however, there also appears to be some evidence of a mismatch between authors and editors, with authors believing bias to be more prevalent than editors (Corcoran, 2019). It is also clear that although reviewers and editors may pick up on language-related issues in their reviews, and comment upon them negatively, it may not necessarily lead to an article being rejected on those grounds. Lillis and Curry (2015), for instance, found, in a detailed analysis of reviewer and editorial comments, that “language by itself does not act as a warrant for dismissal or rejection” (p. 147). In other words, even if gatekeepers make negative comments on the language used by EAL scholars, there is no evidence that this influences their decision to reject or accept a manuscript, but it is possible that it could contribute to the author’s impression that this is the case. My own experience from having worked in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts is that the experiences colleagues share of the writing for publication process have more commonalities than differences, notably lack of time to engage in and sustain writing. Many challenges with scholarly writing appear to cut across the author’s status as first or additional user of English, raising questions about the EAL/non-EAL binarism (Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022; Habibie & Hyland, 2019; Tusting et al., 2019). Alongside very real challenges with getting writing done, it is also not uncommon for manuscript authors to at one time or another feel hard done by or disillusioned with the peer review process. “Slow, biased, contradictory, hurtful or wilfully obtuse, reviewers come in for a lot of stick” (Hyland, 2020, p. 51). Whilst there appear to be some agreedupon norms about what constitutes “good” and “acceptable” English within academic practice (Hynninen & Kuteeva, 2017), it is equally clear that individual reviewers can vary widely in their views, as those

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who’ve received widely different reviews on the same manuscript will know. Hyland reminds us: We have to remember that reviewers are not computers running algorithms which check manuscripts against objective criteria. Values and beliefs always feed into recommendations. Far from being surprising, then, disagreements and subjectivity are inevitable: an inescapable aspect of scientific fact construction. (2020, p. 55)

There is no denying that peer reviewing is to a certain extent a subjective undertaking, influenced by the values, beliefs, epistemological assumptions and background of the reviewer. This is not, of course, incompatible with there being at the same time some generally agreed upon and mutually developed standards and norms within each academic community, such as those pointed out by Hynninen and Kuteeva (2017). While values clearly come into the peer review process, a key question, however, from the point of view of assessing inequality, is whether the injustice reported by some marginalized scholars is systemic in nature, affecting certain groups of scholars, particularly those already marginalized, systematically more than others. There seems to be some disagreement about this, as illustrated by the different positions of Hyland (2020) and Demeter (2020). Hyland, while recognizing the role of geographical location, experience and collaboration opportunities for publishing success, views peer reviewing as embodying “an adherence to objectivity rather than personal self-interest” (2020, p. 52; see also Hyland, 2015, 2016). Demeter (2020), on the other hand, is in no doubt that the peer reviewing system itself is biased. Despite the double-blind peer review system being premised on ensuring an unbiased evaluation, Demeter writes: “the most striking feature of peer review is that, while it is intended to assure the unbiased assessment of academic research, it is one of the most biased processes in academia” (2020, p. 44). Drawing on his own analyses, Demeter found a positive correlation between the nationality of editors (or editorial board members) and the nationality of the affiliations of the published papers. In other words, gatekeepers from the Global North prefer to publish the works of authors from the Global

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North. Based on these findings, Demeter argues that double-blind peer review is an illusion as it does not address the fact that although the identity of authors and their affiliation may be blind to reviewers, it is not so to editors. He also points out that even if manuscripts have been anonymized, author’s identity can be revealed through topic choice, research site, reference list and so on (ibid.). Demeter further argues, drawing on a recent report by Publon (https://publons.com/commun ity/gspr#open-elq-form-slider-DLGSPR) that US-based scholars dominate absolute contribution to peer review, and that a whopping 96% of journal editors are selected from the Global North, creating a Matthew effect that perpetuates existing global inequities. In other words, Global North scholars wield disproportionate amounts of power over what is published and not. Demeter’s analyses, in my view, are powerful and important. Demeter himself, however, stays clear of explicitly discussing whether editorial decisions are located in the individual (whether this is deliberate discrimination or unconscious bias), or in systemic issues. (His Bourdieusian framework, however, implies that he sees it as both.) In line with the argument adopted in this chapter, I would be inclined to locate the problem less in the individual editor and more in the neoliberal system of global academic publishing. This system generates and reproduces a preference for certain topics, epistemologies, theories, methodologies, discourse styles and so on, in which Global North scholars have accumulated capital (for excellent discussions of these issues, see Pennycook and Makoni [2019]; Stroud and Kerfoot [2020]). These taken-forgranted preferences cause some manuscripts to be selected and others to be deselected. It is the argument of this chapter that the neoliberalist premise of global academic publishing is the main culprit in creating and perpetuating systemic inequality. When unregulated profitmaking enters into social and human processes, it invariably creates and exacerbates existing economic and other inequalities. The system of global academic publishing, in other words, is unashamedly founded on accumulating wealth and power where wealth and power already exist. There is no doubt that participation in global knowledge production is highly inequitable and that this correlates strongly with national wealth. Using bibliometric data from

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Elsevier’s Scopus database, O’Neil (2018) shows that only 10 countries in the world—some of the wealthiest ones—produce well over half of the world’s total academic output (63.3%) with the remaining 221 countries producing the rest. In other words, the publication of academic output is concentrated in a small minority of rich countries, although China has recently overtaken the US to become the pre-eminent producer of global research papers while India has overtaken Germany, the UK and Japan so there may be some changes on the horizon (Ware & Mabe, 2015). Despite its merits, then, what peer review as a key form of knowledge certification does not do is address and eradicate systemic geopolitical inequalities in academic publishing. These are caused by differential access to material and academic capital in a neoliberalist system. It might even be argued that putting up a pretense—a smokescreen—of objectivity through the peer reviewing system is worse than recognizing that systemic inequality exists, which would seem a prerequisite for tackling it. Moreover, interpreted through a neoliberal lens, the peer reviewing process serves the interests of the publishing industry by maintaining a guise of integrity of the process and journal prestige. It is easier to justify institutional subscription fees that are renowned for their exorbitant rates when the product on offer is highly coveted and revered. The interest of the publishing industry, then, in upholding the peer reviewing process is clear, particularly given that, unlike in any other business, it incurs virtually no additional expense for them. Editors and authors, in turn, have their own less profit-driven but more career-oriented incentives to uphold the prestige of the journal and therefore become inevitably complicit in the system. In general, then, it seems clear that even in its purportedly fairest double-blind design, peer review is unequipped to tackle ingrained systemic inequities.

Publishing in the Future: For Whom and for What Purpose? In this chapter, I have offered an auto-ethnographic account of my own experiences of certifying knowledge in a profit-driven evaluation regime. Without romanticizing the past, which no doubt had its own problems

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with sexism, racism, classism, elitism, etc., it is clear that there has been a shift in “research and knowledge from something previously valued according to political, cultural, or disciplinary standards into something that is largely monetary in nature” (Muellerleile, 2020, p. 138). Although I have recognized the benefits of peer reviewing and academic publishing, some might think that I have been too critical, disavowing the role of private actors in generating wealth, job opportunities and prosperous societies. My intention here, however, has been to draw attention to some of the more sinister aspects of academic publishing such as its exploitative nature and arguably considerable adverse effects on academic wellbeing and global equality. The system in its current form impacts detrimentally on scholars worldwide with Global South scholars being denied equitable access to and participation in the global system of knowledge production while Global North scholars may pay a disproportionate price in terms of workload, stress and mental wellbeing given incessant demands on constantly producing, reviewing and editing more. In a scathing critique unashamedly titled “The Toxic University”, John Smyth (2017) expresses his astoundment at how submissive and complicit academics have become in reproducing the hegemony of neoliberalism through their practices, despite its undermining of academic freedom, creativity of thought, social justice and wellbeing. Academics are free-thinking individuals who often have a heightened sense of wokeness, and they have repeatedly pointed to inherent flaws and inequities in the current system while calling for its overhaul. However, academics are also conscientious and in many cases ambitious people, and so the system is proving remarkably resilient and can seem entrenched. Shore’s concept of the “schizophrenic university” may help understand what goes on. It rests on the idea that it is perfectly possible for academics to, at one and the same time, “play the game” of the neoliberal system while suppressing their sense of reason and critical faculties (Shore, 2010). Whilst I myself am as much a victim of and complicit in the current system as my global colleagues, my intention here has been to avoid the tendency to self-sacrifice and indulge in dutiful compliance, opting instead to expose those who arguably profit most substantially from the current system: the multi-billion dollar publishing and citation analytics industry. These private actors have cleverly made themselves

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indispensable through locking individuals, institutions and nations in a co-dependent and highly exploitative relationship. Individual academics rely on the system for jobs, career advancement, grant capture and esteem while nations and institutions rely on it to feed their “governance by numbers” policies and practices. Despite their high levels of education, academics are not exempt, it seems, from becoming embroiled in practices that may be harmful for their own wellbeing and detrimental to their commitment to global equality and social justice. So how, then, might an alternative, healthier, more sustainable and equitable system of academic publishing look? For whom and for what purpose should academic publishing exist? Various options have been proposed to replace the current peer review system. Some proposals include an open peer review system, where both authors and reviewers know the identity of each other, as well as more interactive and continuous discussions of a manuscript, sometimes involving a wider range of stakeholders (see Hyland, 2020, for a discussion of the respective merits and disadvantages of such options). Flowerdew and Habibie (2022), in turn, discuss the digitization of knowledge and how platforms such as LinkedIn, Researchgate, Figshare and academia.edu allow scholars to disseminate knowledge and gain feedback in new ways. Some eminent sociolinguists successfully bypass commercial publication channels by engaging in knowledge activism through blogs, twitter, videos and other forms of digital publishing, thereby promoting a wider knowledge dissemination and education of society. To many less established scholars and early career researchers, however, who are dependent on the system to secure tenure and promotion, this is rarely an option. As the world transitions to Open Access publishing and we await to see whether this and other forms of reviewing and digitization will lead to less profit-driven and more sustainable and equitable publishing practices (European Universities Association, 2020), it would be premature to call this chapter a swan song to the current system. Muellerleile (2020), for one, is skeptical that the move to Open Access will shake the foundations of the neoliberal system. He warns that, as the big publishers outwardly adapt to Open Access, behind the scenes, they are busy transforming themselves into “data aggregation platforms”. He mentions the case of Elsevier, the world’s largest publishing company,

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which recently acquired the Danish software company Atria, whose main product was PURE, a database offering a one-stop portal for information about academics’ research, projects, grants and networks. Such information and expertise can then be sold on to universities and national governments who use it for their evaluation regimes. By adapting to the market, the publishing companies thus remain in a position to generate profit and may even create new needs for further evaluation systems. If this is an indication of things to come, then, far from a dismantling of the system, we may see a further escalation of performance management and “governance by numbers” in the future. For this reason alone, it is important to keep pointing to the neoliberal elephant in the room and remind ourselves of those aspects of the knowledge certification process that are less attractive, lest they become so ingrained to go unchallenged. In the meantime, there is also a case to be made for “slow science”2 and for getting away from the idea that a relentless production of academic outputs is axiomatically valuable and meaningful. It is sometimes claimed that Charles Darwin would never have made his groundbreaking discoveries of the evolution of species had they not been allowed to develop slowly over time. Darwin, who took his time to work through his ideas, is unlikely to have survived in the current academic climate obsessed with knowledge production. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the UK Research and Innovation for funding under a Future Leaders Fellowship (Grant reference: MR/T021500/1) for enabling the conceptual work underpinning this chapter.

References Abbot, A. (2015). Futures for Library Research. Library as Laboratory: A Symposium on Humanities Collection and Research. Paper 3. https://eli scholar.library.yale.edu/libraryaslaboratory/3. Accessed 2 July 2021. 2 I am grateful to Janja Komljenovic for this idea, which she shared at the CGHE Annual Conference 2021: Remaking higher education for a more equal world.

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Anderson, K. (2014). Slow and Steady—Taking the Time to Think in the Age of Rapid Publishing Cycles. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/ 11/13/taking-the-time-to-think-in-the-age-of-rapid-publishing-cycles/. Accessed 30 June 2021. Beverungen, A., Böhm, S., & Land, C. (2012). The poverty of journal publishing. Organization, 19 (6), 929–938. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050 8412448858 Block, D. (2017). Political economy in applied linguistics research. Language Teaching, 50 (1), 32–64. Buranyi, S. (2017). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian 27.6.2017. https://www.thegua rdian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishingbad-for-science. Accessed 30 June 2021. Corcoran, J. (2019). Addressing the “Bias Gap”: A research-driven argument for critical support of Plurilingual Scientists’ Research Writing. Written Communication, 36 (4), 538–577. https://doi.org/10.1177/074108831986 1648 European Universities Association. (2020). Read & Publish contracts in the context of a dynamic scholarly publishing system. https://eua.eu/resources/ publications/932:read-publishagreements.html. Accessed 2 July 2021. Flowerdew, J., & Habibie, P. (2022). Introducing English for Research Publication Purposes. Routledge. Gal, S. (1989). Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 1989 (18), 345–367. Grove, J. (2018). Half of UK academics ‘suffer stress-linked mental health problems’. Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 July, 2018. Accessed 2 July 2021. Habibie, P., & Hyland, K. (Eds.). (2019). Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers. Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Hultgren, A. K. (2019). English as the language for Academic Publication: On equity, disadvantage and ‘Non-Nativeness’ as a Red Herring. Publications, 7 (2), 31. Hyland, K. (2015). Academic publishing: Issues and challenges in the construction of knowledge. Oxford University Press. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58–69. Hyland, K. (2020). Peer review: Objective screening or wishful thinking? Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 1(1), 51–65.

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Hynninen, N., & Kuteeva, M. (2017). “Good” and “acceptable” English in L2 research writing: Ideals and realities in history and computer science. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 30 (November 2017), 53–65. Johnson, R., Watkinson, A. and Mabe, M. (2018). The STM Report An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, fifth edition. STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved 21 June 2022, from https://www.stm-assoc.org/ 2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. Routledge. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2015). The politics of English, language and uptake: The case of international academic journal article reviews. AILA Review, 28, 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.28.06lil McElhinny, B. (2015). Language and political economy. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Routledge Handbooks Online. Routledge. Retrieved 22 June 2021. McGill, K. (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23, 196–213. Muellerleile, C. (2020). Open access panacea: Scarcity, abundance, and enclosure in the new economy of academic knowledge production. In D. Tyfield, R. Lave, S. Randalls, & C. Thorpe (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the political economy of science (pp. 132–155). Routledge. Mulligan, A., Hall, L., & Raphael, E. (2013). Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64, 132–161. O’Neil, D. (2018). English as the lingua franca of international publishing. World Englishes, 2018(37), 146–165. Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Palgrave Macmillan. Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2019). Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South. Routledge. Shore, C. (2010). Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university. Social Anthropology, 18(1), 15–29. Smyth, J. (2017). The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan. Soler, J., & Cooper, A. (2017). “We have learned your paper”: Academic inequality and the discourse of parasite publishers. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 184, 29.

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Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Stroud, C., & Kerfoot, C. (2020). Decolonising higher education: Multilingualism, linguistic citizenship & epistemic justice. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 265. Supiot, A. (2015). Governance by numbers. Hart Publishing. Tusting, T., McCulloch, S., Bhatt, I., Hamilton, M., & Barton, D. (2019). Academics writing: The dynamics of knowledge creation. Routledge. Ware, M., & Mabe, M. (2015). The STM Report An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, fourth edition. STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved 21 June 2022, from https://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf Watson, A. (2021). Publisher income from learned journals in the United Kingdom (UK) 2013–2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/307021/pub lisher-income-from-learned-journals-by-source-in-the-uk/. Accessed 30 June 2021.

Part III Roles, Relationships, Challenges

11 The Tug-Of-War of Journal Editing: Trust and Risk in Focus Carmen Sancho Guinda

Journal Editors in the Popular Imagery Few academic figures are as controversial as the scientific journal editor, typically characterised as a “gatekeeper” or “final arbiter” (Leki, 2003; Publons-WoS, 2018); an “assessor” (Habibie & Hyland, 2019); a “mentor” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019); a “mediator” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019; Wellington, 2003) between authors, editorial boards, publishers and the disciplinary field, especially regarding quality standards and expectations; a “custodian” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019) who disseminates ideas and enhances, improves and shapes the communication of science within a particular discipline (Wellington, 2003); and even as a “tightrope walker” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019, p. 267), due to the C. S. Guinda (B) Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_11

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unstable multifunctional role and numerous accountabilities intrinsic to the editing job. Curiously enough, there is a flip-sided reality to the decision-making role of every journal editor, an attribute inextricably associated to gatekeeping. On the one hand, the editor may be portrayed as a “solitary” leading figure (McKay, 2003), “behind the scenes” (Publons & WoS, 2018, p. 7) and ultimately determining the fate of an article by evaluating its novelty, innovation, and usefulness for the discipline. Instances of this individual authority are the practices of “desk rejection ”and the settling of different verdicts from reviewers. On the other hand, we editors may appear at the centre of an intricate web of relationships (Leki, 2003) with whom we share power, although those other actors frequently remain in the shadow and only us become visible. Also, the actions that we may jointly take are often kept “occluded” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019, p. 256), and thus the lines between individual and communal leeway and responsibility are fine. Several renowned scholars with a long editorial experience have acknowledged that reviewers are normally the real gatekeepers throughout the entire screening process (Hyland, 2015; Leki, 2003; Starfield & Paltridge, 2019). Hyland (2015), for one, stresses the collaborative endeavour behind publication and highlights the influence of reviewers, editorial boards, publishers, and contributors to the journal and professional associations, all of whom may give advice and tacitly or explicitly support, constrain and veto initiatives. Editors are certainly powerful, but less than many people imagine, since our power is curbed by the disciplinary community. The decisions we make, however, are qualified as “constant”, “complex”, “difficult” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019, pp. 255, 256, 262 respectively) and “critical” (Publons & WoS, 2018, p. 7), which turns our job into “challenging”, “hard”, “crucial”, and often “forgotten” and “thankless” (Publons & WoS, 2018, p. 7). Amidst this multiplicity of features, this chapter intends to provide insights into the role of editors as “decision makers” beyond strict gatekeeping, and describe the subtle interplay of trust and risk that underpins every decision process, which I metaphorize as a continual “tug-of-war”. For this purpose, I shall be drawing on autoethnography (Blommaert & Jie, 2010; Creese, 2010) to examine my own editorial experience and on

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the Positioning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) and Decision (Baron, 1988; Plous, 1993) theories.

