Learning about journal publication: the pedagogies of editing a ‘special issue’

Despite the development of, and arguments for, alternative genres of open access and devolved publication (Smith, 1999; Willinsky, 2006), writing for commercially produced scholarly journals continues to be significant. In Britain, for example, academic ‘output’ in the social sciences is measured and judged, in the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), largely on the basis of single-authored books (the scholarly monograph) and peerrefereed journal articles. The current proposal to change the RAE process to focus more strongly on citations makes the work of publishing in high-status and publicly indexed journals not simply a necessity, but a high-pressure imperative.