Some readers have inquired about the reasons for TQ’s low impact-factor. The impact factor is an approximation of the average number of citations in a year, given to those papers in a journal that were published during the two preceding years. Impact factors are calculated each year by Thomson Scientific for those journals which it indexes, and the factors and indices are published in Journal Citation Reports (http://portal.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=JCR&Func=Frame).
What is intriguing for many about TQ’s low impact factor is that TQ is the flagship journal of the international TESOL organization. It has a sixty year history. It ranks high on the list of journals universities in many countries recommend to their faculty for publication in regards to tenure and promotion. Scholars from China, Turkey, Hong Kong, and UK have told me that TQ ranks highly in the estimation of their universities. TQ’s acceptance rate remains one of the lowest in the field, proving it to be a highly selective and competitive journal. For the past three years, TQ’s acceptance rate has ranged between 8.5 to 7.0 percent (i.e., only 7 or 8 articles out of 100 submissions get accepted for publication). For the above reasons, many scholars expect articles in TQ to be highly cited and to have a higher impact factor. In comparison, very recently established journals that began publishing within the last five to ten years by commercial publishers have a higher impact factor.
To explain this anomaly, we have to first consider TQ’s poor electronic access and visibility. For a long time, TQ was not available in any online data bases, such as JSTOR. It was just three years ago, after much discussions with the TESOL organization, that I managed to get TQ available in JSTOR <www.jstor.org>. Even now, TESOL has opted to adopt a five-year moving wall. This means that our issues are made available five years after publication. Current issues are available in Ingenta <http://www.ingentaconnect.com/>, but one has to purchase the article one wishes to download. Only subscribers to the journal have immediate and free access to our articles. Obviously, TESOL is concerned that open access to the journal will affect its subscription and revenues.
What bearing does open access have on impact factor? More TQ articles will be cited—and more often—if readers all over the world can read them freely and without delay. Since only the thousand or so subscribers to the journal have unrestricted access to TQ currently, not all of whom are active researchers and writers, our articles won’t be cited as much.
Testimony from other editors suggests that providing open access to their journals not only increased their impact factor, it also increased their marketability and subscriptions. Sally Magnan, in her editorial to the 90th anniversary issue of MLJ, recounts how moving to a commercial publisher (Blackwell) in 2000 enabled the journal to grow in leaps and bounds (see “From the Editor: The MLJ Turns 90 in a Digital Age,” MLJ, vol. 90.1, pp.1-5). Here are some developments she observes: “Electronic dissemination of the Journal has spread rapidly, in large part through consortia
agreements with institutions in the United States and internationally. . . . In addition, many readers whose institutions do not have subscriptions or consortia arrangements can access the MLJ through licensed databases to which they belong. As a result of its increased digital availability, online access to the MLJ has grown steadily in recent years, from 3,720 articles downloaded in 2000 to 7,433 in 2001 and 27,899 in 2002 when JSTOR began offering the MLJ . This number grew to 165,145 in 2003 when Blackwell included the Journal in its Synergy database from which articles were accessed an average of 120 times each, and to 119,326 at the most recent 2004 report. Data from Blackwell Publishing reveals that in 2004 the MLJ’s electronic access allowed it to reach over 135,000 scholars around the world. . . . Given the international visibility of today’s MLJ,it is interesting to look at the Journal’s circulation by world region. From 1999 to 2004, there has been a steady growth in the Journal’s international distribution, which changes the proportion of journals going to institutions and individuals in the United States versus those going abroad: from 70% U.S./30% abroad in 1999 to 57% U.S./43% abroad in 2004. . . . As might be expected, growth in international readership has led to a dramatic increase in the number of manuscripts submitted for consideration by international authors. In 1999, 24% of submissions came from outside the United States; by 2004 that number had grown to 38%. . . . Related to the increasing number of submissions, the acceptance rate is declining as shown in Table 2. The 2005 acceptance rate was 11% overall, with 15% for U.S. articles and 8.5% for articles from other countries.. . . In the Thomson Journal Citation Reports Social Science Edition 2004, the MLJ ranked first in the applied linguistics category in the immediacy index (2.348), which considers how quickly articles in a journal are cited. Its impact factor was 0.750, which gives the average number of times articles published in the MLJ in the past 2 years were cited during 2004. The cited half-life was 7.8 years; this figure gives the median age of MLJ articles cited in 2004.”
Apart from open access and superior marketing networks, there are other resources commercial publishers are able to provide. They are able to post online the upcoming articles, long before they are published in paper form. Imagine the advantages for researchers who can read the contents of an article about a year before it appears in print (this is the length of time it often takes these days for an article that has been accepted to appear in print). Timeliness and speed matter in publishing and research. An article that is available earlier will be cited immediately and influence future research and publications.
We also have to consider the nature of TQ as a journal of a practitioner-oriented professional organization. The editorial board is constantly under pressure to accommodate the interests of teachers, who are our primary constituency. At times, it appears to me as if the expectation of TESOL membership is that TQ should serve as a good professional newsletter for the organization rather than a selective research journal. I have been asked to include more reader exchanges (opinions), book reviews, best teaching practices, and reports from the classrooms around the world. I have now included new sections like the Research Digest (to disseminate research information from significant articles in other journals) and symposia (to present opinions of leading scholars in the profession on key professional issues) to focus more on knowledge dissemination. Though these genres of articles will certainly make interesting reading and appeal to the interests of practitioners, they take away valuable space from research articles. Opinions and exchanges are not taken into account in computing the impact factor.