The Trust-Risk Tandem at Work If solitude and community go hand in hand in editors’ decisions, so does the tandem formed by trust and risk. Elizabeth Moylan, publisher and in charge of the Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics Department at Wiley, observes that the peer review system itself is founded on trust: “trust that everyone involved in the process acts with integrity” (Publons & WoS, 2018, p. 43). Similarly, Hyland (2015, pp. 182–183) speaks of a “question of faith” with regard to the ideal of helping authors gain originality and communicative expertise, as no one can infallibly guess an editor’s motivations. According to Hawley (2012), trust, from which stems a series of interrelated concepts such as reliability, predictability, expectation, cooperation, and goodwill, manifests itself as a sort of two-way street issue. In other words, it is difficult to trust ourselves if others do not trust us, and self-trust is usually guided by experience, which is bound up with commitment and at the same time depends on and generates qualifications and credentials. Editors, for example, are trustworthy because we are thought to be disinterested and committed to our duties, which require specific competences. With time and practice, in turn, we come to trust our own instinct or intuition to appreciate the quality of manuscripts and reviews. We also trust the following: • That reviewers will be found within a reasonable timeframe and will do the reviews with care and submit them punctually • That the reviewers chosen are the right ones, especially in novel research areas • That their reviews will be fair, committed, polite, and constructive • That the boundary between “minor” and “major” revisions is clear enough • That the third referee or final arbiter will incline the balance to the right side

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• That authors have not sent their article somewhere else and the work contains no plagiarism or fallacies • That neither authors nor reviewers will drop out of the process without a very justified reason • That in case some of them do, the social network of the editor is robust enough so as to make up for sudden withdrawals • That the flow of articles, alive thanks to editorial status and staff commitment, will ensure the continuity of the journal Each of these assumptions entails an associated risk (e.g. scarcity of reviewers, wrong choices and lack of commitment, both causing poor reviews, transgressions of deadlines and of politeness and submission norms, dishonesty, author and reviewer withdrawal and journal collapse), which results from the intersection of “facts” and “values” (Fischhoff & Kadvany, 2011). How risk is measured depends on what we value—in the case of academic journals, their competence (the quality and punctuality of its evaluations and issues) and integrity (a feeling of responsibility and reciprocity), which generate public recognition and whose incentives may be academic (prestige) or monetary (in journals supported by big publishing houses). The facts triggering or/and affecting these values are these (Publons & WoS, 2018, pp. 44–47): • The multidirectional pressure on authors (to publish), on reviewers (to accept reviews, submit them in time and write longer comments), and on editors (to maintain a good editorial status of the journal and improve it, if possible); • The rapid decline of the reviewers pool, which does not keep pace with the growing demand of peer review. In 2017, an editor had to send out an average of 2-4 review invitations to get one review report done. This task of finding responsive reviewers has been predicted to get harder, as it is estimated that 10% of reviewers perform 50% of all reviewers (Publons & WoS, 2018). Some seasoned scholars, such as Hyland (2015, 2020), warn against a “marginalisation” of peer reviewing as academic activity; • The generalised lack of peer review training among most reviewers;

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• The scarce recognition of review work, which may raise “mercenary” feelings among reviewers and might in consequence threaten the survival of small middle-rank journals; • The occlusion in most review processes, which does not favour public discussion of scientific content and review quality and makes the latter questionable.

Theoretical Lens Decisions, then, emerge from the outcomes we value, the options we have, and our beliefs about (i.e. our trust in) the outcomes that might follow if we chose each option. This is the principle of Decision Theory (Baron, 1988; Plous, 1993), aimed to bring order to the world of risks by means of risk and choice analysis from three complementary perspectives: “logical”, “descriptive” and “prescriptive”. The first identifies all options and seeks information about their implicit values. The second studies people’s reactions and preferences, and the third scrutinises whether (and how) options fit within existing norms and if there is a need for expanding them. It cannot be said that Decision Theory truly constitutes a theoretical construct, but its threefold approach to risk helps people make the best risky decision possible. While strict gatekeeping decisions do not tend to have significant repercussions on a journal’s identity and reputation, unless their standards are extreme, there are other types of decision that do leave imprints difficult to delete. For example, an unfriendly tone in review reports and permanent carelessness in the management of manuscripts and the interaction with databases (or, conversely, incredibly short turnarounds, singularly helpful and competent review reports, and database updates timely and impeccable), would substantially change the journal’s image for the worse (or the better), unlike the many performance standards between those two poles. Yet simply opting for stopping writing editorials, as Starfield and Paltridge (2019) report to be the case of English for Specific Purposes Journal (ESPJ) and more recently of Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP), depersonalise the communicative interaction

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by diminishing the editors-in-chief ’s visibility, a measure that inevitably reshapes the journal and may not satisfy the readership at large. Obviously, decisions of this sort are always given careful thought and all possible effects are taken into account, gains being prioritised over losses. For JEAP and ESPJ the first may comprise more room for extra articles, fewer costs, and less effort and time investment, whereas the second may consist of relinquishing both a feeling of “nearness” between the editor and the scholar and the provision of articles’ summaries and interconnections, which considerably facilitates information processing and offers a broader and more consistent picture of the articles contained in each issue. Sometimes, drastic decisions are intentionally made to underline the renovation of editorial boards or the adoption of new editorial policies or fresh research directions. It is not infrequent to find radical changes of visual style in the journal cover, as it happened few years ago with Miscelánea (University of Zaragoza, Spain), which hired an awarded graphic designer to give the journal a more modern air shortly after a new editorial board had taken over. If we editors, as Starfield and Paltridge state (2019, p. 262), are “the public face of the journal”, then there is little margin left for us to visibly fulfil such representative and interactional function once editorials have been removed. Might we be slowly evolving towards a blurring of the editor role? And towards its collectivisation? Editors are popularly regarded as the “captains of the ship” who steer it and “sink with it” when things go wrong, no matter what and how many circumstantial factors may have intervened. Our decisions as editors, conditioned by external influences, do indeed mould journals, but these reciprocally impinge on our reputations and bond them with particular traits. How much can a journal weigh on its (ex)editor’s academic trajectory? And how long does a journal need to break up with the styles or images of former editors? Along these lines, decisions may be connected with the journal and editor identity, and in my attempt to shed some light on this relationship, I have found the combination of the Positioning and Decision theories especially revealing. Positioning Theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) claims that the successive positions we take up to cope with the situations we usually find ourselves in end up shaping who we are; that is to say, constructing our persona. Hence, there seems to

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be a link between positions, roles, and identity, none of which is fixed or static but fluid (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999; Jenkins, 1996), although “identity” connotes a longer build-up process and more permanent features over time. Positioning is a discursive practice similar to Goffman’s (1959) notion of “footing” and may reflect a varied range of features: moral or personal attributes, abilities, sociocultural status, provenance, etc. It may be local and ephemeral, conscious or not, tacit or explicit, assign positions to oneself (reflexive positioning) or to others (interactive positioning), and is deeply rooted in rights and duties. Journal editors position ourselves in both ways, reflexively by delimiting our scope of action, detailing “our own ways”, and defining the journal’s scope, purpose and philosophy in mission statements, editorials and elsewhere in a performative manner, and interactively by assigning roles to editorial staff and supervising their work. Additionally, there may exist a “prepositioning” or list of attributions, character traits, and skills deemed relevant to whatever positioning is at stake. The blended framework of Positioning and Decision theories has helped me to reflect on the implicit “prepositioning” for the journal editor role, which assumes us editors to: • Be committed to our readers, contributors, and staff, always seeking the common good; • Encourage interdisciplinarity as much as specificity; • Foster internationalisation; • Improve journal standards (or at least maintain the existing status, if good); • Keep ourselves informed of the latest achievements and trends in the discipline and in journal management; • Be democratic in our relationship with staff. Prepositioning (i.e. the set of expectations about our role as editors) thus guides many of our actions in a circular dynamics (see Fig. 11.1): decisions are made according to it and may simultaneously add, modify, or reduce its premises. In addition to assumptions like these, decisions and actions, the positioning includes “storylines” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, p. 16), personal stories that make those decisions and actions intelligible.

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EDITOR ROLE (prepositioning)

Fig. 11.1

EDITOR & JOURNAL IDENTITY

The circular dynamics of journal editors’ positioning

In what follows I will draw on experiential autoethnography, based on recollection and reflection (Benson, 2018), to tell one of such stories and with it illustrate the interaction of trust and risk when I had to make a difficult decision as editor-in-chief of Ibérica, the journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes (in Spanish “Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos” —AELFE). Despite the criticisms of experience-centred narratives or auto-ethnographic accounts as inductive and even unscientific, they are valuable for setting the analysis of close and local detail against big phenomena and systems (Creese, 2010), and for making known perceptions that otherwise could not be communicated through more conventional and depersonalised forms of research writing (Benson, 2018). It cannot be denied that ethnographic methods see reality under a certain situated perspective, but in doing so they also emphasise its heterogeneous and kaleidoscopic nature and develop a “counter-hegemony” (Blommaert & Jie, 2010, pp. 10, 12) against the simplification and reduction of complexity by the scientific

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method. Through autoethnography we can pay attention to communities and to their part-whole relationships with society by interpreting data and circumstances as cases of larger categories and contexts.

Staying Local or Going Global? A Catch-22 Risk? I have been editor-in-chief of Ibérica since July 2018. The journal is small-sized and supported with AELFE’s membership fees, but this modest budget has been no obstacle for its editorial status to fluctuate between Q1 and Q2 (first and second quartiles). The first issue was published in 1996, born out of the initiative of AELFE’s founders, a group of Spanish and Portuguese university teachers from the field of Applied Linguistics and enthusiastic about promoting the didactics of modern specialised languages and their research. The local geographical ambit at the journal’s inception, the Iberian Peninsula, explains its name choice back then, but that initial localism did not undermine the international vocation of the enterprise. Right from the outset it was agreed to admit articles written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and so it went ever since, until English was adopted as the lingua franca for publication in June 2019. When I took over from my predecessor, one of the pending issues in the agenda I inherited was to decide whether to continue publishing in those six languages or only in English. I decided to present this dilemma to AELFE’s Executive Board at once: my “prepositioning” values as editor-in-chief required my active commitment to internationalisation and to the improvement of the journal’s standards to benefit readers and authors. This “internationalising” drive, however, implied a quagmire paradox: being published in six languages (as said, English among them), which should warrant by itself a manifest international status, Ibérica remained practically stagnated with very little variation in its cite score and impact factor. It seemed as if the journal was undergoing a phenomenon of “readership compartmentalisation”, by which the articles written in languages other than English would be read and cited only by their respective vernacular communities and perhaps by some non-native

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rara avis proficient in the language. Given the power of English as a lingua franca for academic publication, articles written in English should be more widely disseminated, but this expectation is far from axiomatic at times. A case in point is my recollection of a group of Latin-American scholars who had contributed Spanish-written articles to Ibérica and with whom I coincided, not long ago, at an international conference in Spain. They kindly asked me to use Spanish instead of English because the latter “was not their working language”. Besides, facts were turning bleak as to the sustainability of the journal’s editorial policy in the long-run: I was sending up to nine or ten invitations per review report for texts in languages other than English or Spanish, and the risk of not finding any specialist reviewers available was always there, dangling over my head. On a couple of occasions, I had to finally resort to native Spanish-speaking specialists to review articles written in Portuguese, but their evaluations could not regard form, only content. They could not point to linguistic errors and even less suggest any rhetorical and stylistic improvements for articulating more compelling arguments. Those reviewers were being, in sum, half as helpful as a specialist proficient in the language, and the journal could not afford hiring translators or text editors for each of the six languages, who would probably miss the content and along with it the writing practices of the disciplinary community. Under a dynamics of this kind, review processes were doomed to take up a very long time and offer lower-quality texts, both of which would harm the journal’s reputation in the end (Table 11.1). At the meeting with the Executive Board on March 8, 2019, my proposal of publishing in English as lingua franca sparkled a heated discussion. One of the main arguments adduced against it was “linguicism” (Hyland, 2015, p. 48; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988), the linguistic colonisation or dominance of English in science dissemination. Detractors against monoglossic publication seemingly failed to foresee the unsustainability of a polyglossic review process in six languages, the midand long-term harm that it would cause to the journal’s prestige, and the eventual threat this could mean to its survival. Strikingly, my argument of reaching out to broader audiences, shortening review processes, and warranting the journal’s continuity, could be turned into (and here come

Risks

Delay of the review process Lower-quality texts Increased workload for staff Higher costs to hire translators Overall unsustainability

Fact

Publication in six European languages

Journal internationalisation Diversity/pluralism through polyglosssia Reasonable turnaround times High-quality articles Improvement of standards

Values

(continued)

It is not impossible to find specialist reviewers available. There must be somebody They will correct errors and suggest stylistic improvements. With time they will learn the ropes of disciplinary writing Nothing can be done if no reviewers are found after a while. Better be honest and tell authors to publish in more local journals

Prolong turnaround times (IR) = Journal demotion Hire translators and text editors (IR) = High financial costs and training investment in writing for the disciplines Discard articles after a set deadline (IR) = Discrimination and incompetent journal image

The pool of reviewers will increase because most scholars are competent in the English language

Trust/Beliefs

Change of norms to adopt English as lingua franca Implicit risk (IR) = Linguicism

Options

Table 11.1 Analysis of the interplay between facts, risks, positioning values, options, and trust through the lens of Decision Theory

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Fact

Table 11.1

Risks

(continued) Values

Trust/Beliefs Languages from the same family share a number of features easily identifiable in writing

Options Have reviewers evaluate texts in languages relatively close to theirs (IR) = Strategy barely applicable to Romance languages and not very effective, as many features and errors are missed Publication of lower-quality texts and journal demotion

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the big paradox and the ‘catch-22’) one of imperialist ideology, loss of identity, and even betrayal. My board opponents, in effect, at first questioned the proposal of monolingual publication as a potential threat to the distinctiveness, independence, and cultural roots of the journal. Like me and the rest of the board members, they were higher education teachers who worked hard to disseminate their research, and thanks to this scholarly background they came to acknowledge the need to adopt changes and modernise Ibérica to go with the times. Like me, they were Spanish, working at Spanish universities, and proud of having a Spanish journal relatively well positioned among the publications in the field. By contrast, identity and tradition issues were out of the question for the two non-Spanish members of the Board, for whom monoglossia was simply a streamlining strategy. The discussion closed with only one Spanish colleague reluctant to the proposal, while considerable support came from another Spanish member who was (co-)editor of a couple of national journals with somewhat less editorial impact. Undeniably, the decision for monoglossia carried several ramifications. One of them was the risk of exclusion. The supporters of this counter-argument at the Board meeting were unconsciously reinforcing and polarising the native vs. non-native divide, the “lucky Anglophone scholar doctrine” (Habibie, 2019) that fallaciously privileges nativeEnglish speakers in scholarly publication, when expertise and seniority have been noticed to matter much more than nativeness (Fazel, 2019; Habibie, 2019; Hyland, 2015; Swales, 2004; Tribble, 2019). Differently put, to the eyes of many researchers, the ability to deal with academic conventions and being familiarised with the inner workings of scholarly publication are the real crux of the monoglossia vs. polyglossia dichotomy, not cultural origin and linguistic background. Native English-speaking academics, as noted by Fazel (2019), do not speak or write with an academic style in their everyday interactions because academic English is in reality “no one’s first language” (Hyland, 2015, p. 57; 2019, p. 19), and so the research article genre may loom just as challenging for natives and non-natives alike. Analogously, other experts in academic writing (Jenkins, 2014; Tribble, 2019) argue that academic English as lingua franca (ELFA)

