An Editor’s Open Letter to Scholarly Authors

Dear author,  Thank you for your interest in the journal, N.N., and  for submitting your article to the journal to be considered  for publication. I would like to believe that you elected to  submit to this journal because you have been impressed by  the quality articles that regularly appear here, and because you  have identified this journal as the best venue in which to publish  as it communicates with your envisaged academic audience,  where your work will achieve the exposure and interest that you  believe it deserves.  Permit me, then, to ask you in some exasperation, why it is  that you did not bother to read the stated aims and focus of the  journal as published on the website. Alternatively, a perusal of  a number of past issues would also have told you what kind  of discourse it is that this journal promotes and publishes.  Instead, you submitted an article that falls outside the scope of  the journal, which I still have to read before deciding whether  to reject it out of hand or to send it on to reviewers (for I must  protect their time too).  More than that, you also did not bother to read the instructions  for authors, also published on the submission portal. And so, I  regularly receive submissions, such as yours, that do not adhere  to our journal style, and sometimes clearly betray signs of having  been written for another journal (in one case, the accompanying  cover letter even addressed the previous journal to which the  article was obviously first submitted). If you did not take this  journal seriously enough, you create the impression that your  article is just doing the rounds with any and every journal to see  where it gets accepted, as if any other journal would also do.  You might feel aggrieved when the article is rejected out of hand  if it does not conform to the journal style, but who did you think  is supposed to rewrite your article into the correct style?

The solution is so simple: bibliographic management software  would have taken care of such issues. Unfortunately, I  have been in the position far too many times for my academic  sanity where I had to rewrite your references and bibliography.  I no longer do that because I, too, must protect my time and  workspace – I have done that too numerous times in the past  without getting any thank you recognition from authors (OK,  it happened three times over almost thirty years that someone  explicitly thanked me for quality editorial work), and I wonder  if you actually read the finished, copy edited, and published  version to see how it differs from what you submitted. I have a  sneaky feeling you do not.  And speaking of rewriting references, I check every reference  because I have learnt from painful experience that authors are  actually irresponsibly sloppy with their data (and, mind, your  bibliographic references are your data), which if you get it  wrong (page numbers, mis-citations, bibliographic information)  not only undermines the credibility of your research and makes  it kind of worthless, but also tells me that you probably did not  consult the sources yourself.  Maybe it is not a thing to you, but I still believe in scholarship as  the pursuit of accuracy, veracity, accurate curating of data, truth  and truthfulness, and justified reasoned argument, and not the  mere peddling of opinions – research is not the impressionistic  stitching together of references, citations, reports, and opinions.  Does it really not bother you that I, in effect, have done your research for you?

But there is more: Too often I get articles, like yours, where  in spite of you confirming on the submission portal that  the article was language checked by a native English speaker,  the text contains whole paragraphs that do not make sense,  or uncorrected typos, other grammatical mistakes, sentences  without clear subjects, objects, verbs, or my pet peeve, the  sentence that ends in … mid-sentence (yes, they do occur). The  only thing I can then conclude is that your article was a rush job  that you now throw to the hapless editor with some disdain as if  to say: There, see that it gets published!  I can perfectly well imagine that you get aggrieved when I  unpack like this. But then permit me some exasperation and  aggrievement too. You may not think much of me nor take me  seriously, but when your article is selected for publication, I take  your work seriously enough to spend long hours panel beating it  into publishable shape, often into the very late hours of the night  (because I, too, work against deadlines). So, I will let you in on  the secret of what I do: I run three or four online dictionaries  plus some online grammar tools to check spelling and grammar,  an online library catalogue to check publication information  (for the correct edition – since for some reason authors do not  think it matters when there are different editions of a work), two  browsers (at least) with in total around four hundred open tabs  where I have checked the correct text of citations in your sources,  obtained the URLs or DOI numbers of your online sources.  Oh, and when I come across a sentence or paragraph of which  I cannot make heads or tails (and if I can’t, other readers will  most probably also not), I copy that offending piece of text to  a new document and spend an hour or so trying to understand  what it says, changing punctuation, word order, and so on, until  I am satisfied that I understand what you meant and what makes  sense in the context. By the time your article appears in print, I  will have read it at least three times: when received it gets the  initial reading, when I copy edit it, and I also do the proofing. So,  during those late-night sessions, when I realise how unfinished  your article is, I often wonder, if you don’t take your own work  seriously to finish it off in the best possible shape for submission,  why should anyone else take you seriously?

You will realise, of course, that if I spend this amount of effort  and time on your article, that the editorial process is slow.  This is simply because in my particular case, I get no support  from the university where I teach – no teaching reduction, no  appointed editorial assistant, so that I am in effect chef, cook,  and bottle washer as editor. I manage the online editorial portal,  the assignment of handling editors and reviewers (and checking  up on them; often struggling to find willing reviewers; why is it  that no-one wants to review submissions but expects everyone  else to drop their work to review your article to get it published?),  the copy editing, the proofing – handling the whole process from  beginning to end. I do this while I am in the exact same position  as you are. I teach three undergraduate courses (and co-teach one  other) per semester, plus two honours year courses, plus I have  committee work and other academic citizenship responsibilities,  plus academic society responsibilities, plus graduate students  to supervise, plus the pressure to publish research and obtain  external grants (in our case, if you are a professor you have  been instructed to publish three research articles per annum  in subsidy-accredited journals, because the institution regards  research output subsidies as an income stream), all this in the  context of an overly bureaucratised institution (I am sure you  know this, too) with heavy burdens of paperwork to see to; and  then I also edit this journal. Why? Because I have a vision and  I believe in what I do, and it gives me immense satisfaction to  play my small part in helping shape an academic discourse.

Academic work is, among other things, also a social process  which we all labour in collectively, and you are part of  it, for you also contribute to the continued functioning of the  industry (or so I hope you see it too). Next time, if I ask you to  help with the reviewing of someone else’s article (isn’t it good  manners to return the favour when someone else did it for you?),  please do not say you are too busy.  I realise full well you are also under pressure to perform in the  area of research publication, and getting published may have a  real impact on your career progression. I am not insensitive to  that. But you have to realise also that managing and editing a  journal is not a simple box-ticking exercise, it demands deep  involvement, and when it means managing theme issues (with  all the attendant personal issues of authors impacting on their  ability to deliver in time – when life happens to them – that you  also have to deal with), it just so happens that it will take time  for your article to get the attention you want it to receive. So  please, next time, before you fire off angry letters of demand  to know when you can expect publication of your submitted  article (which may or may not be out of scope for this journal,  which may or may not conform to the journal style, which may  or may not have been carefully finished for publication), just  spare a moment to think of the immense amount of work that  goes into the making of each issue of this journal, and it is just  a human who stands at the other end working long hours to  make the journal issue happen. At which end, if your article gets  published, eventually, in this journal, it is as close to perfect as I  could possibly get it.

Let me also add, in case you get the idea I am a curmudgeon  only venting my spleen, I have deep appreciation for those  authors who take care to submit well-written, well-finished  work, written for this journal, and from whom I have had the  intense pleasure to learn a lot, been inspired with new ideas and  insights, and whose work enriched my own continual intellectual  formation no end.

Yours sincerely,

Gerhard

Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies,

University of South Africa

gerhardvandenheever1@gmail.com

Executive editor: Religion & Theology (Brill, Leiden, The

Netherlands)

Gerhard van den Heever

Full list of references and notes can be found in the downloadable article below.

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