If being a leading research journal is what matters, TQ would focus on many other strategies to improve the chances of its articles being noticed and cited more often. Here are some strategies certain editors adopt to improve the impact factor of their journals:
n Insist on titles that would foreground topical, timely, significant keywords that have greater chances of receiving a “hit” in an online search;
n Insist that articles submitted to the journal cite articles previously published in that journal. That would boost the number of times the journal’s articles have been cited!
n Publish more review articles. It is said that research articles get cited later than review articles. However, review articles have an unclear status in TQ as our guidelines state that full-length articles published in the main section must “merge theory, research, and practice.”
Of course, some of these strategies are ethically questionable. We haven’t had to consider these strategies anyway as we don’t compete in online searches (our articles are available only five years later!) and impact factor doesn’t rank highly in our mission. It is more important for our professional constituency that our titles appeal to teachers and sound reader-friendly rather than attract the attention of researchers in online searches.
I don’t think that the demand that TQ serve the interests of teachers and be a practitioner-friendly journal is unfair. That after all is consistent with the mission of TESOL. However, the competition among journals is so intense and research is becoming so specialized that we can’t be all things to all people. We can’t be both a highly cited research journal and also a practitioner-friendly newsletter. We must define the mission of the journal carefully—and stick to it!
I guess the scholar I wrote about in the last blog didn’t read what I had to say. She didn’t also get the subtle admonition that writing an article to suit the interests of the editor is not always the best way to seek publication.
I received another message from her a few days back. She wrote:
Dear Prof. Canagarajah,
Thank you very much for your instruction, and my paper is finally almost done. But after searching TQ, I seemed to be only able to find one reviewer who is an expert in phonology: Prof. --- of --
Thanks and regards,
Dr. xxx
I wondered: why would she want to know the names of our reviewers who are experts on phonology? I wasn’t sure if this was an innocent question out of sheer curiosity. On the other hand, giving the names of experts on phonology might give the impression that these are the persons who would review her submission. It was clear that the author was looking for our potential referees, not just experts on phonology. Furthermore, we may unwittingly mislead the author because we don’t necessarily use only the scholars from our editorial board to review our articles. More importantly, the information might violate the procedures involved in the blind review.
Therefore, I politely responded:
Dr. xxx,
Our review process is anonymous. Therefore, we don't give out the names of the experts on phonology who review for us. In addition to those on the editorial board, we also get other scholars to review for us.
Best,
Suresh
So that’s strategy number 3 I guess. (Note that in the last entry there were two strategies in one!) The third strategy is related to the first two: i.e., to achieve publishing success, shape your article to suit the interests and tastes of the possible reviewers.
The unrelenting efforts of this author only convey to me how the pressure to publish is driving everyone toward lobbying strategies. Publishing is all about making your research and findings appeal to the potential referees of your submission. It is okay if you have to considerably depart from the findings and claims that derive most directly from your study. Writing in a manner that interests the potential referees and getting published is what counts. Are research and publishing for the good of the human community or for the new knowledge contributed to human inquiry becoming a thing of the past?
So, I get this inquiry recently. The author writes:
Dear Prof. Canagarajah,
I would feel honored to contribute two papers to the prestigious TESOL Quarterly regarding how to improve [---] college students' voice control while speaking English in public. One paper talks about ---, while the other talks about --. I believe that most oriental teachers and students, even some native-English speakers, have the same serious problems with speaking English in public. Would you be interested in these topics? Thank you very much for your time, and I'll be looking forward to your reply.
Thanks and regards,
Xxx
As you know now from some of my previous blogs, I am concerned about authors sending multiple submissions simultaneously. So I approach the topic gingerly. I write:
Dear Dr. ---,
Thanks for considering TQ for your submission. Your study can fall into speech communication or TESOL. That depends on your ability to relate your research and findings to relevant articles on phonology in TESOL. If you are able to relate your study to the concerns of TESOL practitioners, please submit one article first. Based on the response of the referees, you can consider writing the other article. Please read our guidelines to authors when you prepare your manuscript for TQ.
Thanks,
Suresh Canagarajah
Editor/TQ
I am puzzled to get a response that goes like this:
Dear Lucy (pseudonym),
Please try to find one article researching on phonology in TQ, then see what you can see(theories, content, references) from there. At the same time, also find out what Suresh Canagarajah's specialty is. It would help if something in the paper holds relevance with the editor; i.e., using/challenging his opinions, adopting his theories or a few words, etc.
Thanks,
Dr. ---
While I wonder what to make of the message, I soon get an apology:
Dear Prof. Canagarajah,
Please disregard the letter I accidentally sent you earlier today --- it was meant to go to my assistant. I guess too much research work has made me giddy, and please accept my apology.
Sincerely Yours,
Xxx
I sympathize with the author. I know that all authors adopt such strategies to succeed. Actually, there are two strategies adopted by the author here: To succeed in publishing in a journal a). cite at least a single article that has appeared in that journal before; b). connect the study to the editor’s research and publications (a few words are enough do the trick).
I want to help the author, at least to save her time from doing unnecessary research about me. So I write:
No problem. What you outline is a strategy most authors use. Though my personal field is academic writing, we do have very good reviewers who are experts in phonology.
best wishes,
Suresh
Well, look forward to receiving more postings from me on strategies that succeed in publishing! (Or would you care to help others by sharing some of the strategies that have worked for you?)