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might be considered a distinct linguistic variety open enough (at least recently) to accept non-canonical uses in high-impact international journals. These evidence-based findings lead these two scholars to reject the label of “native writer”, clearly slippery and problematic. This view stands in stark contrast with the purist academic atmosphere that less than two decades ago motivated scholarly concerns about the dangers of assimilating Anglo rhetorical conventions to the detriment of local patterns of argument. Karen Bennett’s (2007) “Epistemicide!” article is a good exponent of criticism against that past climate of prejudice based on linguistic shortcomings and rhetorical “deviation”. To the ethnographic and empirical evidence furnished by the researchers mentioned above, we could add the current dissemination and accessibility of the English language: it may be argued that if English had not expanded at such a global scale, it would have never thrived as default language in so many fields of human activity. As a direct consequence of this assumption, it is often taken for granted that authors not linguistically proficient in English can always commission translation services, surely more accessible and economical than for any other language. It is equally presupposed that scholars will find more content discussion forums in English on the Internet, which provide a superb opportunity to establish an academic dialogue with international colleagues. Reality, nevertheless, may be quite different in some world regions, where those services are exclusive to the privileged and Internet access is limited. Exceptions apart, the “exclusion argument”, apparently, is naively applied in a single direction—that of authors. But what about readers and journals? Readers may be missing out on local knowledge (or knowledge developed outside Anglo research hubs) that could be inspiring and useful for the global community, and journals might be losing a good opportunity to be part of that dissemination and increase their citation rates, which grow faster for international collaborations than for domestic endeavours (Persson, 2010). Admittedly, there may be cases of reviewer bias and cultural stigmatisation based on the linguistic deficits of EAL authors (i.e. those using English as an Additional Language), but who does the decision of “staying local” exclude in our globalised world, after all? My proposal of monoglossic publication begged the question of how much effort editorial staff should dedicate to

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the linguistic and rhetorical polishing of EAL scholars’ manuscripts, but no consensus was achieved as to the threshold level of linguistic proficiency to require from authors and editors. Does that “polishing” fall within the (copy) editors’ remit? Should journals have a stylistic advisor, just as some have statistics experts to guarantee the empirical soundness of the quantitative studies submitted? A second and rather thorny ramification of the monoglossic proposal was the issue of journal identity. It was feared that publishing only in English would kill the journal’s multicultural spirit and dissolve its original Iberian roots, which tended solid friendly bridges to Latin-American academic communities and helped spread knowledge in Spanish, a language spoken by around 600 million people worldwide, as well as draw attention to Spanish for Specific Purposes as a discipline. The sentimental argument of “turning our back” on Latin-American communities was on the verge of acquiring an ideological tinge especially hard to digest, and generated a certain feeling of guilt in me. My decision had been eminently practical and strategic, not ideological, made in the hope that it would help the journal survive the continual tests of indexations and metrics and prevent it from not falling behind among a growing number of newly launched applied linguistics journals sponsored by giant multinational publishers every year. Today I still receive submissions in Spanish from authors who have not consulted the journal’s web page for a while and cannot believe that Ibérica no longer publishes in Spanish to join the mainstream of English-medium publications competing in the rankings race. Ibérica’s essence was precisely its difference from the rest of the journals, not its similarity with them. Will I be remembered as a tyrannical editor who sacrificed diversity for efficiency and status? As a traitor to the spirit of the journal’s founders? “We must set the example” was the assertion uttered by the reluctant board member referring to the ideals of cultural tolerance, democracy, and integration that had propelled Ibérica’s trajectory over the years. Yes, definitely, but how must we, without disappearing from the map? What type of example are we to offer?

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To my mind, staying independent at all costs, resisting globalisation trends as a cultural stronghold when inter-dependence and geo-casting are the signs of times, may not be the best of examples. I see linguae francae as opportunities, not as threats, and find nothing tyrannical in trying to ensure permanence, reduce material and human costs and simplify procedures through them. To me they appear as dissemination aids, just as the OJS platform the journal has recently migrated to, or the social media where it has begun to advertise itself. I remember receiving e-mails of protest from two members of the Scientific Committee of the journal, who qualified my decision as “a big mistake” once the monoglossic publication policy was in force, but I do not remember having heard any dissenting voices when the trans-national expansion of AELFE towards a broader European scope took place in the early 2000s. The six-language publication policy of the journal then adopted was in itself no less discriminatory than the option for a lingua franca, as more than those six languages are spoken in Europe and AELFE is an association of a European scope. The large contingent of Romanian and Russian members, for example, could have felt under-represented and complain. Other European members, less numerous, could even have felt ignored. Who should decide the languages for publication and on what basis should language selection criteria be set? For Crystal (2003, p. 7) the reason why languages become global is not the number of speakers, but who those speakers are—power surfaces as the true agent of dissemination. In accordance with this observation, a polyglossic journal should theoretically opt for the languages of countries with the most power or impact within the discipline, but their measurement remains uncertain (through the number and editorial impact of their publications? Through citation indices? Through the number and quality of the conferences they organise? Through the combination of all of them?). It was evident that a democratic rotation of the languages of all members for publication would be absolutely unfeasible. To cut this story short, a compromise between monoglossia and polyglossia was finally reached, with a foot in both camps: the body of the text of research articles would be written in English and a second abstract

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in any of the former six languages of publication. In that way, the journal would keep consistent with the inclusive multicultural philosophy of the Association and attain an acceptable level of efficiency in its mechanics, although multilingual abstracts are an extra workload on the editorial staff. Far from being perfect, the solution was the lesser of two evils and was approved by the Board and three months later massively voted by the Assembly of Members, who valued quality indicators and opportunities for higher visibility and ranked self-promotion over cultural identity and tradition. Undoubtedly, reforms in the peer review system would clear the way for quicker turnarounds and better evaluation reports, even in languages other than English. Hyland (2015) enumerates some alternatives still timidly implemented now but that may be the norm in a near future: the incorporation of more stages and more reviewers per article, and open reviews publicly displaying the experts’ names and sanctioning misconduct, etc., but little can be done without enhancing reviewer recognition in research evaluation and accreditation processes. Unlike occluded peer review systems, interactive discussions seem to be a deterrent against low-quality submissions (Pöschl & Koop, 2008), but it is necessary to regulate the access to editing and commenting. Perhaps we will soon witness “hybridised” journal-sponsored platforms fusing elements of the peer review report, the blog and the wiki genres, accessible with the Open Researcher and Contributor Identity (ORCID) or researcher ID numbers and offering modular review. In such a digital setting, peer experts would be able to comment on the article by sections (i.e. introduction, methods, results and discussion/conclusion) in successive rounds within a given deadline. Authors would post their revised versions, adopting some changes and justifying why they have discarded others, and those decisions would be collaboratively discussed by authors, reviewers, and editors in a forum that made all opinions and comments visible. It is still premature to predict a denouement for this trust-and-risk editorial story. The number of submissions to Ibérica keeps growing, although it is true that the ones sent from Latin America are fewer and trends need to be closely tracked in the coming years. The team of

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editors (one editor-in-chief, myself, and two associate editors) is currently engrossed in mastering a new OJS platform and simplifying publication norms to make submissions easier and more effective, as well as in concentrating energies to find dissemination alternatives through the social media (via Twitter, academic networks such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, and video channels such as YouTube), and by creating journal spaces that bring multicultural research communities closer together. In this respect, we have devised a section tentatively entitled “Ibérica events”, which will lodge short videos introducing research projects round the world and inform of, or even display, webinars of interest. These initiatives and their associated tasks position the editors’ profile more as mediators and “research influencers” (let us not forget that Ibérica is an open-access online journal) than as gatekeepers and assessors, and directs readers’ gaze towards the future rather than looking back to our traditional past of Hispanic bastion. Time will tell whether this brand new profile will embody the core of a replenished and more collaborative journal identity.

A Closing Reflection In this chapter I have reconceptualised journal editors as decision-makers and explored the forces underlying their decision processes: trust and risk, in constant tension and affected in turn by facts and values. I have examined the interplay of all four factors auto-ethnographically, by bringing to the fore a personal narrative of decision on the internationalisation and sustainability of a small-sized linguistics journal. In doing so, I have touched upon key issues such as the relationship between role assumptions or values, positioning acts, and journal and editor identity, together with the status quo of peer review and its predictable evolution, and the boundaries between individual and collective responsibility. I have also analysed my own position as an individual divided by the values of efficiency and loyalty to the journal’s ideology, being simultaneously responsible for minimising risks and caught between peer preferences and the fear for becoming a much too prescriptive editor. From the personal narrative disclosed we can learn that misconceptions about academic

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publication are still rampant and that a mere descriptive approach to risk is not always appropriate, even when democratic values are involved. The take-home message of this auto-ethnographic exercise could well be the urgent need for research on the writing habits of scholars and the inner routines of journals, especially concerning peer review, to find out about authors’, reviewers’, and editors’ strains and detect the risks inherent in every editorial option.

References Baron, J. (1988). Thinking and deciding: A comprehensive survey of decisionmaking research. 4th edn (2007). Cambridge University Press. Bennett, K. (2007). Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory discourse. The Translator, 13(2), 151–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2007.107 99236 Benson, P. (2018). Narrative analysis. In A. Phatiki, P. Da Costa, L. Plonsky, & S. Starfield (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of applied linguistics research methodology (pp. 595–613). Palgrave Macmillan. Blommaert, J., & Jie, D. (2010). Ethnographic fieldwork: A beginner’s guide. Multilingual matters. Creese, A. (2010). Linguistic ethnography. In L. Litosseliti (Ed.), Research methods in linguistics (pp. 138–154). Bloomsbury. Crystal, D. (2003). English as a global language. Cambridge University Press. Fazel, I. (2019). Writing for publication as a native speaker: The experiences of two Anglophone novice scholars. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 79–95). Palgrave Macmillan. Fischhoff, B., & Kadvany, J. (2011). Risk. Oxford University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books. Habibie, P. (2019). To be native or not to be native: That is not the question. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 35–52). Palgrave Macmillan. Habibie, P., & Hyland, K. (Eds.) (2019). Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Harré, R., & van Langenhove, L. (1999). The dynamics of social episodes. In R. Harré & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), Positioning Theory: Moral contexts of international action (pp. 2–13). Blackwell. Hawley, K. (2012). Trust. Oxford University Press. Hyland, K. (2015). Academic publishing: Issues and challenges in the construction of knowledge. Oxford University Press. Hyland, K. (2019). Participation in publishing: The demoralizing discourse of disadvantage. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 13–33). Palgrave Macmillan. Hyland, K. (2020). Peer review: Objective screening or wishful thinking?. Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 1(1), 51–65. https://doi. org/10.1075/jerpp.19010.hyl Jenkins, R. (1996). Social Identity. 2nd edn (2004). Routledge. Jenkins, J. (2014). English as a lingua franca in the International University: The politics of academic English language policy. Routledge. Leki, I. (2003). Tangled webs: Complexities of professional writing. In C. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication (pp. 103– 112). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McKay, S. L. (2003). Reflections on being a gatekeeper. In C. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication (pp. 91–102). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Persson, O. (2010). Are highly-cited papers more international? Scientometrics, 83(2), 397–401. Plous, S. (1993). The psychology of judgment and decision making. McGraw-Hill. Pöschl, U., & Koop, T. (2008). Interactive open access publishing and collaborative peer review for improved scientific communication and quality assurance. Information Services & Use, 28(2), 105–107. https://doi.org/10. 3233/ISU-2008-0567 Publons, & Web of Science Group. (2018). Global state of peer review. Clarivate Analytics. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1988). Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas & J. Cummins (Eds.), Minority education: From Shame to struggle (pp. 9–44). Multilingual Matters. Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres exploration and applications. Cambridge University Press.

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Tribble, C. (2019). Expert, Native or Lingua Franca? Paradigm Choices in Novice Academic Writer Support. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 53–75). Palgrave Macmillan. Wellington, J. (2003). Getting published: A guide for lecturers and researchers. Taylor and Francis.

12 On Mediating and Being Mediated: Experiences of Harmony and Contention Sally Burgess

The book chapter, a relatively under-researched genre when compared to the research article, provides the main focus for this discussion of mediation. My experience as both an editor of contributions to scholarly volumes and a contributor provides the starting point for this exploration of authors’ responses to editorial interventions in their texts. I seek to arrive at a better understanding of the social practices of editors and how these practices contribute to successful and unsuccessful publishing experiences for themselves and their authors. I begin by exploring the literature on mediation, focussing specifically on the context of the book chapter. Since power relations play such a crucial role in how authors and editors frame the mediation process, a theoretical lens that allows for an understanding of these relations is necessary. It is to be found in Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus” as outlined in Navarro (2006). Equally, S. Burgess (B) University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_12

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the constructs “frame” and “schema” provide an essential element in the theoretical framework I employ. For this, I draw on Wood et al.’s (2018) “evocation model”. A third element in the framework is Brown and Levinson’s (1978) theory of politeness strategies, a theory which further elucidates the responses to mediation I explore in the chapter.

Setting the Scene: The Who and How of Text Mediation Academic texts might bear the names of single authors, but they are never truly univocal. There are many potential and actual interventions in a text such as this and many kinds of individuals who potentially intervene. A panoply of terms is used to refer to these people. Luo and Hyland (2017) list many of these, ultimately opting for “mediator”, the term I too employ here. Lillis and Curry (2006), who adopt “literacy broker”, define the term as including “editors, reviewers, academic peers and English-speaking friends and colleagues who mediate text production in a number of ways” (p. 4). In their study, most of these people fell into two broad categories: academic or language professionals. The academic professionals that Lillis and Curry (2006) identify are frequently mediating text production as gatekeepers. Dissertation supervisors and committee members, peer reviewers, journal editors, series editors, or editors of books such as this, all intervene in an author’s texts. These interventions are “occluded” (Swales, 1996) in that they are normally only available to the interested parties, namely the author(s) and gatekeepers themselves. The interventions made are at least implicitly solicited if not always welcomed. They are expected and are an acknowledged element in the research publishing process or the process of academic writing for assessment. A second group of individuals mediate only in response to an explicit request from the author for them to do so. Those involved in the process of explicitly solicited text mediation are known to one another, though the interventions are essentially even more occluded than those of the first group. They typically take place earlier in the text production process before the text is subject to evaluation by peers or assessors and are

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only available to the author and the mediator. Those who intervene in others’ texts at this stage are frequently paid to do so. Though sometimes dubbed “proof-readers”, many who perform this function prefer to describe their work as “author editing” (see Matarese, 2016) or “text shaping” (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003; Li & Flowerdew, 2007) and to refer to themselves as “word-face professionals” (Shashok, 2008). Professional authors’ editors tailor the interventions they make to the author’s needs and wants. Because of this, their practices are somewhat different from those of in-house copyeditors whose task is to enforce the standards of the publishing house. For the authors’ editor, the role relationship with the author is one of service provider to client (see Matarese, 2016, for a fuller account). This role relationship has implications for the way mediation is conducted and how authors respond to it. The interventions themselves also influence authors’ responses. These interventions can be deletions and additions tracked as changes, perfunctory directives in the margin of the text, or may even constitute major rewrites almost amounting to ghost-writing. This level of intervention raises issues of ethics, a major focus of research interest, particularly where the text produced is an assessed element in a course of study leading to a qualification (Harwood, 2018, 2019; Harwood et al., 2009, 2010, 2012). In the case of translators as mediators, a new text is produced in whole or in part without violation of ethical principles unless the source and target text are published separately, thus raising issues of self-plagiarism, the nuances of which Zhang (2013) teases out in a discussion of duplicate publishing and translation. If modifications are not made to the text, authors are directed to make such changes themselves. Lillis and Curry (2015) review much of the literature on efforts to analyze peer reviewers’ comments in terms of textual features, grouping these analyses under the heading “reviewer’s evaluative stance” (p. 128) and “reviewers’ comments on content” (p. 129). Shashok (2008), in her analysis of reviewer comments, identifies two principal functions, namely a “screening function” targeting scientific or technical content and an “improving function” where the aim is to improve the article’s communicative potential (p. 2). Najmeh

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and Nasrin (2015) focus on the clause types—i.e., imperatives, declaratives, and interrogatives—reviewers use. A more detailed taxonomy of reviewers’ comments is provided by Mungra and Webber (2010). Lillis and Curry (2015) observe that analyses of textual features have predominated over those which seek to characterise reviewers’ or authors’ perspectives. Among those studies in which the author is the focus is Li and Flowerdew’s (2007) bid to determine which kinds of mediators are most likely to offer support that will lead to a paper ultimately being published. More recently, Kheradparvar, Shokrpour, and Mirzaee (2013) provide a similar analysis, concluding that best practice would involve authors benefitting from comments and interventions by both gatekeepers with disciplinary expertise and “word-face professionals”, to use Shashok’s (2008) term. Shaw and Voss (2017) look at take-up of authors’ editors’ suggested amendments and the relationship between take-up and the employment status of the editor i.e., in-house with institutional support as opposed to freelance. Burgess et al. (2006) offer a case study of their interventions in a paper written by a colleague, also focusing on take-up but in this case with the variable being the level (syntax or rhetorical structure) of the intervention. Among the earliest studies to have looked at how authors interpret or act upon reviewers’ comments are Gosden (2001, 2003). Hyland (2011) also looks at both the form and function of reviewers’ comments and observes that the tendency of many peer reviewers to shy away from bare imperatives in favour of hedged directives makes it difficult for novice authors to interpret their interventions. Shashok (2008) also examines the helpfulness of gatekeepers’ comments, noting that one in particular is confusing for both authors and authors’ editors like herself. This is the demand that the manuscript be revised by a “native English speaker”. Shashok argues powerfully that this directive may be motivated not by “verbal hygiene” (Cameron, 1994) issues but by a range of factors, among them negative evaluation of elements in research design. The degree of social distance between author and text mediator is another dimension with effects on response to interventions. Peer reviewers can maintain a social distance through the mutual anonymity of author and gatekeeper; other gatekeepers are known to the author, as are the authors to them. This is the case of dissertation supervisors and

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book editors where communication with the author is “on record” i.e., not mediated through anonymity or third parties such as journal editors. Where mediation takes place in the context of a chapter contributed to an edited volume, authors’ and mediators’ perceptions of who is “in charge” may be at odds. For example, an author might consider that having been invited to contribute a chapter, ultimately any gatekeeping role lies with the in-house publisher’s editor and not with the volume editor who issued the invitation, though comment and some editorial intervention might still be expected. By the same token, volume editors do not always gladly take on the mediator role even though extensive mediation of the text may be demanded by the authors themselves, by co-editors, or the publishing house. One motive for this reluctance is the uncomfortable feeling that in making interventions or suggesting changes, especially those concerned with style and usage, one is propping up the dominance of explicitly prestigious varieties of English in international research publishing and attempting to block the impact of the use of English as an academic lingua franca (Mauranen, 2011). Heng Hartse and Kubota (2014) provide an account of a copyeditor’s questioning of his role in editing for publication a volume with contributions from multilingual senior academics using English as an additional language. Through a conversation with the volume editor who is herself a multilingual author, the editor comes to see many of his interventions in the text as pushing for his stylistic preferences rather than for improved clarity of expression. Though the explicit aim may be to mediate in such a way that multilingual users of English might successfully publish their work, interventions of this kind may simply confirm the dominance of the norms of a privileged group. Interrogating and contesting hegemonic discourses ascribing authority to NES—and more specifically to innercircle (Kachru, 1986) NES norms—are social practices in which many scholars of language(s) for research publication would readily engage. This is not, of course, the case for those who earn a living from author editing, understandably considering that their prime responsibility is to clients who may view an editor’s NES status as their most important attribute.

