Editorial Board composition - acm-toce/documentation GitHub Wiki

Forming and sustaining an editorial board of Associate Editors (AEs) for the journal is a complex, social, and intellectual endeavor. There are several key requirements for the board to meet:

• Board size. Have enough AEs to manage the volume of submissions. The journal's goal is for each AE to be assigned no more than one paper per month, averaging a total load of 2–3 papers at any given time, assuming a three-month review cycle for a submission. In an ideal world, every paper would have a recommendation by three months, so all board members would have capacity for a new submission each month. In practice, reviewer response rates are low, and many board members go on leave or take on conflicting peer review obligations. More realistically, only about one third of the board has capacity for a new submission after any given monthly deadline. Therefore, the number of board members should be roughly three times the number of monthly reviewable submissions. (For example, if the journal is receiving 12 reviewable submissions per month, the board should ideally be at least 36 people.)
• Research area diversity. The board should have sufficient expertise diversity to cover all research areas that could hypothetically be submitted to the journal. Because TOCE's scope covers all areas, the board should cover all areas. The "hypothetical" in this case is important: if the board does not contain a particular area -- let's say cybersecurity education, for example -- many authors will not submit to the journal, because they might perceive they would not get reviews of adequate expertise (and they would be right). Therefore, it is best to have at least two board members for every major research area in the field, including new research areas.
• Epistemic diversity. Just as research areas should be covered well, the epistemological stances of the board should be highly diverse. One of the greatest risks to any interdisciplinary journal is that one way of knowing -- usually post-positivism, otherwise known as empiricism -- dominates the field, often excluding other ways of knowing (usually interpretivism, critical theory, design). The board must have AEs that take these various viewpoints, including pluralists and pragmatists who take multiple viewpoints on ways of knowing.
• Geographic diversity. The board should be global. There is no strict proportion expected, as research expertise is not distributed randomly across the world, but there should be representation from Europe, North America, and Australasia, and ideally some representation from South America, Asia, and Africa to the extent that suitable scholars are available to serve.

Because board members come and go, meeting these requirements is an ongoing process. The EiC should:

• Check monthly to identify any gaps in expertise or epistemic coverage and overall board capacity, and if necessary, broadcast board needs to the community to see if anyone is interested in serving on the board.
• Check monthly with board members whose requested terms have expired, notifying them and giving them the opportunity to renew if their expertise is still needed.
• If a new research area emerges (often indicated by submissions for which no board member has suitable expertise), attempt to identify two new AEs with suitable education research and peer expertise to help with the area. Sometimes, authors of papers in the new area are suitable candidates. Add the area to the journal's scope, add the new AEs to the board, and consider a special issue that highlights the area to the board.

These are easy to forget; EiCs should set up recurring reminders to do these board composition tasks.