It doesn’t take much effort to explain that an article to a refereed journal is best reviewed by the scholars who have invested most time and effort in that area of scholarship—in short, those who have expertise. Even in cases where an article criticizes a scholar’s work, there is a time-honored practice of treating that scholar as one of the referees for that submission.
However, I ran into some problems recently when I sent an article to be reviewed by a scholar whose school of opinion is critiqued by the author. To make matters complicated, the referee (let’s call him Dr. X) not only wrote a scathing review but also identified himself in his commentary. I agreed with both referees that the article lacked complexity and rejected it, while providing detailed suggestions on ways to rewrite a more compelling piece for TQ. All hell broke loose when the author received the decision letter and referee comments and discovered Dr.X’s identity. Before I go into his case, readers must note that the author was discussing a position I was in sympathy with and I had publicly identified myself with. In fact, Dr.X had made a sarcastic reference to me in his commentary and criticized me for sending articles of low scholarly caliber for review. Despite these considerations, the author was incensed. He wrote back and said that he was not interested in revising the article for TQ and added that it was unfair to have sent the article to be reviewed by Dr. X as he critiques his position in his article. He felt that the outcome was too predictable and, therefore, sending the submission to a well known critic of a school of thought was a pointless exercise. I tried to explain that getting the most rigorous reviews from the broadest possible spectrum of opinions was good for the author and his submission. That only made the author feel more insulted, and he ratcheted his invective. He argued that if I agreed with the referees about the nonpublishability of his submission, I must have sent it intentionally to Dr. X so that his article will get rejected. In short, he felt I had rigged the review process so that he will receive a negative decision.
Should we then discontinue this practice of including those whose work is critiqued as one of the referees? On the other hand, I can think of many good reasons why we should treat a scholar who is criticized as at least as one of the referees for that submission. Note that even if the referee turns out to be biased and rejects the manuscript, he/she is only one of two or three referees. Not all three referees will come from a homogeneous school of thought. Furthermore, the editor has the power to use his or her discretion to accept or reject the manuscript by triangulating from among the divergent views received from the referees. Despite the possible bias, there are good reasons to send the manuscript to the critiqued scholar. In a submission of such nature, it is important to see if the scholar who has been criticized has been represented fairly. It is in fact collegial to let the scholar know that we might be publishing an article critical of his work and give him an opportunity to make his case before publication. As we all know, authors tend to stereotype or simplify the opinion of the opponent in order to argue more conveniently. From the point of view of the review exercise, the critiqued scholar might produce a very detailed and thorough review of the submission as he/she is deeply invested in that topic and has a personal stake in its publication. If the critiqued scholar provides constructive suggestions for revision, the author has the possibility of engaging with some of the most critical points against his argument and improving the quality and significance of the article.
Sending an article to a scholar who is criticized doesn’t always mean that the author will be insulted and the submission rejected. My personal experience has been different. Both as an author and an editor, I have seen avowed critics of a position provide balanced reviews and recommend publication. Scholars with integrity are able to look beyond the personal criticism and focus on the possible contribution to knowledge construction. When I submitted my first article in 1993 to TQ on resistance, I was using the articles published in 1989 by Alastair Pennycook and Bonny Norton as my departure. I charted a qualified middle position between what I perceived as the bit too overdetermined and volitionist positions of these scholars and focused on ambiguities in resistance. It turned out that one of the referees was Alastair. He disclosed his identity in his review. (I have a strong suspicion that the second referee was Bonny, but till she comes out and says so I won’t insist on that.) Though Alastair pointed to some areas where his position was misrepresented, he recommended the article enthusiastically. Yet again, three years back, when I submitted an article to CCC on ways of accommodating World Englishes in academic writing, I used as my point of departure the article by Bruce Horner and John Trimbur who made a case for working on policy and curriculum level for changes. I invoked the tension between the macro and micro to argue that we can intervene at the local level in classrooms and texts to initiate changes before policies catch up. The article went to both these scholars for review. Trimbur identified himself in his comments, while Horner mentioned months later that he was the other reviewer. Though both made a strong case for continuing to work parallelly at the level of policy, and offered other useful criticism, they recommended the article for publication. I not only acknowledged the point they made for parallel intervention at the policy and pedagogical levels, but improved the article by engaging with their criticism. When I submit an article for a journal now, I always assume that the scholar I critique will be the obvious choice as the first referee. This awareness helps me represent the position of the critics fairly and engage at a complex level with their argument.
In TQ, again, the experiences I have had as an editor with scholars reading articles that criticize their work has been very positive. We routinely treat as one of our referees the scholar whose position has been criticized in the submission. We have always seen these scholars respond in a collegial and constructive manner. For example, in the December 2008 issue, TQ will publish a Forum piece that is critical of a position on methods introduced by a scholar a few years back. Though the scholar never identified himself in the review, he read multiple drafts to help the author make constructive changes and finally recommended the article for publication. What does it take for a scholar to sacrifice his time for an article that criticizes him, read it objectively to assess its pros and cons, patiently help the author improve the argument, and then recommend for publication an article that might ring the death knell for his theory or finding? Quite simply, that’s the mark of good scholarship!
So, shouldn’t I treat a scholar who is criticized as one of two or three referees for that submission?