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The author/client–author/editor relationship is contractually established and accepted by both parties. The relationship between the author and gatekeeper mediator is institutionally established and understood by all but the least experienced early career researchers (ECRs). When one acts as an editor of a collected volume, however, relationships are less well-defined and assumptions about these relationships may not be shared by the author and mediator. When there is such a mismatch, the mediation process can be a lengthy and painful one for both parties; in extreme instances, mismatches can lead to the text being abandoned by the author or publication being blocked by the volume editor acting as a proxy agent for the publishing house. Since book chapter publishing in the humanities and social sciences remains an important medium for disseminating research it is worth looking more closely at what goes right and wrong for authors and mediators in this context.

Power Relations in Text Mediation In my description of the various dimensions involved in text mediation (who mediates, how they mediate, whose texts are mediated, how the relationship between the mediator and author is constructed, and what factors determine authors’ responses) the ghost in the machine is power. Without an understanding of power, the social practices that result in successful and unsuccessful instances of mediation, cannot be understood. In order to arrive at a better understanding, I use as a theoretical lens Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as outlined in Navarro (2006). In habitus theory, shared beliefs, including beliefs about who holds and controls various forms of cultural capital, find expression in social practices. These practices may remain unexamined though they are amenable to change over time and according to context. People become disposed to particular social actions that are shaped by past experiences and structures. These “dispositions” also condition the way these structures are seen. People reproduce and (re)create habitus without being aware that they are doing so in various “fields” defined as “areas of struggle around production, accumulation, circulation and possession of goods, services,

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knowledge, or status and the competition among agents to monopolise distinct capitals” (Navarro, 2006, p. 12). Efforts made to legitimise social differences encourage “misrecognitions” i.e., uncritical acceptance of asymmetries and their origins. Thus, continued accumulation of capital is ensured, and hierarchies maintained. So as to examine habitus in relation to text mediation, I also use schema and frame theories. I adopt Wood et al.’s (2018) “evocation model”, in which they differentiate between personal and public culture and correspondingly between schemas and frames. Schemas, as instances of personal culture, are characterised as non-idiosyncratic (i.e., shared) aspects of a person’s memory. Personal culture, for Wood et al. (2018) can be declarative i.e., explicitly recalled, or non-declarative i.e., composed of unanalysed patterns of behaviour or beliefs. They further identify two types of schemata: image and foundational. The notion of “image schema”, Wood et al. (2018) explain, had its origins in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) formulation of the sources of conceptual metaphors. Quoting Mandler and Cánovas (2014), Wood et al. (2018) define image schemata as “simple spatial stories” (p. 247). Citing Shore (1998) they describe foundational schemata as “central to the organisation of many distinct domains for specific times, places, and subgroups of people”. They make a further distinction between frames and models of frames. Whereas the former are “situational and material”, the latter they define “as simplified sets of declarative instructions or nondeclarative abilities” (p. 248) used to recreate a frame. Models of frames are for Wood et al. (2018) “cultural” because they are learned and shared. Frames can be “crafted sets of beliefs and meanings facilitating collective action by bringing together individuals and organisations who share congruent or complementary beliefs and meanings”. (Wood et al., 2018, p. 251) or “public interpretative tools” leading those who adopt the frame to arrive at similar interpretations of events and actions. In Wood et al.’s model, frames activate image, foundational, and domain-specific schemas. Responses to frames differ, for example, because they violate cultural norms for one group but not for another. One such body of norms is those related to representation of self, the third element in the theoretical framework. I follow the nuanced account of Brown and Levinson’s (1978) politeness theory in Scollon and Scollon

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(1983) and use their preferred terms and explanations of “positive” and “negative” politeness, namely “solidarity” and “deference”. Instances of text mediation pose threats to face authors and mediators alike. Face threatening acts can be mitigated through the use of either solidarity strategies where the mediator signals low social distance and low power difference or deference strategies where social distance is emphasised and rights to resist impositions respected.

Exploring Experiences of Mediation with My Colleagues My starting point in this exploration were two of my own experiences, one as a corresponding author of a book chapter written in response to an invitation and the other as the sole author, not of a chapter on this occasion but of a book review commissioned by a journal. I use these two examples because, despite both being instances of commissioned contributions, the mediation undertaken by the editors elicited very different responses from me. In the first case, some of the interventions irritated and perplexed me since they seemed to be largely motivated by the editor’s stylistic preferences, preferences I did not share. I felt entitled to resist these interventions and, in most cases, did so with the support of my co-authors. I agreed to content and structural changes of various kinds, though my co-authors felt that the original version of the paper was stronger than the version ultimately published. The book review experience was a salutary one in that I experienced first-hand what skilled and tactful editing can do for an author and her text. Here the editor made a couple of suggestions in terms of changes in content and structure and corrected, without further comment, two embarrassing errors, one the use of “there” for “their” and the other a citation error. The published text is one I feel happy with. I would characterise my overarching reaction as one of embarrassed gratitude rather than irritation and perplexity as in the first case. The book chapter was edited by a NES and the book review by a multilingual user of English as an additional language (EAL). In both cases, I see myself and the text mediators as being on an equal footing in terms of academic seniority and experience.

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I then approached several of my colleagues, all of whom I knew to have had recent experience of both editing and being edited. In one case, I had been the mediator, editing a book chapter as a favour. In another, my colleague was engaged in editing a volume of conference proceedings in Spanish and was meeting challenges and sometimes angry responses from the Spanish-speaking authors of the chapters. We are all members of an English department at a Spanish university; three of us are full professors and the other two, associate professors occupying senior posts with considerable responsibility. All of my colleagues are L1 Spanish speakers who regularly or exclusively publish in English. Two of us specialise in literatures in English and the other three in English language and linguistics. In all but one instance, the texts we discussed were written in English and edited by others or, in the case I mentioned above, by me. The exception was the volume of conference proceedings, written in Spanish to be published in Spanish. All the contributors were L1 users of Spanish as was the editor. Our conversations took place in my colleagues’ offices. I began by asking them about their recent experiences of being edited or editing. In all cases, they were very reluctant to recognise any affective dimension, stating forcefully that mediation should be understood as an essential element in screening contributions for quality. All said they were perfectly happy to have their work reviewed and edited. I then showed my colleagues the two texts I refer to above and the interventions and explained my reactions. To elicit think-aloud protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1980) from my colleagues, I asked if they would be willing to bring up onto their computer screens a text that had been subject to mediation and comment on some of the changes or requests for change made by the editor(s). In the case of my colleague who was engaged in editing the Spanish conference proceedings, our focus was on authors’ responses to her interventions. Although no one had initially been willing to acknowledge an emotional reaction to mediation, in the course of their commenting on the example texts, expressions of feelings around interventions and the people who had intervened began to emerge. I did not ask to see the texts though they were partially visible to me. The protocols were not recorded. I noted down comments which included expressions of emotion. I then typed these comments up and used a

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word cloud application as an initial analytical tool (see McNaught & Lam, 2010) to tag them. In each case, I also took note of the language backgrounds of both author and editor and their relative academic status.

Framing Interventions and Mediators The terms that have prominence in the word clouds when my colleagues expressed largely positive feelings about mediation were the following: accepting, grateful , comfortable, confident, humbled , satisfied , safe, and happy, the last two of which were repeated by two or more participants. Where the experience had been a negative one, the terms used to describe their feelings were embarrassed , exposed , humiliated , threatened , challenged , ashamed , invaded, and most prominently offended . When they described their positive experiences, they characterised the interventions in these terms: understandable, justified , respectful , surprising, supportive, thorough, helpful, and polite, the last two of which were more prominent than the others. Negative responses to interventions were described as follows: insensitive, intrusive, subjective, shaming, patronising, and opinionated . These last two terms were used by the Spanish volume editor to characterise responses to her interventions. The terms used suggest that the frame “text mediation” evokes declarative and non-declarative schemata (Wood et al., 2018). In the declarative schema being edited is part and parcel of contributing to a learned volume and the work of editors a service they perform; in the nondeclarative schema, cultural capital endows the possessor with the right to edit. Claims to possession of cultural capital, especially when that cultural capital is a site of struggle, may be challenged or questioned. Terms such as respectful , polite, and helpful evoke the declarative schema in that while authors seek to retain control over their texts, they position the editor as performing a valued service. My colleague who was editing the Spanish volume perceived that, although the authors positioned her in the service provider role, they also exhibited territoriality and were sometimes defensive in their responses to her comments and amendments. It was, for her, as if, as a specialist in English language and linguistics, she was somehow seen as having rescinded her claim to the

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cultural capital of knowledge of Spanish academic discourse conventions. She observed that those contributors who do not publish in English and express resentment of the greater prestige apportioned to English language publication by research evaluation agencies (see Burgess, 2017), were even more likely to exhibit the territoriality and defensiveness. Where mediators position themselves as gatekeepers enforcing standards or are perceived as adopting that role, their interventions can provoke in authors feelings of being challenged , humiliated , threatened and shamed . Whatever power the authors believed they held is seen as potentially undermined, claimed, or even seized by the editor. In such cases the authors talk about their texts as having been invaded by editors whose interventions are intrusive. Sometimes, however, the authors’ responses seem to signal a willingness to relinquish control. The mediators here are seen as having greater expertise and, by virtue of that expertise, make amendments that are pleasingly surprising in that they evidence access to linguistic capital unavailable to the author. These amendments are accepted as necessary. The interventions are no longer intrusive and the editors are now thorough rather than opinionated or subjective. This thoroughness makes the authors feel safe though they may also be humbled , accepting even those amendments they do not wholeheartedly countenance as understandable; after all, they see these editors as knowing more. Their comments also suggest an image schema (Wood et al., 2018) in which the text is a physical space, a contested territory which the mediators themselves or other actors might invade. Where the potential incursion is seen as coming from an outside actor, for example an academic rival who might attempt to disparage the author’s chapter after publication, the positively evaluated mediators construct a protective edifice for the authors so that they are less vulnerable to attack. In a bid to tease out the elements of control of cultural capital by both the author and mediator that condition responses to text mediation, I posit a series of scenarios drawing on my colleagues’ and my own experience. I have used bold type for the key elements in each scenario.

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Scenario 1 The author, a multilingual user of English for research publication purposes and a senior academic, submits a chapter to a volume edited by a prominent scholar, a first-language user of English, working at a university in an Anglophone centre country. The editor amends the author’s paper and asks for changes in content and structure. The author does not see the editor’s interventions in the text as in any way problematic. Indeed, she welcomes them and complies with all of them to the letter. She feels that her paper has been substantially improved.

Scenario 2 The author, the Principal Investigator (P.I.) of a national project, is invited to speak at an event at another university in her country. She is later asked to write her paper up for publication in a volume edited by her multilingual EAL—user colleagues, all of whom are members of her project team. They make a number of modifications to her text, some of which she considers to be stylistic preferences rather than necessary corrections. She accepts the majority of the modifications, only rejecting two that she considers would actually produce grammatical errors. She does not consider the volume sufficiently high stakes to merit the effort involved in further contesting the editors’ interventions. She also considers that by contributing in the first place, she was doing her colleagues a favour.

Scenario 3 A senior multilingual academic with high status in his national community participates in an international conference and is then invited to submit a chapter on his principal area of research to a volume edited by multilingual scholars based in another country. They make editorial amendments to his text and suggest substantial changes to the structure of his contribution. He refuses to make the structural

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changes but hires a NES author’s editor to revise his text. She confirms the need for some of the amendments originally made by the volume editors. He accepts all her changes and returns his chapter without revealing that a third party has intervened in his text.

Scenario 4 A senior multilingual scholar is an invited keynote speaker at an international symposium chaired by another multilingual colleague from his country. With the other keynotes, all of whom are NES from Anglophone centre institutions, he is asked to publish his contributions in an edited volume. The scholar has his paper author-edited by an NES colleague who has some knowledge of his field but is not an expert. The scholar submits the paper assuming that the colleague who chaired the symposium will be the editor. Instead, an early-career researcher (ECR) from another language background has been given the task of editing the papers. This person makes a number of interventions, correcting supposed grammatical errors which he lists in his highly critical comments on the paper’s theoretical framework. The author is very angry and sends his paper to one of the Anglophone keynote contributors. This person dismisses many of the ECR editor’s corrections as unwarranted and says the criticisms of the paper indicate the editor’s lack of understanding. The author contacts the other editor and says he will withdraw his paper unless he is assured the ECR editor will have no further role in editing the paper or indeed in the book. He receives this assurance, and the paper is published a few months later.

Scenario 5 A multilingual ECR using EAL who answers a call for contributors to a volume edited by a senior scholar who is an NES and another multilingual EAL user. The author submits her chapter and is then asked by both editors to make major changes in terms of both theoretical framework and approach. She is also directed to rephrase a

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number of sentences. Some of these directives are unhedged and written in an informal register which she regards as inappropriate in an academic context. The author considers that she is being asked to produce a completely different paper and that the directive to “rephrase” is unclear. She submits a second version having only acted on the changes requested by the NES editor. When this editor also insists on the structural and content changes, the author says she has lost faith in the project and opts not to proceed with the writing of the paper.

Managing Power Relations as an Editor: Lessons from Authors’ and In-House Editors What I have tried to suggest through the bolded elements in the scenarios is that possession of cultural and symbolic capital by author and editor, together with the contextual circumstances which lead to the writing of the paper (e.g., in response to an invitation or a call for contributions) will condition the author’s response to editors’ interventions. This conditioning comes about as the result of congruence or mismatch between the declarative schema editing is to be expected and accepted and a model of a frame (Wood et al., 2018) where an editor’s academic status and language background warrants or constrains their right to intervene. Where authors control more cultural capital than editors, interventions in the text are major threats to author’s face which, if left unmitigated, may be met with resistance or even retaliation. Among these elements of cultural capital are institutionally assigned academic status and seniority, prestige within a disciplinary community, and a first language that is also the medium of the publication or a demonstrable command of that language. Where the medium of publication is a language which ostensibly competes with English for prominence and prestige, academic status and native speaker competence in the language may not be enough. The editor may also be expected to display loyalty and a willingness to defend the other language. This I argue was the case of the editor of the Spanish volume in my study. Additionally, suppose the paper is written in response to an invitation to contribute, especially if it has been delivered in spoken form as a plenary or keynote lecture.

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Suppose as well that the publication is not high status and is edited by relative newcomers. In that case, demands for anything beyond correction of the odd stylistic infelicity are even more susceptible to provoking a negative or retaliatory response. I would also contend that if these do occur, the editor would be well-advised to simply make the corrections, possibly without tracking the changes and risking shaming the author. If editors consider that more than the most superficial modifications are needed, where they are minus power and lacking in cultural capital in relation to the authors, care needs to be taken with what my colleagues called “tone.” Unmitigated directives can be read as on-record threats to face but the adoption of the wrong set of politeness strategies can also produce a negative reaction. Claiming solidarity through the use of informal colloquial language with someone who does not perceive you as an equal has its risks. It may also be read as either patronising or simply sloppy by those who perceive one as in a position of dominance. By the same token, deference politeness may be read as irony or sarcasm. Directives expressed as interrogatives may allow for the avoidance of an imposition, but they may also be misread as options rather than demands for change. A recent experience of editing a volume offered myself, the other editor, and the contributors a useful example of how a skilled in-house editor can handle threats to face. We were lucky to have a publisher who offered such a service which meant much of the potentially facethreatening editing was not in our hands as volume editors. The in-house editor, who was neither an expert in the field nor a L1 user of English, handled her task with great aplomb, somehow balancing deference with friendliness and authority. This is something many authors’ editors also know how to do, correcting what is potentially embarrassing without drawing attention to it, suggesting a citation is missing rather than demanding it should be provided, and offering alternative rephrasings rather than simply demanding the author should do so. But are authors’ editors normalising the multiplicity of multilingual authors’ voices to create a monochrome English (or Spanish etc.) for research publication purposes? I have said that having a first language that is the medium of publication is an element in cultural capital. Unfortunately for some of my colleagues, when it comes to English, it is

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also an element in cultural capital that trumps academic status and prestige, though not, it should be said, expertise in the questions of a specific discipline. For my colleagues, L1 users of English who act as book editors have more credibility as text mediators than their multilingual EALusing counterparts. This is an instance of Bourdieu’s “misrecognition”, I would argue. It is also an unanalysed patterned response and thus an element of personal culture (Wood et al., 2018). Two of the colleagues who contributed to my study work with post-colonial literatures and would, in the context of their research, be very reluctant to give preeminence to colonial hegemonic discourses giving greater status to L1 users of English. Instead, once made conscious of the contradictions in their schemas, they would most likely happily accept the idea of English as an academic lingua franca. It is to be hoped that the experience of discussing their responses to being edited, opens up the possibility of looking critically at the native speaker mystique and that the same might be true for readers of this chapter.

