Editor's Notes

• Date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21280
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Mark A. Hager

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N M  L, vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21280

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

EDITOR ’ S NOTES

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP is one of about 1,700 academic journals

published by John Wiley & Sons.  is past June, I attended their fi rst assembly of editors of

Wiley academic journals, in Hoboken, New Jersey (United States). More than 100 editors

attended.  is was a chance for Wiley to communicate collectively with editors, and for edi-

tors to talk with each other about the issues they confront. I was immediately pulled from

my comfort zone by being surrounded by an amazing diversity of scholarly concerns, particu-

larly in the hard sciences (medical, biological, chemical, and physical). I came away from this

meeting with a new orientation to three main issues: speed to press, engagement with review-

ers, and the continuing infl uence of technology on publishing.

First, the Wiley editors meeting opened my eyes to how slowly the social sciences move.

Editors in the hard sciences spoke matter-of-factly about how cutting-edge science came in

their door with demands for immediate review and quick publication. When I remarked that

manuscripts in the social and management sciences rarely make it to press in less than a year,

I met quizzical surprise. This experience helped me understand the evolution of the two-year

impact factor as a measure of the value of a given manuscript. In the fast-paced hard sciences,

fast-moving manuscripts cite immediate research, resulting in high impact factors, where the

two-year factor has the most meaning. In the social sciences, a given manuscript will have

little opportunity to attain citations in a mere two-year window, making the five-year impact

factor a more relevant measure of recent influence. In any case, the conclusion that our sci-

ence moves s-l-o-w-l-y was hard to escape.

Second, I was pleasantly surprised, on the other hand, by the number of voiced complaints

from editors in other fields about finding reviewers for their manuscripts. I say “I was

pleasantly surprised” since this is not a particular problem for Nonprofit Management &

Leadership . My sense is that this journal is a known entity in a fairly small field, so review-

ers both feel obligation and derive benefit from their association with the journal. Whereas

editors in other fields may routinely solicit six to ten critics to fill a panel of three reviewers,

I can often (although not as often as I would like) fill a panel with three requests. The quality

of peer review is a strength of the journal.

Third, current and future changes in the journal publishing industry were recurring presenta-

tion themes at the Wiley editors ’ meeting. The internet has deeply influenced many aspects

of our lives, and publishing is not immune to these changes. One obvious change regards

process: an online submission system has revolutionized how we receive and conduct reviews

of manuscripts; the workflow of writing, editing, and proofing are now done electronically.

In the week I write this editorial, Wiley announced that authors for Nonprofit Management

& Leadership will now be able to track their manuscript online through the entire publica-

tion process. The influence of technology on process—aside, the less obvious influence—will

be on the products themselves. In some ways, The Scholarly Manuscript has not changed

much in hundreds of years, except for the fact that it has been translated into an electronic