The question came from a graduate student in our “How to Publish” session at the TESOL convention last week. She asked, “How can we know the ideological biases of journals so that we can send our articles to the appropriate venue?” The 15 or so editors on the podium remained silent for a minute, taken off guard, before we managed to say something to avoid the question. The truth is that though we will insist that our journals are ideologically neutral and that our decisions are purely based on merit, journals inevitably acquire identities and positions of their own. Even if they don’t have settled identities for all times, journals do adopt particular directions and tendencies at specific times that characterize them ideologically. Sometimes, this happens by default—by the types of articles they have failed to publish than by the ones they have made an effort to include. Even if editors are not conscious of it, readers can sense the ideological drift of particular journals. Of course, some journals have taken very explicit stances for polemical reasons. I can list the journals that have taken a cognitivist orientation in Second Language Acquisition and published articles that relate only to that orientation. Can journals that take pride in their double-blind review and scholarly objectivity have ideological commitments?
This question hit me personally when I took up the editorship of TQ four years back. I had just sent an article to be reviewed by a leading scholar in form-focused teaching and cognitivist orientation to language acquisition. He returned the manuscript, saying he refused to referee articles for TQ as he objected to its politics. “What politics?” I protested. Failing to get any specifics, I imagined he was referring to the social turn in TQ and in many other journals in our field. We had recently published articles on critical orientations to language acquisition and teaching. I assured him that my policy was to give voice to any and every worthy research orientation and that I intended to be inclusive. After all, it is difficult for a journal to be a leader in the field without representing the diverse tendencies in the profession and publishing the best and most rigorous studies that point to challenging new directions. The scholar refused to buy my protestations of objectivity and impartiality.
Just a month back, I was confronted with the same question from a surprising source. This time, it was from a scholar who has taken a contrarian view on the form-focused teaching of the other scholar. He asked me how I could have published many articles on form-focused teaching and cognitivist orientation to acquisition when, according to his perspective, “there is not a shred of evidence to support their validity.” He has made it a mission in his life to wipe out the position of the other scholar. I told him that it is TQ’s intention to give voice to the diverse tendencies in our profession so that we can explore all of them to construct more explanatory models. He considered this objectivity and neutrality reckless. He charged me of ignoring the students in favor of scholarly inquiry. He argued that it is dangerous to publish articles belonging to the opposite position as students will suffer from bad pedagogies and teaching recommendations.
In a sense, I am happy that these scholars representing two warring schools in TESOL feel that TQ belongs to the rival’s camp. This realization should help cancel out each other’s charge and prove that TQ does have a sense of balance. On the other hand, the claim that TQ and the editor are neutral is somewhat uncomfortable for me. This is especially so as I have identified myself as a critical practitioner. I have argued that it is impossible not to take social and ideological positions on teaching. Even refusing to take a position is an ideology in its own right.
How then do I reconcile my critical stance and the need to keep the journal open to unfettered inquiry? I would argue that this desire to keep TQ open to diverse theoretical and pedagogical paradigms itself derives from my critical values. The missions I have articulated for my editorship in a very public way—such as making the journal more international, mentoring offnetworked and novice authors into publishing, and accommodating new forms of research methods and writing conventions in the journal—similarly derive from a critical perspective. I admit that these objectives represent a politics of a sort, and critics have a right to object to this direction of the journal. Though these objectives and directions make TQ ideological, they are ideological in a democratizing and inclusive way. Journals and editors may also adopt commitments that narrow down the journal to a specific orientation or inquiry. These ideologies are disempowering and exclusionist. So, it is not whether a journal has an ideology or not, but whether its commitments further or limit inquiry that is the question. Does this distinction help clarify how journals may have an ideological grounding and still be open to inquiry?
I need some help to think through this dilemma. How can an editor own up his/her commitments and values and still keep the journal open to constructive inquiry? What kind of politics does TQ represent?
TESOL holds an event on publishing for conference attendees in the annual convention. In the upcoming convention in New York City during the first week of April, editors from diverse journals in applied linguistics and English language teaching will answer questions related to their journal in specific or on publishing in general. The following are the journals that will be represented in the session titled “How to Get Published in an Applied Linguistics Serial” at the
Hilton Beekman Parlor, on 4/3/2008 2:00:00 PM to 4:45:00 PM:
Gong, Gwendolyn [Asian Journal of English Language Teaching]
Hubbard, Phil [Computer Assisted Language Learning and CALICO Journal]
Belcher, Diane [English for Specific Purposes]
Whitecross, Cristina [ELT Journal and Applied Linguistics Journal]
Koller, Max [English Teaching Forum]
Cornwell, Steve [JALT Journal]
Pierson, Herbert [Journal of Asian Pacific Communication]
Purpura, Jim [Language Assessment Quarterly]
Andrade, Maureen [TESL Reporter]
Menken, Kate [Language Policy]
Wurr, Adrian J. [The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal]
Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun [Language Learning & Technology]
Ariza, Eileen [Essential Teacher]
Jeon, Jihyeon [Journal of Asia TEFL]
Representative [International Journal of Applied Linguistics]
Smoke, Trudy [Journal of Basic Writing]
Sivell, John [Canada TEFL]
In the past, we have provided brief comments on the following questions:
