Journal editors’ perceptions of academic publishing outside major publishing houses

Despite increasing demands to publish in English, publishing in private publishing houses’ small number of prestige journals remains a benchmark of journal and manuscript quality. How such journals have responded to increasing demand for English language publication has been well-documented. However, the perspectives of editors working in non-prestige journals not affiliated with large, private publishing houses remain underrepresented, particularly concerning academic editorial work. To better present a diversity of editors’ perceptions, this collaborative autoethnography explored the views of five applied linguistics and TESOL journal editors working in journals unaffiliated with private publishing houses. Issues explored included our respective journals’ struggle to compete, such as in bibliometric assessment and maintaining quality review processes. Our explorative narratives of editorial perceptions revealed issues internal and external to journal editorial practice. Internally, ‘quality’ in blind and non-blind reviewing, evaluation criteria, reviewer bias, and field-specific norms of academic writing were problematized. Externally, issues of open access, author publication fees, bibliometric indexing, and our journals’ positionings in their fields were raised. We believe that sharing our views through this collaborative narrativization can help broaden understanding of editorial practices and, by highlighting issues of interest to editors more broadly, can help to foster a sense of common purpose.