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Today I have stepped down from the editorial board of Memory. This is simply due to not having enough time to really make a go of it. Here’s a thread about how I found that work.
I have always been very proud to be associated with this journal, which Martin Conway and Sue Gathercole founded with the aim of publishing novel, non-paradigmatic research into memory.
I was on the editorial board at two distinct time points with a break of a couple of years in between. When I started on the board, everything went by paper, and I also helped in the backroom with the filing cabinets full of papers, reviews, and revisions.
Being an action editor is hard, and I felt the pressure to get a good decision out quickly, but I also agonised over the right decision. As each paper came in I was too easily seduced by the novelty and importance of the topic, and too critical of the methods and terminology.
In the end, I was slow, & the stress of finding the right reviewer, rather than asking the same willing people over and over, got to me. I let myself down often on the deadlines. Yet if I ever have to break my rule about weekends & evenings, it is often about editing/reviewing.
JANE was extremely helpful. https://jane.biosemantics.org
Publishing portals mostly suck and the trudge of logging in to do business there also slowed down my responses.
On the whole, the quality of the reviewing really blew me away. People really work hard on their reviews, and I am grateful for all those people who helped me along the way.
Where I disagreed with my reviewers, I tried to explain my position. Where they disagreed, I tried to give the author a steer. This I learned from being an author desperate for the editor to intervene when there was conflicting or contradictory reviews.
The really great submissions were those which made my job easy - those with respectful, lengthy, legible and organised responses and cover letters.
My personal statistics were ACCEPT 70.4%, REJECT 29.6%. I only ever desk-rejected 4 papers. The editors in chief never gave any steer about what to accept or reject, nor any feedback on acceptance and rejection rates.
I mostly worried I accepted too many articles.
Only once did a big name contact me personally to challenge the decision I had made.
It’s a funny role. You sit behind your author portal and feel detached from it all. I loved receiving papers that were yet to be published, as interesting and original work came to me.
I learned from the papers I read. I learned to act on an acceptance as soon as possible, but to act on a rejection even quicker. But I didn’t learn much else, and I didn’t make any friends doing it either.
It was very unlike any other part of my job. I got paid a small amount for each paper I acted on. But its an amount that doesn’t reflect the work involved, and so it feels like more of an insult than an incentive.
There are no great highlights to share with you, nothing I felt I did well, nothing I felt I did badly. I don’t even honestly remember much about all those manuscripts I must have processed so deeply.