1. How authors choose a journal for their submission:
2. On multiple submissions of the same article to different journals
3. How authors should write a cover letter
4. How authors should prepare papers for submission
5. How editors assign papers to referees
6. How referees evaluate articles
7. How editors make publication decisions
8. How authors should interpret the feedback of the referees and editorial decisions
9. How authors should prepare the resubmission cover letter and response
10. The types of collaboration that are permitted in an individually authored article
11. How/when should authors obtain copyright permissions
12. How a paper presented in a conference or on the Internet might affect submission to a journal
13. How authors should engage in proofreading/copyediting
14. Behind the scenes in the editorial office: questions about liaison, deadlines, inquiries from authors etc.
However, many of the participants have commented that they would like a more interactive session where they can ask more focused questions from the editors. I am now collecting the type of questions to be answered by the editors. If someone likes to send some questions to be answered in this session, please send them here and also mention the journal editor whom you would like to answer it for you. Indicate also if you would like the question to be anonymous or if you would like me to mention your name as I read out the question. Thanks!
They said the conference was to be held in the Canary Islands. What a place for a conference in the middle of wintery January in the US! It was after jumping to accept the invitation to speak there, with visions of romping along the beautiful beaches on the island in shorts and t-shirts, that I realized the important mission behind the conference. It was called the 1st International PRIISEAL Conference (Publishing and Presenting Research Internationally: Issues for Speakers of English as an Additional Language). Other keynote speakers included John Swales, John Flowerdew, Francoise Salager-Meyer, and Srikant Sarangi.
The hospitality and entertainment exceeded my expectations. There is something to be said about the care European conference organizers take over their guests. They arrange tours for sightseeing between conference sessions. They organize grand banquets to honor their visitors. Local town officials compete with each other to fete you with wine, food, and music. Here in the United States they let the conference participants find their own way to their expensive hotels, turn up at the conference hall at the expected time, and then leave the town unceremoniously when they are done with their talk. Things are very impersonal in comparison.
But what surprised me even more was the radicalism of the mostly European scholars who attended this conference. They felt strongly about the inequalities in access to journals, the monopoly on academic journals by certain publishers, and the one-sided flow of scholarly knowledge in academia. I guess Europeans too are at the receiving end of the American dominance in academic publishing. But, more significantly, there are differences in the type of politics US and European scholars engage in. While US radicals focus on airy-fairy things like semiotic, textual, or identity politics, Europeans are focused on structural and material inequalities. (And this, despite the irony that much of this airy-fairy politics is a derivative of thinking imported from France!) Inspired by this activist mood in the conference, on the last day I proposed that we do something practical about the issues we cared about. I proposed that we formulate a statement to the scholarly and publishing world on the changes we would like to see in academic journals. The ideas generated in the collective brainstorming session in the final hour were soon drafted by the conference conveners Sally Burgess and Margaret Cargill. The feisty scholar and activist Francoise Salager-Meyer from Venezuela also played a key role in drafting the statement. It came to be known as the Tenerife Manifesto, after the island in which the conference was held.
When I circulated this statement later in an American meeting of editors in applied linguistics, I was surprised by the resistance. Some commented that titling it a “manifesto” made the statement unnecessarily confrontational and controversial. Others wondered how we could criticize the very publishers who help produce our journals. Representatives of major publishers were doubtful about the call for open access. They asked, “Then who would bear our publishing and operating costs?” I saw that there was once again a cultural difference between American and European scholars on publishing. What had seemed a straightforward statement in Tenerife seemed odious even to me when I landed in US soil!
Nothing has come of the Tenerife Manifesto now. It has gone through some revisions. Its title has been changed to “Tenerife Statement” to appease sensitive scholars and publishers. However, apart from the few who drafted the statement, no one has come forward to sign it. I post the statement in its earlier “provocative” version below. I wonder if anyone is interested in providing some thoughts on ways to revise it or getting concerned scholars to sign it.
‘The Tenerife Manifesto’
Preamble
As part of the growing call for more just and equitable practices in the conduct and communication of research worldwide, the participants of the 1st PRIISEAL Conference took the decision, in plenary session, to produce a manifesto for promulgation within the various professional communities we belong to and beyond. The conference brought together people from 14 countries interested in identifying and addressing issues that affect speakers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) as they seek to publish and present their research internationally. We met at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain from 11-13 January 2007 and shared perspectives based in teaching, editing, researching, refereeing, publishing and translating.
Body
We, the participants of the 1st PRIISEAL Conference, issue the following calls to the international community of knowledge producers and consumers, to governments (especially those of ‘non-centre’ countries beyond the mainstream of international publishing) and to international, regional and national governmental and non-governmental institutions.
1. That a review be conducted as a matter of urgency of the eligibility criteria for schemes designed to enhance the access of researchers in non-centre countries to published research findings, in order to overcome inequities related to issues including national income figures inflated by commodities such as oil. These schemes include HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) and OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment).
2. That the publishing houses that produce and distribute research journals be commended for moves they have made towards increased author support and journal development in some non-centre locations and allowing some of their journals to be available in some places following the “Open Access Initiative”. However, that the publishing houses also be reminded that these moves currently fall far short of what is needed to provide appropriate and equitable access to published research and publication opportunities in non-centre locations.
a. That publishing companies be urged to accelerate their efforts to provide online access to published journals at rates that are affordable by readers working outside the established Western academic systems, including at no cost where this is warranted (cf. International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications), as well as discounting the cost of books and hard-copy journals for libraries and individual researchers in non-centre locations.
b. That the publishing houses be urged to retain options for manuscript submission and subsequent negotiations to be conducted in hard copy or as e-mail attachments, to facilitate submissions from locations where internet access is unreliable, intermittent or unavailable.
c. That the publishing houses be urged to revise their policies to facilitate the inclusion of post-publication articles from their journals on institutional repositories or researchers’ homepages.