References Burgess, S. (2017). Accept or contest: A life-history study of humanities scholars’ responses to research evaluation policies in Spain. In M. Cargill & S. Burgess (Eds.), Publishing research in English as an Additional Language: Practices, pathways and potentials (pp. 13–31). University of Adelaide Press. Burrough-Boenisch, J. (2003). Shapers of published NNS research articles. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 223–243. Burgess, S., Fumero Pérez, M.C., & Díaz Galán, A. (2006). Mismatches and missed opportunities? A case study of a non-English speaking background research writer. In M. Carretero, L. Hidalgo Dowling, J. Lavid, E. Martínez Caro, J. Neff, S. Pérez de Ayala & E. Sánchez Pardo (Eds.), A pleasure of life in words: a festschrift for Angela Downing (pp. 283–304). Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. In E. N. Goody (Ed.), Question and politeness. Cambridge University Press.

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Cameron, D. (1994). Verbal hygiene for women: Linguistics misapplied? Applied Linguistics, 15, 382–398. Ericsson, K., & Simon, H. (1980). Verbal reports as data. Psychological Review, 87 (3), 215–251. Gosden, H. (2001). ‘“Thank you for your critical comments and helpful suggestions”’: Compliance and conflict in authors’ replies to referees’ comments in peer reviews of scientific research papers. Ibérica, 3, 3–17. Gosden, H. (2003). ‘Why not give us the full story?’: Functions of referees’ comments in peer review of scientific research papers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2, 87–101. Harwood, N. (2018). What do proofreaders of student writing do to a master’s essay? Differing interventions, worrying findings. Written Communication, 35 (4), 474–530. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318786236 Harwood, N. (2019). “I have to hold myself back from getting into all that”: Investigating ethical issues associated with the proofreading of student writing. Journal of Academic Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-0189322-5 Harwood, N., Austin, L., & Macaulay, R. (2009). Proofreading in a UK university: Proofreaders’ beliefs, practices, and experiences. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(3), 166–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2009. 05.002 Harwood, N., Austin, L., & Macaulay, R. (2010). Ethics and integrity in proofreading: Findings from an interview-based study. English for Specific Purposes, 29 (1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2009.08.004 Harwood, N., Austin, L., & Macaulay, R. (2012). Cleaner, helper, teacher? The role of proofreaders of student writing. Studies in Higher Education, 37 (5), 569–584. Hyland, K. (2011). Welcome to the machine: Thoughts on writing for scholarly publication. Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research, 1(1), 58–68. Heng Hartse, J., & Kubota, R. (2014). Pluralising English? Variation in high-stakes academic texts and challenges of copyediting. Journal of Second Language Writing, 24, 71–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2014.04.001 Kheradparvar, N., Shokrpour, A., & Mirzaee, A. (2013). Academic research networks and the role of literacy and network brokers in the publication of articles in Institute of Science Index-indexed journals: A case study of University Professors in English as a foreign language context Journal of Scientometric Research, 2/2.

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13 The Journal Editor as Academic Custodian John Edwards

Introduction Since this chapter is quite wide-ranging, this introduction provides a brief overview of the coverage. Immediately below this section is one that needs no explication; it only appears to offer a brief account of my own editing career. The next part describes editorial duties. Here, I stress the custodial function, pointing out that editors are in place as much to filter out poor or inappropriate submissions as they are to encourage, facilitate and ultimately publish good ones. There follows an account of an actual, and somewhat troubling, editorial ‘episode’ which serves to I regret that this chapter can provide only very abbreviated coverage of the topic. A monograph is forthcoming.

J. Edwards (B) St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada e-mail: [email protected] Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_13

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illustrate some of the interpersonal dynamics that need to be navigated by editors. I then highlight some further salient details of the review process. These are to do with the editor’s role in assessing what constitutes ‘publishable’ research and the (in)famous example of the ‘risky-shift’ phenomenon. Few obstacles remain in place as long as this one did, but a more common variant—in which authors provide endless embroideries on the same basic fabric—continues to plague editors. I am not unaware, of course, that my discussion here is closely related to editorial ‘subjectivity’. In the final section of this chapter, I return to the important point, highlighted in the title here: the editor as custodian.

A Personal Note I think it is appropriate to begin with a brief account of my own editing career. From 1982 to 1993 I was the first book-review editor of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology (now published by Sage) and, during the last two years of that position, I was also the associate editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (JMMD, now published by Routledge). This was a transition period, after which I assumed full editorship of the journal (established in 1980), remaining at the helm there for exactly a quarter-century. In this role I was both general editor and reviews editor, and I remain in the latter capacity. I also have editorial-board experience for about twenty international scholarly language journals. Besides journal duties, I was the general editor for the Multilingual Matters series of books (published by the Bristol firm of the same name) and took almost 60 projects from initial proposal to finished volume; from 2016 I have been accompanied by a co-editor. Among my own publications are four edited collections. Editorial assessment responsibilities of a sort have also included membership on several granting agencies; most notably, I was for a decade the chair of the panel within the federal Department of Canadian Heritage that assessed research-grant, fellowship, conference, ethnic-chair, and visitinglectureship applications dealing with the language-and-culture nexus in one form or another.

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An Editor’s Duties in Brief The Policeman’s Song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance— which was first staged in 1879—includes the memorable lines: ‘When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done/a policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. Three points brought this little ditty to mind: enforcement of rules is the central tenet of constabulary duty, the constable is— at least in the British context—the initial and thus the lowest rank of policeman—and ‘constable’ was originally the name given to a keeper of an important person’s horses (comes stabuli = count of the stable). Academic editors are a bit like policemen. Their duties are not invariably joyous—as we shall see, they are sometimes the unhappy ones themselves, but, more frequently perhaps, their work can make others unhappy. Like constables, editors are there to ensure adherence to rules in a spirit of fair play, to assist those in need, and to put some obstacles in the way of those whose efforts are not worthy. The latter may of course improve and come before the editor again in hopes of receiving some official imprimatur. A number of iterations may ensue before publication is achieved or, indeed, before an ultimate disapproval that writes finis to the author’s aspirations. All is not necessarily lost at this point, of course— there are other editorial constables in other jurisdictions, overseers who may see things differently and more favorably. With all of their significant functions, editors should remember with humility that constables are not necessarily the most important players when it comes to rules and their enforcement. Appeals to higher authority sometimes reverse their judgements and—even before providing their verdicts on publication—wise editors consult with others: external reviewers, editorial boards, and sometimes fellow editors can all be drawn upon to make sure that academic constables are not alone on their beat. Finally here, that initial sense of ‘counts of the stable’ seems apt in the scholarly cloisters. These premises house a great many contenders, each of whom is intent on running his or her best race, and who is dependent upon interpretations and applications of the course regulations. Equally, however, the larger academic enterprise involves getting as many worthy participants out of the gates as possible, bringing together those who seem to be moving in some approved, interesting,

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suggestive, or provocative direction, and separating them from the alsorans (who, as I’ve just written, may yet live to race another day). The editor, then, has a duty to both the individual and to the discipline as a whole. The role of editors is therefore a custodial one, and their value to the larger community lies just as much in keeping out poor material as it does in encouraging and ultimately accepting what is worthwhile. If the editorial filter is important where books are concerned, it often has even greater importance for journal publication, where articles are typically not solicited and where many (often most) submissions will not survive the reviewing process. While the mechanics of typical editorial practice are well known, circumstances often alter cases. Unsolicited contributions are generally sent out to expert referees for assessment: two has traditionally been the minimum, but computer-based managerial systems now make it quite easy to request reports from several more. This can be very helpful to editors, who must often deal with non-responses from referees and who, therefore, may like the idea of throwing out a wider initial net. One or two concerns have been raised, however. Zanna (1992, p. 488) commented on the trend—noticeable well before the routine use of manuscript-submission programs—for editors to request reviews from more than two referees. ‘It is not the most pleasant experience’, he writes, ‘for an author to satisfy five sometimes contradictory Caesars’, and he bluntly notes (too bluntly, in my opinion) that ‘editors can do the job by relying on two initial reviews’. More reports can mean more insights, more fuel for editorial decision-making. More reviews may also mean more work for the editor, however, especially where referees’ recommendations and criticisms do not coincide. Editorial discretion clearly comes into its own here, although, in fact, it exists from the very beginning of the review process. Editors must select reviewers, after all, and dispassionate judgment is not always perfect; indeed, there is no reason to think that, at this initial stage, editors invariably maintain a disinterested stance. This is sometimes suspected when a submission falls at the first hurdle and is never sent out for review at all. Such out-of-the-box rejection most often occurs because

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of perfectly valid reasons having to do with the inadequacy of the potential contribution; I will turn to these below. Still, many authors will have experienced such an immediate rejection, will have then submitted their work elsewhere (sometimes with little or no alteration), will have had it sent out for review by the new editor, and will have ultimately been published. While this does not invariably—or even usually—mean that the first editor had a strong and prejudicial parti pris, it at least illustrates the considerable amount of editorial subjectivity that exists. We ought not simply to decry such subjectivity, however, or try to turn editing into a more precise and measurable quantity. This is simply because the entire publication enterprise involves subjective choice and assessment at every step, from the first intention to write something all the way through to its appearance (or non-appearance) in print. This is not a game played by robots, and we must allow for bad or unjustifiable editorial decisions, relying on the hope that worthwhile material will eventually see the light of day. Turning something down without having it reviewed can be a difficult decision. The good editor will often agonize over whether to err on one side or the other. Perhaps some publishing circumstances in some literary or academic worlds allow for every contribution to be sent to external readers, but this is rarely the case in academia. Most journals (for example) simply receive too many submissions for the time available to have them all assessed. Furthermore, if editors were able to send out every paper that they received, the already constricted peer-review system— heavily dependent upon collegiality—would seize up every more tightly. Hard-pressed referees do not appreciate being sent sub-standard material, although, as with variance among editors themselves, what is deficient for one reviewer may be novel and ground-breaking for another. If editorial decision-making can be difficult when a submission is turned down out of hand, and when no external readers are pressed into service, it is also difficult once reviewers’ comments have been received. There are of course instances in which clear recommendations emerge but, as already implied here, it is rare indeed that referees concur more or less exactly on what should be altered or what needs to be added or subtracted. (It is rarer still, of course, for an original submission to be passed as it stands.) This means that the editor can hardly ever just add

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up the comments and send them back to the contributor. Some further assessment and intervention will be called for: first, for the editor’s own grasp of the thrust of the referees’ remarks; second, for the interweaving of his or her additional commentary; and third, for the transmission of some overall report to the waiting contributor. A further wrinkle, a further instance of editorial judgment, a further illustration that we are not dealing with a mechanical process here is revealed when it is considered important to overrule referees. Sometimes this means sending reports to the contributor with a note advising that one—or part of one—can be downplayed or ignored entirely. Sometimes it means going against reviewers’ recommendations more thoroughly: accepting (perhaps with some qualification) a paper that the referees have agreed should be turned down. It may also mean rejecting one that the external reports have found satisfactory; see also Zanna (1992). A message to the author may point out that the negative comments made by reviewers who were generally in favor of publication were considered collectively by the editor, and subsequently found to create a significant impediment. There are murkier waters, too, and possibilities too complicated to outline here. Common rationales in what editors see as doubtful cases, however, are those that rest upon salient knowledge of the author, reviewer and, indeed, the topic area in general—knowledge that goes beyond what is written in submissions and their assessments. Such subjectivity will often seem appropriate to the experienced editor, but obvious ethical difficulties suggest themselves, and should be taken into account. Honest editors will also admit to sometimes looking for a more or less objective peg upon which to hang their subjective judgements. Notwithstanding the pitfalls here, however, I would not wish to leave no room for such evaluations. With all the attendant difficulties, flaws, and opportunities for misjudgement and bias, the editorial thumb must turn up or down. It may not be the final arbiter—appeals can be made, decisions altered, judgements overturned—but we note that any further action will itself be subject to editorial assessment. (This applies not only to initial rejections giving way to eventual acceptance, but also to the retraction of work previously accepted … and published.)

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An Instructive Episode A member (‘M’) of the editorial board of the JMMD wrote to me on behalf of a young colleague of his—perhaps a supervisee—to complain that, after having submitted an article some six months earlier, she had received from me a ‘summary rejection based on ambivalent referee reports’.1 M’s view was that the piece would be acceptable after some revision. Putting aside this second-guessing on his part, I replied that delays in receiving referees’ reports were common, that editors must often struggle with difficult sets of comments, and that—once the submission had been sent out for review—I was obliged to wait for the assessments. (M had asked why I didn’t simply reject the submission out of hand, immediately upon receipt.) M now wrote to say I had been ‘dismissive’ of him (and reminded me, as he had before, that he was on the editorial board) and that my points were ‘frankly grotesque’. He asked to be taken off the board and said that he would now ‘actively discourage people from publishing’ in the journal. When I reported all this to the firm that was then publishing the journal, I was surprised to hear that the owners had pleaded with M not to resign, the reason being that ‘we just can’t afford and don’t want to make enemies’. They had written to M without first letting me know because of the urgency they perceived: ‘we do not want him to be against [us] … the academic world is small and [we] did not want him to fire off letters’. The remarks made by M—who had perhaps let the young colleague think that his position would expedite acceptance—highlight a number of the difficulties that may present themselves to editors. First, of course, one should think carefully when selecting board members! There is also the thorny matter of rejecting a submission after some months have elapsed. Editors are well aware that it is painful for authors to be kept in publishing limbo, only to find that their work has been turned down— but this is not an infrequent occurrence. A third point: it could well be a breach of good conduct (if not an ethical matter) if editors reject a submission without sending it out for review because their experience suggests that it might well evoke conflicting or ambiguous assessments. 1

The quotations here are verbatim remarks taken from email messages.

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What I consider to be M’s overreaction is an example of consequences of decision-making that may be highly charged; they are, at a minimum, trying and draining for editors. A lack of the support that editors might generally expect is also noteworthy here, and we see that positions taken on commercial rather academic bases may be important. At least in this instance the reasoning of the journal publishers was quite candid.

The Review Process … and Its Discontents2 Here is a cursory selection of recent scholarly comments about the review process; they all cover obvious and familiar ground, and need little amplification. They serve to illustrate the somewhat subjective nature of the editorial process and editors’ varying preferences. Joseph (2008) remarks upon authorial inconsistency, either in the text of the paper, or in the bibliography; the stylistic sin of inflated or convoluted language; and numbers cited in figures and tables that do not add up properly. Cornwall (2010) points to further problems, including poor presentations of qualitative data, and lack of originality. Powell (2010, p. 874) reminds her readers to have their work read by others before submission, to bear in mind that—in revision stages—‘every stage of advancement places more emphasis on quality than on quantity’, and that ‘the most significant work is improved by subtraction’.3 She also points out that rejections are not at all uncommon, and that while they should of course be taken seriously they ought not to be read as a wholesale rejection of all present and future efforts. Appeals to editors are possible where egregious comments have been made, although frivolous appeals are inadvisable, and it is often useful to allow for some ‘cooling-off ’ period between

2 I regret that I can only deal in this section with what remains the most common review mechanism, and cannot touch upon recent developments with (for example) open-access publishing. Nor is there space to discuss the historical antecedents of review practices, the increasing presence of ‘predatory’ publishing, and so on. 3 I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s description of a hard day’s work on his manuscript: in the morning he inserted a comma; in the afternoon, he took it out. As with many such aphorisms, the attribution is unclear, and other writer have certainly made similar statements. The general feeling that ‘less is better’ is common among novelists.

