In the past, when I thought of where academic journals exist physically, I thought of a specific university space. I now believe that some academic journals mirror the very hiddenness of academia’s curriculum, making academia a tough space to navigate for the newcomer. A reason for my initial thought process is that I was introduced to the idea of journals when I heard the faculty at Saint Louis University (SLU), where I finished my MA, often say that the editor of the African American Review “brought the journal” to SLU. The phrase “brought the journal” drew the image that the department was deeply linked with the workings of the journal even though, as graduate students, we rarely heard about the journal. Interestingly, the title “Saint Louis University” was also nowhere to be found on African American Review’s website. I quickly realized that the journal was most likely just another point factor for department rankings and while the editor of the journal was dedicated to its workings, the English department at SLU didn’t do more than pay the editor for his professorship. More importantly, it was Johns Hopkins University Press that ensured the supply of the journal.
In order to understand the relationship between the journal editor, their institutional affiliation, and the journal’s distribution, I looked into one of the esteemed journals in my research field, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. Pedagogy is published by Duke University Press but its editorial office is in the Department of English, Calvin University. Pedagogy came out with its first issue in 2001 wherein the then editors marked its inception as a necessary step to nurture pedagogical conversations in the field of English studies. While the journal “seeks to reverse the long history of the marginalization of teaching and of the scholarship produced around it,” the majority of its online issues hide behind a paywall. In their first published Editor’s Review, co-editors Jennifer L. Holberg and Marcy Taylor end by thanking “[T]he staff of Duke University Press also have been generous with their guidance and creativity” along with “the moral and financial support of our respective institutions, Calvin College and Central Michigan University” (Holberg and Taylor 5). The words “guidance” and “creativity” give me the impression that most content-based decisions are guided by the press while the editors are responsible for the mission of their institutions given that they provide “financial support”.
As for distribution, Duke University Press works like any other entrepreneurial brand today, they “use a number of strategies to attract new readers, from direct mail campaigns and social media publicity to website development” (“Support for Journal Editors”). However, these strategies don’t seem very personalized. Funnily enough, they share the same Northeast sales representative as that of Columbia University Press: Conor Broughan. Other major journals like Harvard University Press are also marketed by the “Columbia University Press Sales Consortium”. In an interview about the pandemic’s effect on publishing, Conor highlights how individual customer-driven sales can be: “One store in Halifax, Canada, found out when it reopened that a number of its web orders came from women in their 20s who wanted to support the store. It is now ordering with them in mind” (Rosen). Since I had never experienced the publishing industry’s workings, I had not realized how spread out a press that published most of my bibliography can be. In terms of access, while Duke University Press does participate in Open Access, with some of their publications being accessible for all online a week before they’re mailed out, Pedagogy remains a subscription-based journal. Perhaps institutional financial aid is not enough. It is still unclear to me how the subscription money is used since authors don’t get paid for publishing.
Overall, I think all that I know about the labor involved in the production of academic journals has been acquired through my personal experience in academia, eg. conversions with the invisible graduate research assistants to journal editors. If not blackboxing, I think the information about academic journal publications is peripheral, the facts are available but they’re difficult to link together. Where are the agreements between the journal and the press? Can someone like the “woman in her 20s” who might be interested in reading an issue of Pedagogy find how the journal distributes its labor? Can we figure out the logistical details of Calvin University’s financial assistance to Pedagogy or the editors? Graduate students might submit to these journals multiple times but are we really made able to critique any aspect of Pedagogy beyond an angsty book review? Are readers to journals what peer reviewers are to submitters: only valued for the content they provide? As someone who has no experience with academic publishing, I am urged to think that the process is quite hidden.
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