3. That international professional organisations in all fields be urged to ensure that access to their journals is not restricted, whether they publish them through a publishing house or independently. Of special relevance to this conference, journals such as TESOL Quarterly, published by TESOL Inc., should provide open access to their issues, and as a first step should be encouraged to develop a proactive stance of enhanced access for teachers and researchers in non-centre locations.
4. That all international professional and academic societies be strongly encouraged to provide reduced registration fees at their conferences for researchers from non-centre locations, and that bodies such as the commercial publishing houses be encouraged to provide grants to facilitate attendance at these conferences by non-centre researchers.
5. That regional editorial bodies be established in each region of the non-centre world (i.e. Latin America, Africa and Asia) to oversee the refereed publication of research in formats and languages that suit the needs of the region. That these bodies be funded by national governments and international research and development agencies, and fully supported by the nations of the region, including by the granting of appropriate credit in terms of academic assessment for editing and refereeing work conducted for these bodies and articles published by them.
6. That means be developed to effectively incorporate the knowledge base of teachers, researchers and practitioners of ‘EAL for publication purposes’ into international forums and initiatives seeking to develop equitable practices in the conduct and communication of research.
To this end we, as the PRIISEAL community of conference participants and like-minded colleagues, will take the following actions:
1. Publish on our conference website a list of open-access alternatives to journals such as English for Specific Purposes and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, whose cost structures are currently prohibitive for libraries, researchers and teachers working in non-centre countries.
2. Seek to identify an appropriate open-access publication outlet that can be suggested to PRIISEAL presenters submitting papers for publication under the auspices of the Conference, as a possible alternative to those already planned.
3. Share through an open-access email list information regarding opportunities for access to articles and other publications of interest to our professional communities.
4. Participate in and encourage the development of open-access repository schemes for self-publishing and institutional archiving.
5. Whenever we referee manuscripts for publication, aim to do so in a spirit of constructive advice and collegiality; in addition, seek to develop training options for referees towards this goal, as may be possible and appropriate within our respective professional lives.
6. Proactively seek ways to maintain effective communication across the different areas of practice that were represented at the 2007 PRIISEAL Conference, and to collaborate as appropriate in initiatives to move forward the agenda expressed in this Tenerife Manifesto.
Here I am, the fourth day in a row, going through the mechanical process of changing double quotation marks to single in my article already accepted for publication. I am also changing my transcription conventions. For code mixed items and translations, I have to italicize what I had bolded, underline what I had italicized, and bold what I had underlined. Though I had used the standard conventions, I didn’t realize that the publishers of the journal had their own in-house convention for these matters. Of course, I had taken care to follow the publisher’s style sheet for parenthetical documentation, references, and other main features in my original submission. However, I hadn’t realized that the European publisher had some quirks on minor conventions that differed from American journals. There is a proliferation of style manuals and rules for all aspects of manuscript preparation these days. Apart from the standard style sheets (APA, MLA etc.), we also have the in-house style sheet of many publishers.
After going through the rigorous process of revising and editing my article multiple times to clarify my argument, and having the article finally accepted, I had heaved a sigh of relief. I thought I could now turn to other pressing matters of teaching and institutional service as the new semester had begun. Now I am getting irritated. That’s when I start quarreling with the publishing industry and its conventions. I begin to smell conspiracy theories and political schemes behind style conventions. I ask: Whose interests do style conventions serve? Does it make a difference to my argument or to the significance of my findings that my article adopts APA or MLA? Is it worth spending so much time on mechanical conventions rather than on other constructive activities, such as reading a research article, grading students’ essays, or even writing this blog? Though I can understand the need for a few major style manuals such as MLA or APA, why do publishers develop their own in-house conventions? I can even understand the reasons for having different manuals for the different disciplines (say the natural sciences and the humanities), but why should we have different conventions within the same discipline? I wish all the editors can get together and decide on a single style sheet at least for their own discipline.
At this point I begin to sound like a lazy undergrad complaining about having to mind documentation in a term paper. It was I who had considered many authors lazy when they didn’t follow the APA consistently when they submitted articles to TQ. I can now understand the reason why many foreign authors come off as careless about such matters. It is not only that they don’t always have the different style manuals or that they don’t have a knowledge of the periodically changing conventions. It also takes a lot of effort to change style conventions when they resubmit an article elsewhere, even though they might have followed a style sheet religiously on their first submission. Matters are doubly complicated for authors who are still using typewriters or unsophisticated word processing programs to prepare their manuscripts. (And I am complaining despite the superior resources afforded by Word 2007?)
The publishing industry, however, is relentless. There is inordinate time and effort given to legislating style. I can remember Chuck Bazerman’s observation once that APA has grown from six-and-a-half pages in 1923 to “approximately two hundred oversized pages of rules, ranging from such mechanics as spelling and punctuation through substantive issues of content and organization” in 1983. Well, it has grown to 439 pages now, in the fifth edition that came out in July 2001.