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receipt of unfavorable remarks and response to them.4 Zanna (1992, p. 487) makes the important point that it is wrong when ‘authors are … invited to resubmit manuscripts without a clear understanding of what it will take to convince the editor (or reviewers) that the manuscript be accepted for publication’. Hamnett (2016, p. 20) adds some further reasons for the rejection of submissions, advising against working on a topic ‘no longer current in the field’, presenting a fragment of what should be a more comprehensive account, providing inadequate or incomplete responses to referees’ comments, and drawing weak or insufficient conclusions from the study. Finally here, an editor-in-chief of Nature highlights the need to clarify what was done … and why (Skipper, 2018, p. 18).5 As I said, these admonitions and criticisms are generally quite clear, and the advice to authors is entirely reasonable. I should return, however, to one or two of the issues touched upon. The first has to do with qualitative work, with ethnographic inquiries, with a close study of individuals or very small groups, and the like.6 Investigations here are entirely justifiable in some areas, and the best of them clearly qualify as social-scientific in nature. Others, however, may be more suited to arts-and-humanities journals than to social-science publications. For the latter, common questions often arise: how can a research exercise with only a handful of 4 Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria appeared late in the first century, and the text was preceded by a letter to his friend and publisher Trypho, who had for several years been pressing him to publish. Quintilian wrote that he had felt that his work ‘was not ripe for publication’ and that he was following the advice of Horace who had earlier—in his Ars Poetica—suggested that authors put their work away for nine years before publishing; see Quintilian (1996 [95], p. 3) and Horace (1942 [20 B.C.E.]). Most readers will no doubt find this caution a little excessive and impractical, but, after all, while you can shelve or destroy what has not yet been published, words in print cannot be erased. Remember the verse of Omar Khayyám (in the translation of Edward Fitzgerald, 1859) about the impossibility of canceling even half a line once the ‘moving finger … having writ, moves on.’ Or consider, more colloquially, the impossibility for jurors to observe the judge’s injunction to ‘disregard that last remark.’ 5 Skipper also advises authors—especially beginners—to avoid mentioning endorsements from prominent scholars. This attempt to impress is liable to have the opposite effect. Such endorsements rarely accompany journal submissions (at least, not in the social sciences) but I am reminded of the letters of recommendation that sometimes accompany book proposals—the longer and more intimate they become, the more suspicious. 6 This broad area also encompasses, of course, the large and ever-growing number of ‘criticalstudies’ perspectives on aspects of language and culture, as well as discourse and conversational analysis and their offspring; see Edwards (2010, 2013) for some critical remarks.

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informants (or perhaps only one) provide any substantial amount of that generalisability which is surely the hallmark of useful scientific work (social or otherwise)? Sometimes, the answer given to this sort of observation is that we ought to consider small-scale qualitative work as a beginning, a pilot, for further and fuller research. Fair enough, but in that case we are entitled to ask for some novel insights—things that such a fine-grained perspective might highlight, things that a larger-scale ‘averaging’ might miss, and therefore things that could be usefully built into future studies. If these are not to be found, however, then the exercise usually collapses into something essentially anecdotal, making one think (taking the most charitable stance) that a fuller piece of work should have been attempted at the outset. I mention these issues to highlight that the remit of editors also involves judgements as to what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘publishable’ research and that these judgements may vary between editors. Many researchers who provide micro-narratives, mini-ethnographies, and other in-depth investigations of a very small number of informants, seem to imagine that presenting largely qualitative work somehow exempts them from the sorts of requirements noted above. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, to conduct and present qualitative work that can plausibly take its place under the heading of social science is generally much harder than to engage in most quantitative exercises. To put it another way: much of the sort of work I refer to here may certainly be styled ‘social’ but, in my view, can hardly qualify as ‘scientific’. Important questions about ‘representativeness, selectivity, partiality, prejudice and voice’ cannot be answered satisfactorily (Blommaert, 2005, p. 31). Without at least some attention to such matters, the potential exists for a virtually endless stream of inquiries, without any meaningful degree of accumulated knowledge—one of the chief characteristics of rational scientific data-gathering. Further indication of the infinite elasticity of purely social approaches is provided when, as is frequently the case, analyses of excerpts of cultural interactions, of texts and conversations, are considerably longer than the excerpts themselves. Here is what (I hope) is a rather extreme example: ‘Grimshaw (1989) … devotes more than 600 pages to an analysis of a committee’s evaluation of a doctoral dissertation. The actual transcript used here was less than

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300 lines of text, representing about ten minutes of conversation among four examiners’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 36). In a related piece, Grimshaw (1994) admitted that little of value had emerged, and a reviewer (Firth, 1996, p. 1489) wrote that ‘for students of spoken interaction, such an experience confirms what is already known’. Of course, a book is not a journal article, but the Grimshaw example—beyond illustrating unsatisfactory (and theoretically limitless) approaches that make no concession to generalisability—also strongly suggests that more is not always better. All journal editors have had to deal with submissions that are over-long, and often must make the case to authors that there are virtually no articles that cannot be more economically phrased. When verbosity is coupled with a lack of originality, problems multiply. As already cited, Hamnett (2016, p. 20) advised against trying to publish something on a topic ‘no longer current in the field’. In the social sciences, this touches on a particularly important matter, one to which editors are routinely exposed. More than a generation ago, Meehl (1978, p. 807) provided a stringent criticism: ‘It is simply a sad fact that in soft [sic] psychology theories rise and decline, come and go, more as a function of baffled boredom than anything else; and the enterprise shows a disturbing absence of that cumulative character that is so impressive in disciplines like astronomy, molecular biology, and genetics’. The curious case of the ‘risky-shift’ phenomenon illustrates Meehl’s concern. From a journal editor’s perspective, it involves issues of both originality and fashion, as well as two other factors that worry editors. One is what I have called ‘endless embroideries on the same theme’: a basic idea is reworked with many minor changes, each iteration leading (it is hoped) to a new publication.7 The other is so-called ‘salami slicing’, a process in which one research effort is split into many smaller parts, with the same hope in mind. What should be a coherent and comprehensive account is divided into what critics have called ‘least publishable’ or ‘smallest publishable’ units; see Broad (1981), Scott-Lichter (2011) and—for more general discussions—Billig (2013) and Moosa (2018).

7 Readers will know that sometimes this embroidery begins as early as a master’s thesis that reworks undergraduate work, and that then leads seamlessly into doctoral inquiries and beyond. Such early narrowness bodes ill for future intellectual growth.

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Stoner (1961) coined the term ‘risky shift’ in reference to his finding that decisions made at the group level were riskier than the average of those made earlier by individual members; his work soon led to many further studies and assessments. Isenberg (1986, p. 1141) thus remarks on ‘risky-shift’ as being a ‘particularly pervasive phenomenon’, involving several hundred research investigations. A special section of a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology issue printed twenty articles on the phenomenon in (1971). Something of a race ensued to find the ‘true’ cause of the effect, and more than a dozen competing explanations emerged: a recurring thread was the supposed ‘diffusion of responsibility’ that group decisions allowed. In a social-psychology textbook of (1965), Brown referred to the phenomenon as a ‘recent discovery’ (p. xxiii) that contradicted the popular belief that group decisions are less risky than individual ones. (Joynson [1974] was not the only one to question the generality of this ‘popular belief ’.) Criticisms began to appear in the early 1970s (see Belovicz & Finch, 1971). Cartwright (1973) paid close attention to the ‘risky-shift’ phenomenon, one in which a great many researchers invested considerable time and effort— one of the reasons why the studies proliferated well beyond the point of diminishing returns. As time went on and as research findings accumulated, doubt began to set in about the basic proposition itself. It was commonly found that group decisions were not invariably less cautious than those made by individuals, and Stoner himself (1968) soon came to describe both risky and cautious shifts. And so Cartwright wrote that ‘since the most dramatic outcome of this work was a demonstration of the inadequacies of its underlying premise, one might be tempted to argue that the whole enterprise was useless’ (p. 227). How might things have unfolded differently? One obvious route, once the initial ‘riskiness’ had been found in the artificial laboratory setting, would have been to move immediately to real-life group settings. But it is entirely representative of the state of much social-psychological research—now as then—that this was not done. The disappointing outcome was thus simply the ‘demise of the risky-shift paradigm’, with Cartwright concluding that ‘interest in the topic [may] gradually subside into the history of social psychology. Such an outcome would not be unprecedented, for this has been the fate of many quite popular research

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enterprises of the past’ (p. 230). Nothing of value, then, really emerged after ten years of research work, for ‘we still do not know how the risktaking behaviour of “real-life” groups compares with that of individuals’ (p. 231).8 Isenberg (1986, p. 1141) notes that, by the mid-1970s, many of the risky-shift scholars had ‘begun to veer away from further research in the field’. And why? It seemed that ‘the risky shift was an interesting but limited and severely qualified phenomenon that had already outlived its theoretical usefulness’. One might point out that the risky-shift phenomenon was eventually folded into a larger, self-correcting, and cumulative scientific story, one involving group polarization and decision-making; see Hogg (1995a, 1995b)—and that it was perhaps an instructive case. But socialpsychological ‘fashion’ is still a danger, even in those areas most closely aware of the ‘risky-shift’ enterprise. Isenberg (1986, p. 1141) writes, for example, that ‘enthusiasm for group polarization research has again begun to wane’. The word ‘enthusiasm’ is suggestive, of course. Overall, the saga exemplifies the dangers of inadequate beginnings, uncritical replications, and an unseemly and premature rush to ‘theory’. One thinks inevitably of Kuhn’s (2012 [1962]) discussion of the persistence of deficient paradigms, and this commentary by Bird (2018, Sect. 3) seems particularly apt in the present discussion: Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘preparadigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much intellectual energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition.

8 Now, this may be true at some overarching, all-inclusive and probably unattainable theoretical level, but we all know a great deal about specific cases. This is reminiscent of a point that Joynson (1974) made, and is something upon which the philosopher Ryle (1949) commented in his discussion of causal explanations generally.

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Concluding Comments As various commentators—and all classroom instructors—have noted, authors should provide a strong concluding section to their submission, one that highlights, clarifies, justifies, and suggests fruitful directions. There is room for some speculation, but they should not go too far beyond their material. Finally, a conclusion should not be a simple repetition of what has gone before (just as, incidentally, opening paragraphs ought not to repeat the text of the abstract). I have tried to demonstrate here that all of the central editorial duties, and all of the processes involved in them, come together in the role of custodian and gatekeeper. I use both words because a recent chapter (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019) has drawn a false distinction. These authors seem to think that the latter word usually has a negative connotation and that, in any event, referees and not editors are the real gatekeepers. In the present context, at least, the two words are of course virtually synonymous. The thrust of this chapter is a commentary on the interplay that connects authors, referees, and editors. The chief substance of the chapter is an outline of the routes and the ramifications of reviewing procedures. And the particular features of the latter that I have emphasized stress the difficulties associated with qualitative work, with originality and needless repetition, and with the pitfalls accompanying ill-advised and counterproductive persistence in following ideas well beyond the point of diminishing returns. I want finally to touch upon three matters worthy of further attention; the first two are not of central salience, perhaps, but the third is. They all provide regular thorns in the editorial side. First, readers will have noted that my references to Horace and Quintilian give two dates, one of which indicates the work’s original appearance. It is regrettable when this is not done, particularly when ancient or venerable authors are referred to. In November 2020 I received a message from the Folio Society, the company that produces sumptuous editions of classic books. It offered a new and limited edition of ‘signed and numbered copies’ of

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The Histories. This struck me as a remarkable offer, since the author— the Greek scholar Herodotus—died almost 2500 years ago.9 This sort of advertisement is amusing, but there are more immediately significant instances of what might be termed ‘referential disservice’. In a very recent book, Stephens-Hecker (2020) cites works by Martin Luther and the less familiar Matthew Henry. Although the first is dated 1955 and the second 1991, Luther’s publication appeared in 1545, Henry’s in 1791. It is true that readers have been forewarned in the text about Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century Reformation. They were also told that Matthew Henry was a late seventeenth-century divine. Nonetheless, StephensHecker should surely have given us the full and original titles and dates, as well as those of the editions she has consulted herself. Interested readers will easily find many other examples of this practice. The second matter has to do with a regrettably growing tendency among authors to try and come up with ‘cute’ titles. There are, admittedly, some very clever and, indeed, appropriate ones. Poplack’s (1980) article on code-switching provides an example, as does the piece by de Vries (1990) on census data. The first of these is ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of codeswitching’ and the second is ‘On coming to our census: a layman’s guide to demolinguistics’. Poplack’s title immediately signals the content to follow, and that of de Vries is a clever play on words. However, the titles of very recent articles by Gonçalves (2020)—‘“What the fuck is this for a language, this cannot be Deutsch?” Language ideologies, policies, and semiotic practices of a kitchen crew in a hotel restaurant’—and Masoumi (2020)—‘“Some nice Latin American music will be played by a tape player”: Anti-racist critique and the multicultural state’—are not well-chosen in any academic sense, and I am surprised that they were allowed to stand. Allowing for the obvious fact that the opinions of different editors (and authors) may vary in such matters, I would argue that neither of my examples has much to recommend it. Besides the juvenile attempt at some shock value in the first piece, neither tells the reader anything about the substantive part of the title that follows the colon.

9

The signatures are those of the editor and illustrator of this new edition.

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Finally, while the authors of articles seldom have to be chased to provide revisions, editors often find that book reviewers do need to be nudged, sometimes repeatedly. When it is clear that a review will not be forthcoming, the book is rarely returned by recalcitrant scholars. I have on occasion been reminded, as well, that book reviews are not very prestigious publications—this may be so, but reviewers have in effect contracted to provide their thousand words or so by an agreed date. There are two immediate consequences of their laxity. First, there is a considerable waste of editorial time; second, things can become so protracted that a timely review by another scholar is impossible, a loss for the book’s author and his or her potential readership. In addition, given the frequent unavailability and indifference of the most appropriate book reviewers, editors know that they must often turn to junior and less suitable colleagues. The idea of publishing a list of negligent reviewers is very tempting.10

References Belovicz, M., & Finch, F. (1971). A critical analysis of the ‘risky-shift’ phenomenon. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 6 , 150– 168. Billig, M. (2013). Learn to write badly: How to succeed in the social sciences. Cambridge University Press. Bird, A. (2018). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge University Press. Broad, W. (1981). The publishing game: Getting more for less. Science, 211(4487), 1137–1139. Brown, R. (1965). Social psychology. Free Press. 10 There is a second relevant aspect of book reviews: the aggrieved reaction of authors whose books have received what they consider to be unfair or inaccurate reviews. Fussell (1982, 1988) provides some apt discussion of this important matter, which I cannot treat here. A third recent phenomenon is the increasing number of offers made of unsolicited book reviews; again, a subject for further discussion.

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Cartwright, D. (1973). Determinants of scientific progress: The case of research on the risky shift. American Psychologist, 28, 222–231. Cornwall, M. (2010). From the editor: Ten likely ways an article submission fails to live up to publishing standards. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49, i–v. de Vries, J. (1990). On coming to our census: A layman’s guide to demolinguistics. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 11, 57–76. Edwards, J. (2010). Language diversity in the classroom. Multilingual Matters. Edwards, J. (2013). Sociolinguistics: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Firth, A. (1996). Review of Collegial discourse and What’s going on here? [by Allen Grimshaw]. American Journal of Sociology, 101, 1487–1492. Fitzgerald, E. (1859). The rub¯a’¯ıy¯at of Omar Khayyám. London: Quaritch. [This is the famous selection and translation of quatrains attributed to the work of the Persian mathematician and poet of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.] Fussell, P. (1982). The Boy Scout Handbook and other observations. Oxford University Press. Fussell, P. (1988). Thank God for the atom bomb, and other essays. Simon & Schuster. Gonçalves, K. (2020). ‘What the fuck is this for a language, this cannot be Deutsch?’ Language ideologies, policies, and semiotic practices of a kitchen crew in a hotel restaurant. Language Policy, 19, 417–441. Grimshaw, A. (1989). Collegial discourse: Professional conversation among peers. Ablex. Grimshaw, A. (Ed.). (1994). What’s going on here? Complementary studies of professional talk. Ablex. Hamnett, H. (2016, September 29). Why are academic papers rejected by journals? Times Higher Education, 20. Hogg, M. (1995a). Group decision making. In A. Manstead & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Blackwell encyclopedia of social psychology (pp. 264–269). Blackwell. Hogg, M. (1995b). Group polarization. In A. Manstead & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Blackwell encyclopedia of social psychology (p. 269). Blackwell. Horace. (1942 [20 B.C.E.]). Ars poetica. [The edition cited here is the bilingual version of H. Fairclough]. Harvard University Press. Isenberg, D. (1986). Group polarization: A critical review and meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 1141–1151. Joseph, B. (2008). On making a mark and making marks. Language, 84, 3–7.

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Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyJournal of Personality and Social Psychology. (1971). Special section of Volume 20:3 on the ‘risky-shift’ phenomenon. Joynson, R. (1974). Psychology and common sense. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kuhn, T. (2012 [1962]). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Masoumi, A. (2020). ‘Some nice Latin American music will be played by a tape player’: Anti-racist critique and the multicultural state. Social Identities, 26 , 705–718. Meehl, P. (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46 , 806–834. Moosa, I. (2018). Publish or perish. Edward Elgar. Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 581–618. Powell, K. (2010, October 14). Publish like a pro. Nature, 873–875. Quintilian. (1996 [95]). Institutio oratoria. [The edition cited here is the bilingual version of H. Butler.]. Harvard University Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind . Hutchinson. Scott-Lichter, D. (2011). Got content, get attention. Learned Publishing, 24, 245–246. Skipper, M. (2018, November 29). How to get your article ready for take-off. Times Higher Education, 18. Starfield, S., & Paltridge, B. (2019). Journal editors: Gatekeepers or custodians? In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 253–270). Palgrave Macmillan. Stephens-Hecker, N. (2020). Grammar next to godliness: Prescriptivism and the Tower of Babel. In D. Chapman & J. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: Values, ideologies and identity (pp. 213–230). Multilingual Matters. Stoner, J. (1961). A comparison of individual and group decisions involving risk. M.Sc. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit. edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11330/33120544-MIT.pdf?sequence=2&isA llowed=y Stoner, J. (1968). Risky and cautious shifts in group decisions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 4, 442–459. Zanna, M. (1992). My life as a dog (I mean editor). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 485–488.