But there is a larger problem with style conventions. They are not merely mechanical. They have discourse and ideological implications. The style manuals also legislate on syntax and word choice. For example, APA has low tolerance for the passive construction. We frequently run into discourse level problems when we follow APA for TQ. As we try to open up our journal to narrative inquiry, we find that APA is not very friendly to certain forms of informality and personal voice. We faced a special problem when we published a special topic issue on gender a few years back. Many female authors complained that our insistence on changing passives into active voice (in addition to other more subtle changes, following APA), had distorted their voice. We also frequently run into problems with British authors who find it enigmatic that some of our American copyeditors have changed their choice structures, blaming it on APA. In this age of voice and diversity, style conventions are not innocent anymore.
If we are expending so much time and effort on legislating style, let’s at least have a gathering of editors and publishers to review our current practices. It would be ideal if we can have some uniformity across journals for some basic conventions, while providing for a lot of flexibility to accommodate diverse identities and voice on other matters of style. Can we agree on a common style manual at least for our individual disciplines, while providing for more flexible practices that give enough space for different identities and ideologies without being smothered by the seemingly mechanical conventions? Would someone organize a conference on style conventions that would help us find a way out of the current quagmire of messy rules and insensitive regulations?
And then there was that huge package for me the day before Christmas. Since it wouldn’t fit into the pigeonhole for faculty mail, the office staff had placed the package outside the mailbox. My first thought was that this was a nice Christmas surprise from someone. A closer look at the label showed that it had been addressed to the editor of TQ and that it came from China. I then thought that it must be from a gratified author whose work I had shepherded into print. I had to revise this assumption as I couldn’t identify the name from our recently published authors. Guided by the stereotype that Asians are immensely grateful people, I then thought that the package was possibly from a rejected author who still wanted to thank me for the time I had put into reviewing his/her submission and providing valuable suggestions. With mounting curiosity, I heaved the package away from the prying eyes of jealous colleagues, shut my office door, and exerted myself on opening the box.
What tumbled out of the package were reams of typed paper. When I sorted out everything I counted three manuscript submissions, with three copies of each article, with their own set of cover letter, abstract, and author information. I read the cover letter repeatedly and confirmed my worst fear—yes, it was all by the same author.
This is an increasingly common phenomenon I see in academic publishing these days—an author making three articles for publication in one submission—and so far it has come to me mostly from China. It was not the stress of reviewing the increasing number of manuscripts that bothered me. From 94 submissions in 2004, the final year of the previous editor of TQ, the submission rate has increased to an annual average of 250 during my term. And there wasn’t anything in our guidelines that prevented authors from making multiple submissions at the same time—unlike the policy against submitting the same article to multiple journals. What troubled me were the implications for the composing process of the author and the quality of the submission when someone is under pressure to send three articles in one envelope. Or was academic publishing becoming similar to lottery—you buy multiple tickets in the hope that one will hit the jackpot?
After inquiring from friends in China, I understand that the motivation for this practice is far more complicated. I understand that many academic communities in the East are putting pressure on their scholars to get published in journals with high impact factor in order to get tenured or promoted. According to some accounts, even graduate students in China are expected to publish a couple of refereed articles in order to earn their doctorate. The bug of corporatization, measurement, and productivity has bitten administrators and policy makers in the East. Such institutional expectations might not sound surprising to European or American scholarly communities. Publish or perish has been the name of the game for a long time in the West. In the East, we must consider these publishing expectations in the light of the working conditions of local scholars. These scholars are expected to do a lot of teaching, far more than it is expected of tenure line faculty members in USA. They are not given time off for research or writing in many institutions. The scholars have to find the time themselves, after they take care of teaching and service. The limited library facilities, with the latest books missing and a smaller range of journals subscribed to, prevent local scholars from keeping up with the theoretical paradigms or research trends in the West. There are other personal and domestic pressures they have to negotiate before they can invest their time and resources on publishing. Many of them have to supplement their limited salary by doing other jobs to support their families. Local scholars also lack the support system and peer circles that can review or edit their work before submission. Need we mention the linguistic challenges involved in having to publish in English in the high impact journals (which for some strange reasons are all published in English)? Such are the problems these authors are expected to deal with in order to satisfy their institutional expectations.
A local scholar now teaching in Singapore (who likes to remain anonymous) wrote to me: “Almost all universities in Mainland China set down a specified number of publications as a precondition for promotion to an associate professorship or full professorship. I learned from a student of mine in China that at his university, the required number for promotion to associate professionship is 10 journal papers. In addition to quantity, there are also requirements about the quality of publications. . . One of my colleagues told me that his former university in China give 5 times more reward points to a paper published in a high-impact overseas journal than one published in a "national-level" domestic journal. I have also heard unverified stories that some Chinese universities give 10,000 reminbi yun per article to their faculty who publish in SCI and SSCI journals. The deputy dean of the English Language and LIterature College of another Chinese university told me that the rate at his university is 3,000 yun per article. Given such financial rewards, it is little wonder submissions from China to international journals have greatly increased in recent years.”
Matters are compounded by the lack of information on the publishing process. Editorial board member, Judy Chen, writes from Taiwan: “Many authors do not understand what the publishing effort involves, what the submissions require, what the process is, and even what the APA Guidelines are. For example, it is normal that in Taiwan and China student researchers do not have an APA manual. The reason for this is that there is an informal translation to Chinese of the manual widely available on the Web. When asked, students respond they DO have it, but what they mean is the online version in Chinese. And they often are not aware there is such a thing in English and how detailed it is. Of course the online version is full of errors and omissions, and does not even begin to include the style guidelines of the real APA book (such as here http://www1.mcu.edu.tw/Apps/SB/data/20/APA.pdf).”
Shouldn’t we consider other more reasonable—and appropriate—bench marks for productivity in the East then? Why not give more credit for authors who publish in local journals? Wouldn’t knowledge about local education or linguistic realities be more relevant to local teachers, policy makers, and community members? And why overlook semi-scholarly and popular publications as a forum for one’s research? Is publishing in a high impact journal located in an English-speaking country the sole standard for one’s scholarly worth? Further, should a published article be always the measure of one’s productivity? What about giving more credit for teaching and knowledge dissemination in oral genres and other media forms in one’s own community?
As a well-published Turkish scholar once put it to me: “It’s a dog eat dog world out there in the West, as American and European scholars try to cope with the publish or perish culture in their own institutions. How can one expect us from the periphery to enter into that competition and satisfy the newly formulated academic policies in our communities?”
How indeed? And who is there to think of a poor author toiling during the year-end holiday season finalizing three 30-page articles for submission to the same journal? What pressure to publish? How realistic the expectation? And at what cost?
Adeyami sent three articles for publication in quick succession in late 2004 when I was settling into my editorship of TESOL Quarterly (TQ). No sooner had I rejected one than the next one would arrive from Nigeria. I wasn’t even sure if he waited to read my comments before he sent the next submission. I haven’t seen any author with so much enthusiasm for academic publishing.
It was not that Adeyami didn’t have some original insights into the educational situation in Africa. It was not that he didn’t know the dominant trends in language teaching to speak with authority on the issues he was taking up for analysis. It was simply that the articles never followed our guidelines for publication. It appeared as if the author didn’t focus clearly on the preferred format, discourse, and conventions of TQ. One of the articles was based on the author’s personal observation of classroom life; the article wasn’t data driven. Another article was based on very dated publications and, therefore, framed inappropriately in terms of the current conversations in our journal. All of them didn’t follow the APA guidelines, were too short for our main section, and structured in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. I felt bad that an author with such enthusiasm had to be rejected mainly for not following our publishing guidelines and conventions.
Flash forward to July 2005, about seven months later. I am in Madison, Wisconsin, in the conference of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. As I treat myself to some wine in one of those open receptions thrown by some rich American university, the name badge “Adeyami” flashes in front of my eyes. I make sure I am not seeing things. The tiredness of listening to long lectures in endless panel discussions, made worse by the wine consumed on empty stomach, might have made my mind float to Africa. But, no, it is indeed him.
I pull Adeyami to a side and introduce myself. I explain how painful it was to reject his articles when our readers badly needed such knowledge on the educational scene in Africa. I ask him why he hadn’t read our publishing guidelines closely so that he could write with greater relevance and appropriateness to our journal. It is then that he blurts out the shocking information: he had never read or even seen a single issue of TQ. I ask him why he had chosen to submit the article to TQ then. He simply said that he had heard of TQ as the leading journal in the field and proceeded to obtain the editorial address from the website. His university library did not subscribe to TQ—nor to many other journals in the field. For this reason, he couldn’t also base his discussions on recent research and publications.
I feel powerless when I hear stories like this. I realize how little I can do as an editor, though I often speak idealistically about democratizing academic publishing. The odds are stacked heavily against scholars outside the more developed countries. We have a cycle of self-perpetuating problems. Because academic journals are priced so expensively, many periphery universities and scholars are unable to subscribe to our journals. If they don’t read our journals, periphery scholars can’t send submissions that meet our guidelines, discourses, or stylistic conventions. As their submissions are rejected, academic knowledge is defined narrowly as it is based solely on the research from the more developed communities. As we cater to a small circle of scholars with resources to engage in publishing, we don’t complain against the increasing price of journals or the huge funds needed for research.
I think of many controversial options: Should we really insist on the in-house stylistic and citation conventions, if an author has something significant to share with us? Is the lack of recent publications in the references really a big deal if the article reflects a general awareness of the trends in the discipline? Is data (by which we tend to mean information gathered in a systematic and controlled fashion over a substantial period of time, with a large subject pool, and sophisticated instruments) really important to validate our knowledge—i.e., what’s wrong with intuition, reflection, and informal observation as the basis of one’s article? Should we really insist on an impersonal blind review and subject periphery authors to the same competitive evaluation, when their scholarly context is in no way equal to other scholars who publish in our journals? When we need more research and information from peripheral communities to challenge our assumptions and make a critical contribution to our field, shouldn’t we step out of the impersonal review process and help, mentor, and even shepherd such rare submissions into print, without bothering about charges of bias, favoritism, or unfairness?
I knew I wasn’t going to succeed any time soon in persuading the publishing companies in the West to send free copies of their journals to Africa. I knew I wasn’t going to succeed in achieving open access in scholarly publishing right away. Other correctives, like reforming our publishing conventions, revising our assumptions of research knowledge, and re-envisioning the nature of good research writing are all even farther behind in anyone’s agenda.
I satisfied my conscience when I returned home by putting Adeyami on the mailing list for one of the 10 complimentary copies given to the editor of TQ. But how many more Adeyamis are out there? And how few complimentary copies . . . !