14 From Birth to Maturity: Reflections on Editors’ Experiences and Challenges in Founding, Managing and Promoting Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research Karim Sadeghi and Farah Ghaderi

Introduction As we are writing the chapter (July 2022), Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research (IJLTR, hereafter) has recently celebrated its 9th birthday, entering its 10th year of publication. In the world of scholarly publication, ten years is a very short period of time for a journal to gain international recognition given the specific context in which IJLTR is being published. Our 9+ years of experience as editors of this journal indicates that had the word ‘Iranian’ not been part of the journal title, IJLTR would have even developed more rapidly and witnessed more success stories than it currently has. As a living case in point, we, the editors, recently invited a well-known figure in the field to contribute a paper to IJLTR, at the same time as he was asked to join the editorial board member of another non-Iranian new journal we were launching. K. Sadeghi (B) · F. Ghaderi Urmia University, Urmia, Iran e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4_14

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The contributor was however happier for his work to be included in a yet-to-be-launched journal than an established Q1 (Scopus/Scimago SJR first quartile) journal, simply for the reason just mentioned. We have had several other similar reservation stories. Although IJLTR tags the word ‘Iranian’ as part of its title, it has not been meant to be a national level journal, devoted to research studies conducted in Iran only. The word Iranian as part of the title was only meant to signal the origin of the journal, as is the case with many other journals based in a certain country but international in scope such as American Journal of Public Health, a top-tier journal based in America with an international scope. To set the scene and represent the international scope of the journal, almost all published papers (except for 4) in the first three issues of our journal (and all papers in its first issue) came from outside Iran and were written by leading scholars in the field. The most recent issue of IJLTR (July 2022) similarly carries as many papers written by international as Iranian scholars. The word ‘Iranian’, rather than the journal’s being national in scope, seems to be the motivation behind why many reputed international scholars have been reluctant to publish in IJLTR. Although this paper is not the right place to discuss this, from a political stance, the words Iran and Iranian are unfortunately not welcomed very warmly in many countries because of the xenophobic and negative discourses emerging from political tensions between Iran and the West, although its culture is appreciated in many places. These international discourses have negatively affected all people living and working in Iran, including academicians and journal editors, both economically and socio-politically, with implications for international communications and developments. In short, political tensions between Iran and the West have drastically affected life in all phases in Iran, and the word ‘Iranian’ has unfairly been associated with negative connotations, preventing even academic collaborations with the world such that Iranian scholars have limitations is publishing papers in certain international journals and with publishers such as Wiley. The unwillingness of international and anglophone authors to publish in IJLTR (and similar semi-peripheral outlets) can also be understood within the frame of the dominance of Anglophone publishing world as well as the traditional divide between Anglophone and English

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as an additional language (EAL) speakers. ‘The belief that ‘nativespeaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology’ (Holliday, 2006, p. 385) has now well extended from teaching to the publication world, bringing with it inequalities to journal publishing and reflecting the traditional divide between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ (Phillipson, 1992) even further. In academic publishing world, as Bennett (2014) rightly acknowledges, the neat split continues between the ‘prosperous’ centre with access to all material and scholarship resources and the ‘disadvantaged’ periphery ‘deprived of even the most basic equipment such as good-quality paper and photocopiers’ (p. 1). This essentially implies that journals published in the periphery have little chance of success in competing with those in the centre; that many EAL speakers do not stand a high chance in placing their work in journals published in the centre; and that periphery journals may not be very fortunate in attracting works from Anglophone authors. As far as IJLTR is concerned, although our inclusion in Web of Science and Scopus databases is gaining us more international recognition, attracting more international (but EAL) authors than we used to some 6 years ago, the issues just discussed are still seen as preventive measures in introducing IJLTR as a fully fledged reputable journal (comparable to those of similar rank mainstream journals) to the international (and more specifically Anglophone) community. Despite these obvious disadvantages and constraints at several levels, as editors, we obviously cannot hide our joy at the current international reputation IJLTR is enjoying which we would like to highlight at the very beginning of the chapter before we attend to the trajectories that lay behind this recognition. Only in 2020, IJLTR gained three important national and international seminal achievements. At a ceremony held on 15 December 2020 at the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT) to mark top researchers, IJLTR was announced as Top Journal in Humanities and Social Sciences at 21st Festival on Appreciating Top Iranian Researchers. Only three months before that in September 2020, in its first-ever evaluation by the MSRT, IJLTR was ranked as ‘International’, the highest ranking possible. Previously MSRT ranked journals as A+, A, B, C and D, with A+ as the highest rank. In

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the new ranking system introduced in 2020, A+ changed to International (to be given to titles with international indexing such as in Scopus and WoS), with others still in place (for national level journals). Our watershed and most prestigious and landmark achievement in 2020 came in June when IJLTR —which had an SJR-Q2 ranking in SCImago (since its indexing in Scopus in 2013)—managed to enter the first quartile (Q1), making IJLTR as the first ever and the only Iranian journal in Humanities and Social Sciences with such a ranking, as well as the only journal in Language/Linguistics in the Middle East with this ranking. More recently in June 2022, IJLTR made history again by entering the list of TOP 15% journals in Scopus and SJR in Language and Linguistics Category. Given the constraints under which IJLTR started working and the very short time it has taken to escalate the ladder of success, we aim to share some of the challenges we have been through in starting the journal, pushing it forward as well as offering some key advice to local and small journals who wish to gain international recognition but do not have the support (material, human, technological and other) to make it happen. In so doing, we look more specifically at some communication challenges with contributors.

Methodology This chapter is primarily an autoethnographic account of the editors’ experiences and challenges in founding a national journal in applied linguistics with an international scope. To do this, we use memory data based on our first hand experience as well as the available documents to tell the story of founding IJLTR first, where we highlight the role of various socio-political issues and national policies affecting the launch, growth and success of IJLTR. We then share a number of email excerpts we have received recently some of which may be very specific to our academic context and highlight some of the challenges we are facing as editors of an international English-medium journal published in a peripheral context in communicating with some potential contributors.

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Process of Founding an Academic Journal in Iran Journals are usually published by publishing companies (such as Springer, Elsevier, Routledge, Sage, and others) that specialise in this enterprise, or by academic organisations like universities (university presses) and/or professional societies like TESOL. In Iran, journals are published primarily by universities or less commonly by academic societies; publishing companies however engage in publishing books rather than journals. For a journal to be allowed to be published by a university or a society, formal permission should be obtained from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MoC) before the start of the publication. The university (as the owner of the journal) appoints an academic member of the department as the Director-in-Charge (with legal and administrative responsibilities) who should then follow up journal permit issues at the MoC. The process at the MoC takes between one and two years. Like appointment for important government jobs, the Directorin-Charge needs to go through several screening processes by having their finger-prints taken and undergoing a criminal record check to make sure that they have no court convictions of any type preventing them from taking up the role of journal ‘manager’. As soon as a publication permit is issued, the Director-in-Charge needs to draw up a journal team (editorial board) and appoint a member of the founding department as Editor-in-Chief who will be in charge of academic issues. After successful publication of a few issues, seeking accreditation comes next. A journal should have a publication history of at least two years before they can apply for accreditation by the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT), the organisation in charge of accrediting academic publications and ranking them. There is also a parallel organisation, Regional Information Centre for Science and Technology, also called ISC (Islamic Science Citation Centre) in Shiraz (a major provincial capital city in Iran, home to Shiraz University) which indexes journals published in Iran and other Islamic countries and offers rankings from Q1 to Q4, to which journals usually apply after being recognised by MSRT. ISC indexing is a journal quality yardstick in Islamic countries and functions like Scopus or WoS. This regional database was established

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in response to a need to index journals publishing mainly Persian and Arabic content that have little chance of finding their way to international databases that index primarily English content. A journal’s rank in ISC is a major quality indicator of the published papers and counts as a parallel to Scopus/WoS indexing whenever a publication is to be evaluated for promotion purposes. Journals published in English have the additional privilege of applying for international indexing services, but there are not many Iranian journals in Humanities and Social Sciences that are successful in this regard. For example, in the field of Language and Linguistics, while there are currently 100 journals accredited by the MSRT, there are only 5 journals indexed in Scopus, with only one, IJLTR, having an SJR Q1 ranking.

The Story of IJLTR When I (Karim Sadeghi) was the head of English Language and Literature Department at Urmia University (Iran) in 2010, I decided that our department needed a journal devoted to issues in second language education. I discussed this with my colleagues, and they agreed that there was a need for such an outlet, to allow a publication chance for the increased number of papers in the field given the very limited number of available periodicals, which hardly exceeded the number of fingers on one’s hands. Indeed, it had also just become a requirement for PhD students to have a publication out of their thesis before they could be allowed to defend their theses; also many academics sought promotion opportunities and there was not enough publication space available, with most of the available space used by the owners or board members of the journals. The ‘internationalisation’ movement in Iranian universities since a decade ago, and the desire to meet the ranking criteria (e.g. the number of publications) imposed by major university ranking services like Times Higher Education, have instigated ministerial policies for more research productions. Given the place of Web of Science and Scopus-SCImago SJR indexes in ranking systems, more and more emphasis is placed on publishing by the academic staff (and more recently PhD students as well) in outlets indexed in the above databases such that, as noted, one

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publication in such indexed journals is now mandatory for PhD students to defend their theses and to be able to graduate. Apart from these international indexes, the MSRT has created a list of nationally credible outlets, assigned ranking by ISC (as mentioned above), which can be used for similar purposes as well as for promotion purpose, primarily for non-English journals—which stand little chance of indexation by Scopus and WoS. The second, and more important, goal for this new venture was to set a model for existing journals through publishing works of higher standard and more international in scope (rather than those of friends, colleagues, or recommended ones) as well as book reviews, which was the norm in quality international outlets but missing in the Iranian context. Given the very limited number of journals in the field back then, finding a publication space in one of those few outlets was very competitive and, as our first hand experience and what we have learned from colleagues indicate, relied to a great extent on whether there were any personal links with the journal manager and editor as well as the academic rank of the author, rather than on the merit of the paper. In a study of 15 Serbian editors’ views on the motivation behind launching journals in English (rather than Serbian) as the medium of publication, Petric (2014) identified the main reason as ‘international scholarly exchange’ (p. 197), beyond-national visibility and a better chance for indexation, a similar goal to ours in launching IJLTR. The department proposed me to Urmia University Chancellor to be assigned the role of Director-in-Charge or Founding Editor. I was appointed by the Chancellor as Director-in-Charge and was asked to prepare and submit an application for the MoC (per above procedure); and after a lengthy process of almost two years, I was granted an official permit by the MoC to start publishing the journal. As part of my application to MoC, I needed to fill out several forms and in one of them I had to propose three potential journal titles, type of articles to be published, publication policy, publication frequency and so on. Of the three titles proposed, the current title, Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, was approved and I eventually received the permit as the formal Directorin-Charge of the journal in August 2012. A Director-in-Charge is a legal entity responsible for all journal affairs from selecting journal team and

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editorial board to managing publication, to financial issues and all else that is involved in publishing a periodical. As soon as I received the permit to go ahead with establishing the journal, I started liaising with the then-head of department and some other members about whom we should appoint as the Editorin-Chief. They insisted that I myself should be the Editor-in-Chief. As the Director-in-Charge and Editor-in-Chief, I had now to manage both the academic and administrative issues of the journal, which was not an easy task given that I did not have any previous editorial experience. I decided that I should browse a few international journals published by major publishers in my field to learn more about journal structure, aims and scope, publication policies, editorial board members, review policies, stylistic preferences, website, etc. I had then to draw up a list of editorial/advisory board members. There were ministerial guidelines and criteria for accrediting journals, including specific conditions for academic rankings of editorial board members and so on, that needed to be followed. For example, the editorial board members should have had the academic rank of associate professor; at least three members of the editorial board should have been affiliated with the founding university, and the like. I set my standards very high from the start and invited some of the key international and national figures to join our journal, and I am very pleased that most of these scholars accepted my invitation to sit on the board of an unknown yet to be established journal. And this strong foundation of staunch board members has always been both a motivation for us to work harder, and a stimulus behind our recognition and success. Several things (like developing a website, writing materials for pages, inviting board members, setting up an in-house journal team, preparing an article template, and many others) were to be conducted at the same time in a matter of months as I was planning the journal’s first issue for January 2013, only 4 months after it was given a formal go-ahead. I was sure that a simple announcement of the launch of the journal would not get IJLTR enough number of papers for the first issue, and I was also aware that a new journal would face problems in findings papers for more than two issues. So I planned the journal as a semi-annual journal and invited leading scholars in the field to contribute papers to the inaugural issue. The first issue of IJLTR which was published on the 1st of January

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2013, with all the papers contributed by some of the internationally reputed figures, was itself another drive for our continued success. The journal was planned to be published on 1st January and 1st July (and 1st October for the Special Issues), and all our issues so far, without an exception, have followed this timeline, with no issue having been published on the 2nd of the month, for example, an indication of exemplar timeliness in publication. This timeliness in publication has still been another landmark achievement and another story behind IJLTR’s success. To our credit, one of our international board members noted, calendars should be set based on when a new issue of IJLTR is published. As soon as we published the first issue of IJLTR and as a measure to promote the journal and other department activities, we also planned an international conference in language teaching, which was held at Urmia University in May, 2013. The department did huge preparations for the conference and as the academic organiser of the conference, I invited 7 well-known international figures in the field to deliver plenary speeches. Selected papers from these keynote speakers were then published in a Special Issue of the journal as the conference proceedings (in October 2013), followed by some other invited papers from board members in July, 2013 issue. Accordingly, the first year of the journal with many quality publications, most of them penned by experts in the field, laid a strong foundation on which all the rest of our success stories rested. Meanwhile, we applied for COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and were accepted for indexing from the start. While our very firm start with international level quality publications and being a member of COPE, Index Islamicus and MLA earned IJLTR some reputation at an international level, the next two years (2014 and 2015) were hard days for IJLTR for securing papers from Iranian scholars. IJLTR had not yet been accredited by the MSRT; neither was it indexed in ISC which acted as quality criteria for the majority of Iranian writers who looked for such metrics as markers of quality. Quite surprisingly, we did have requests for withdrawal of papers after acceptance when the authors found at that stage that our journal was not yet recognised by the MSRT or not indexed yet. Papers published in journals not accredited by the MSRT and not indexed in ISC, WoS and Scopus would not be considered for promotion and that is why very few Iranian authors (expect for

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those not requiring promotion) would have been happy with publishing a paper in a then-non-indexed or unaccredited journal. However, we still received some good quality papers that went through the review process successfully and were published. In late 2014 we applied for inclusion in Scopus but since we did not have enough material for evaluation and as we had a very basic, almost non-functioning website, our application was not successful. We reapplied in early 2015 (when we had an updated, better functioning website and had published 6 issues) and this time we received a very positive evaluation from Scopus team who informed us that they were willing to index IJLTR from the start (i.e., 2013). Although we had already applied for accrediting by the MSRT, we did not get recognised since we did not meet the important ‘criterion’: that two of the editorial board members should be based in the department which publishes the journal, and these members should be associate professors at the minimum. At that time, unfortunately our department did not have any associate professors (except for the Editor-in-Chief of IJLTR, who was himself an assistant professor when he founded the journal). However, as soon as IJLTR was accepted for indexing in Scopus, things changed greatly. IJLTR received more submissions (and of higher quality) but again to the editors’ astonishment, when some Iranian authors learned that IJLTR was not still accredited by the MSRT, they asked to withdraw their manuscripts. As the Editor-in-Chief of a journal with international recognition (already indexed in Scopus), I had to write to MSRT authorities to persuade them that IJLTR has a higher recognition (at an international level) and this entitles it to a national recognition. Unfortunately the senseless regulations were still in place and IJLTR was not accredited by the MSRT until 2017 when we had two department members promoted to associate professorship. Ironically, although they did not recognise IJLTR, authorities form the MSRT contacted me from time to time asking for advice on how they could have other Iranian journals indexed in Scopus. As journal editors, we were not keen anymore to receive recognition by the MSRT but we did follow this route simply because of the requests by many Iranian authors for whom this recognition worked in defending theses, getting promoted, etc. As noted above, only journals accredited by the MSRT as well as those indexed in semi-international (ISC) and

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international (WoS-SCI-SSCI, and Scopus-SJR) databases were given credit. It is unfortunate that even today well-known journals like TESL Canada Journal which is not indexed in such databases or those indexed in WoS-ESCI [Emerging Sources Citation Index] and WoS-AHCI [Arts and Humanities Citation Index] are not given any credit simply because they do not have an impact factor. Although the logic is understandable for those in ESCI, the policy is simply wrong for AHCI as these are some of the most prestigious journals in the field of arts and humanities, and the reason they do not have an impact factor is the policy of the owners (Clarivate Analytics) not to calculate an impact factor for them because of the different nature of knowledge production in the field which does not depend on citations (personal communication). Different countries have different policies in this regard; for example, in Turkey, unlike Iran, journals indexed in Scopus are regarded as superior to those indexed in WoS-SSCI, and that within WoS itself, those indexed in AHCI are superior to those in SSCI, while the former is not recognised in Iran at all. As we were working for MSRT recognition, we also applied for indexing in other national and international databases and were indexed in DOAJ [Directory of Open Access Journals] (from early days of the journal), ERIC (in January 2017) and ISC (in 2015). All these applications, follow-ups, and other administrative processes were conducted by the Editor-in-Chief by 2014, and with the help of the Executive Editor (Farah Ghaderi) who joined the team in late 2014. Furthermore, since we developed the journal website in 2012 using our university web-pages, the paper submissions, review process, communications with authors and so on were all handled manually via email, which was a very laborious process. Also, when each issue was published, we had to make a new webpage for that issue, make changes to previous webpages, upload the papers manually and so on. All this was challenging, time-consuming and the outcome was not very professional, given that managing the growing number of submissions was becoming a nightmare. This aspect of the job eased up a little when thankfully the University bought a journal management system in late 2017 (currently in use) which has at least made submission/acknowledgement and tracking system more

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automatic, if for the time being we ignore the many times its malfunctions forcing us to revert to email communication once more. In the rest of the paper, we focus on one challenge we have had in managing IJLTR: email communications after submission, after paper rejection and other similar cases. We look more closely into some of the email messages sent to us for various purposes.

Email Messages to IJLTR by (Potential) Contributors In January 2021, we received the following email message: Good evening dear editors of the magazine! I .... researcher from …. wanted to know do you accept articles in education and psychology? And what will be the amount of payment for the publication of the article? Please write has anyone from …. published their articles in your magazine?

There are many similar other messages that we receive every now and then where potential authors ask for publication fee, review process, appropriateness of their paper for the journal and the like. Contributors who know the rules of the games are normally expected to consult journal homepage where they can find answers to all these types of questions. Editors are of course happy to provide advice on queries that cannot be answered by visiting the journal webpages or submission guidelines. Other examples include: I am curious about whether you ask for an article publishing fee. Could you please inform me about the issue?

Or ... Do you can about the publication fee?

The homepage of the journal explicitly mentions, in a highlighted form, that there is no publication charge.

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Sometimes we receive a blank email with only an attachment which in some cases is the abstract of a paper and in other cases, the full paper. Although these emails are meant as submission of a paper, there is no email body to let us know what they mean. The only message in the email in one case was: Publish this, and in another case, this is my article in second language learning. I will be happy if it catches your attention... Note: My papers words are about 28,000.

Another example of an author who sent us an abstract only was, I would be thankful if you have time to go through this abstract and ensure its content for publication.

Similar submissions/queries may tell several things: the contributors are novice, still learning the rules of the game, so they still do not know where to look for the needed information; they simply do not bother to browse the journal webpages to find the needed information and find it more convenient to email the editors instead; they subscribe to cultures with different publication norms where soliciting editors is encouraged before a formal submission; and so on. In several cases, we have had submissions not following submission guidelines and when authors were asked to resubmit their work, they seemed not to know the meaning of a title page, annonymised submission and a cover letter: Dear Editor, I want to submit my paper on your journal, But I don’t know what I do with cover letter, I don’t understand.

When his paper was rejected at a later stage, he wrote back, it is ok I will not send any more. In one case, an (established) author submitted a recommendation letter by a professor instead of a cover letter. More recently, as a measure to reduce the number of less-qualified and plagiarised submissions, we require authors to submit a similarity report along with the paper as part of the submission as there are too many submissions and we have limited resources to check them all

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ourselves. We have had hard time with numerous authors whose works were returned for resubmission, some not understanding what we mean by similarity report, or that they do not know how to do this and ask us to do that for them, although this has fully been explained in the website. In a recent case, when the author asked for advice on how this can be done and when we gave them the needed information, they said, I do not have dollar in my account to do this… I am so sorry for receiving a similarity check report form these two software that you mentioned, I have to pay money (dollar) which is not possible for me. Can you suggest any other websites or software?

We replied to this email with information on an Iranian company which offers the service, and then here is the author’s feedback, Hello, I gave it to ….. and this is the result. I will send my password so that you can login and watch it. Here is the link: ... for the first box type this: [username] and for the second box: [password] Then you can go in my archive and see the result.

Rather than sending a similarity report along with her submission, another author sent an email immediately after submission explaining, In regard to plagiarism, I try my best to use the citation when it is necessary and I should mention that through some plagiarism checker’s site I checked it somehow but, to be honest, there are some professional sites that need a fee to check it. I hope everything goes well [which didn’t unfortunately] and I become the first person in our city to publish an article at Urmia University.

After receiving a rejection message, an author requested that her paper be considered for ‘regularly published journal’ which we could not understand: Dear Sir I regret that your journal has such low acceptance rate. Can I send it to your regularly published journal?

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Another author, when asked to resubmit his manuscript since it did not follow journal submission style, wrote back: Dear Sir, Thanks a lot for your cooperation. I really confused. Would you please send me the specific format that your magazine will accept or some article samples that are published. I highly want to publish my article in Iran.

These have however been fully explained in Guide for Authors page, and all published papers are also free to download. Author reactions to rejected papers have been interesting. In response to our feedback to an inquiry on whether his paper ‘on translation of homographs in the Quran’ would fit our journal (our response being ‘not appropriate for our journal’), an author reacted rather impolitely, breaching the same principles he seemed to promote: It seems you reached a level of knowledge that is too high to start your email with greeting and close it with courtesy.

One similar author whose work was rejected objected to the decision complaining, Did you really read it and rejected it?

There have strangely been cases of annoying authors who were frequently writing to us, inquiring about the status of their paper without having submitted any papers (or showing proofs thereof ). We recently rejected a book review submission on the grounds that the review was not solicited. The author first made a complaint to us, asking also what soliciting meant; and we learned from another journal editor that she was upset with our journal and other Iranian journals since they work for themselves and their friends rather than following an academic practice. Although nepotism is a common practice in the country, our journal was indeed launched as a reaction against such policies, the proof being that there are numerous board members who have not had a publication in

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IJLTR after 9 years or other department colleagues whose works have been subjected to the same review process as others and rejected. Indeed, this objective nature of IJLTR, the submissions to which are evaluated only based on scientific merit and are based on review outcomes, is one further driving force behind its success since most other journals in Iran usually publish papers coming from the editorial board members (most of whom are members of the publishing department) or their friends. This is a socio-cultural phenomenon not only in academia but in other sectors in Iran where you can get things done more easily when you have a relative or a friend in charge. Although not publishing recommended works by colleagues and university authorities has made us as editors unwelcome and tough colleagues, it has brought them all a fame and reputation which would have been out of reach otherwise. There are also agents who approach us for publication in return for high fees. The most offensive email we received (the number of which has been increasing very recently) proposed a bribe and a publication plan, along the following lines (only parts of the email included, translated form Persian). Hello dear friend I have a friend outside the country who holds conferences. We have several papers from several countries that we would like to publish in journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. We understand that your journal has a big potential in this regard and would like to offer you the following proposal. We will process and prepare the papers we have according to your guidelines. Our own reviewers will do the review. We would like our papers to be published in your 2020 issues [the email was received after we had published all our 2020 issues]. We offer you 100 USD for WoS and up to 400 USD for Scopus Q1-Q2 journals. We can pay in dollar or in your own currency. We would help your journal grow by citing the papers we submit in our other numerous papers that we submit to other journals in other countries; and to annonymise the process, we will have only two papers from each country to be published in your journal. This helps you to get a better rank [in] Scopus and WoS.

When we replied telling them we are not doing business but that IJLTR is an academic outlet, they wrote back saying, this is not business but a gift

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to thank your efforts! Although dealing with such emails has been a real challenge, we see it our ethical responsibility to invest time and energy in answering messages that may seem irrelevant or even insulting at times.

Conclusion This chapter was an attempt to map the trajectory the editors of a local applied linguistics journal (IJLTR ) went through and the path they trod in developing the journal from a departmental outlet to an international Q1 publication in a short period. The challenges of managing the journal and watching it develop from birth to maturity were shared and some of the success stories and the motives behind were recounted. One such challenge, i.e. dealing with certain email messages, was also reported. Dealing with emails by a rejected author like: It seems like many other Iranian journals, your journal just publishes the papers through nepotism and favoritism. That’s so pathetic will remain a challenge for us until when such authors are convinced that unlike a long-standing culturespecific norm, nepotism is not at work at IJLTR. We hope that reading this paper, and examining the peer-reviewed nature of published content (which applies to our own works as well) and the success story behind IJLTR will pave the way for such authors to be more sympathetic towards us. Our final recommendation for the outlets favouring favouritism is to move away from that culture if they long for international recognition.

References Bennett, K. (2014). Introduction: The political and economic infrastructure of academic practice: The ‘semiperiphery’ as a category for social and linguistic analysis. In K. Bennett (Ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities and practices (pp. 1–9). Palgrave. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60 (4), 385–387. Petric, B. (2014). English-medium journals in Serbia: Editors’ perspectives. In K. Bennett (Ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities and practices (pp. 189–209). Palgrave. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press.

Index

A

academic discourse socialization 66, 85 academic journals 14, 17, 19, 21, 33, 34, 102, 115, 116, 119, 143, 188 academic publishing/knowledge production 20, 21, 63, 64, 72, 76, 78, 175–178, 247 academic writing 32, 67, 78, 109, 117, 124, 145, 197, 208 access 11, 30, 39, 40, 52, 77, 84, 85, 92, 93, 95, 96, 106, 107, 133, 144, 176, 177, 198, 201, 202, 217, 247 article titles (‘cute’ or otherwise) 241 auditor of research 18, 48 author 18–21, 52, 60, 69, 70, 78, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 113–115, 119, 133, 139, 140,

144, 148, 151–153, 158, 159, 172, 173, 179, 188, 208–212, 214, 216–221, 232, 241, 242, 251, 257–259, 261 authors’ responses 21, 207, 209, 212, 215, 217 autobiographical narrative 63 autoethnographically-oriented narrative 45, 47 autoethnography 28, 46, 47, 50, 93, 124, 125

B

Bakhtin, M. 101, 102, 105, 107, 110 bi/multilingual journal editors 74 bi/multilingual scholars 218 Blommaert, J. 19, 102, 105–107, 110, 118, 236

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds.), The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06519-4

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Index

book chapters 21, 95, 207, 212, 214, 215 book reviewing 166

C

centre(s) of authority 102, 107, 115, 117, 119 custodian of research 49, 56–58

D

decision-making 36, 48, 186, 230, 231, 234, 239 discretion 230 diversity 20, 72, 84, 93, 96, 199 double blind 144 Du Bois, J. 19, 102, 110, 111, 118

E

Eastern Europe 94, 131, 134, 136 editing 33, 47, 54, 88–92, 103, 152, 165, 177, 186, 201, 211, 214–216, 219, 221, 227, 231 editor 18–22, 28, 33, 35, 36, 39–42, 47, 51, 53, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 85, 86, 88, 90–93, 96, 101, 102, 110, 113, 114, 118, 124, 127, 130, 132–134, 136, 139, 140, 169, 173, 175, 185–188, 190, 191, 199, 202, 207, 209–212, 214–221, 228–232, 235, 251, 259 editorial 18, 32, 35, 41, 47, 48, 53, 72, 74, 76, 91, 92, 94, 102, 103, 107, 126, 128, 131, 133, 140, 165, 171–173, 175, 186, 188, 190, 193, 194, 197, 198,

200, 201, 203, 207, 211, 227–232, 234, 240, 242, 252 editorial board 14, 30, 31, 39, 40, 47, 54, 56, 71–74, 93, 95, 104, 115, 124–126, 130, 133, 139, 148, 165, 170, 174, 185, 186, 190, 229, 233, 245, 249, 252, 254, 260 editor-journal identities 21, 175, 190, 202 editor perspectives 102, 103, 111, 172, 237 educational justice 94 English for research publication purposes (ERPP) 16, 18, 28, 32–34, 37, 40, 102, 105, 106, 116, 118, 165, 172 Epiphanies 50 equity 84, 96 ethical dilemmas 49, 59 ethical tensions 48, 59 ethnography 18 evaluation regime 106, 167, 168, 171, 172, 176, 179 evaluative language 80, 147 experiential autoethnography 192 explicit genre instruction 50, 64, 66

F

face-threatening acts 221 field-theory 20, 123, 124 founding a new journal 248, 249 frames 29, 213 Francophone scholars 18, 75

Index

G

gatekeeping 10–17, 19, 20, 22, 27–31, 33–35, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 52–59, 93, 123, 126, 139, 164, 186, 189, 211 genre 11, 18–21, 33–35, 37, 63–67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 101, 107, 144, 145, 147, 159, 197, 201, 207 global inequalities 20, 163 Global South 85, 93, 94, 177

265

113–119, 124, 127, 130, 132, 134–138, 140, 143–147, 153, 159, 166, 168–170, 176, 185, 188–191, 193, 194, 197–200, 202, 214, 228, 230, 233, 234, 237 journal editing 53 journal editor role 18 journal indexation 137 journal promotion 138, 193, 259

K H

habitus 14, 16, 123, 125, 128

I

identity construction 49, 55, 56 identity trajectory 18, 28–32, 36, 39, 41, 42, 48, 55 inclusion 58, 84, 96, 106, 107, 247, 254 indexicality 102, 105–108, 114, 115, 118 inequalities 13, 84, 165, 172, 175, 176, 247 inner circle 18, 48, 54, 57, 58, 92 interpretation 13, 20, 29, 30, 123, 160, 213, 229 Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research (IJLTR ) 22, 245, 251

J

journal 19–21, 30, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 51, 53, 54, 56, 64, 68, 70, 73–75, 78, 84–86, 89, 91, 93–95, 102, 105, 109–111,

knowledge certification 20, 35, 163, 167, 176, 179 knowledge production 10, 20, 28, 32, 64, 77, 79, 102, 116, 117, 119, 123, 124, 126, 134, 136, 164, 172, 175, 177, 179

L

linguistic injustice/privilege in academic publishing 19, 64, 76, 78 local publishing 132

M

manuscript review 19, 28, 33, 34, 39, 68, 70, 85–87, 90, 91, 145, 148 mediation 21, 138, 207–209, 211–217 Monolingual vs multilingual publication 197 Multilingual genre learning 18, 63

266

Index

N

‘native speaker’ mystique 222 neoliberalism 163, 177 norms 10, 19, 20, 37, 101, 107, 115, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128–133, 135, 138–140, 174, 188, 202, 211, 213, 257

200, 203, 217, 218, 220, 229, 231, 235, 242, 247, 249–251, 253, 256, 257, 260 publishing in applied linguistics 16, 19, 20, 28, 54, 85, 93, 94, 96, 147 publishing industry 107, 116, 163, 171, 176

O

order(s) of indexicality 19, 102, 105–108, 118 outer circle 18, 54, 55

Q

qualitative research 30, 67, 79

R P

peer review 12, 17–19, 21, 22, 35, 36, 64–66, 68, 79, 80, 102, 105, 106, 108–111, 114, 118, 126, 127, 133, 135, 144, 159, 164, 165, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 188, 201 peer reviewer development/training 117, 119 peer review of research articles 66 periphery publishing 91, 107, 118, 134, 135, 247 Polycentricity 19, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 118 power relations 207, 220 private-public sector 168 profit-driven 20, 165, 176, 178 publication 17, 18, 30–34, 49, 51, 54, 57, 58, 65, 68, 70, 75, 80, 84, 87, 89, 95, 96, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 115–117, 119, 126, 132, 133, 136, 137, 143, 145, 147, 149, 152, 158, 159, 167, 171, 176, 178, 194, 197,

racism 83, 94, 116, 177 recommendations 12, 105, 114, 115, 117, 133, 145, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155, 159, 174, 230–232 register 19, 78, 102, 105–111, 113, 115, 118 rejection 12, 21, 34, 51–53, 74, 76, 77, 230, 232, 234, 235, 256, 258 research communities 101, 102, 117, 202 research dissemination 20, 117, 125, 202 Research in Languages for Publication Purposes 218, 221 research mediation/influencing 55, 56, 102, 111, 166, 202, 207 research publication 11, 101, 172, 211, 218 reviewer 17–20, 27, 34–36, 51–53, 55, 56, 68–73, 75, 78–80, 85–88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109–111,

Index

113–115, 117, 118, 127, 130, 135, 143, 144, 146–149, 151, 153, 158–160, 165, 169, 171–174, 178, 186, 188, 194, 201, 209, 210, 232, 242 reviewing 19, 21, 34, 35, 37, 67–69, 71, 72, 75, 87, 88, 102–105, 110, 119, 144, 159, 163–167, 169–171, 174, 176, 177, 188, 240 reviewing process evolution 21 review process 11–13, 17, 22, 32, 34–36, 41, 51, 52, 56, 87, 95, 126, 133, 144, 147, 173, 174, 189, 194, 228, 230, 234, 254–256, 260 rhetorical moves 149, 150 risk 21, 172, 186–189, 192, 194, 197, 202, 203, 221, 238 risky-shift phenomenon 228, 237–239

267

S

schemata 213, 216 Scholar wellbeing 165 self-case study 18 significant others 49, 53, 55, 56, 59 stance 19, 80, 93, 102, 106, 109, 110, 114, 115, 118, 124, 164, 165, 230, 246 subjectivity 124, 174, 231, 232 system transformation 178

T

titling of articles 48, 241, 248 trust 12, 21, 31, 34, 42, 186, 187, 192, 195 types of comments 144–146, 149, 155, 159

V

values 19, 49, 53, 59, 140, 174, 188, 195, 202, 203