With help from graduate student interns funded by my home college (Syracuse University’s iSchool), we have documented our administrative efforts; researched publishing trends such as open access agreements, uses of AI, and peer review; made changes to author guidance; reviewed our operations; and, kept up with more than 20 peer journals. The Journal is better for the work of Caitlyn Brady, Alexandra Meyer and Ruth Xing: Thank you.

My term as EIC during COVID’s lockdown: I am stepping down as artificial-intelligence (AI) -enabled scholarship accelerates at a pace faster than science and scholarship can currently absorb. The pandemic made it hard to assess workload, which is unnerving when you are new to something. The rise of AI makes it hard to assess what is happening, which has unnerving of late.

Across 2021, the Journal saw a roughly 40% increase in submissions when compared to 2020, then a decrease in 2022. The thinking is that the increase reflected people home due to COVID, completing unfinished manuscripts.  The decrease in submission numbers in 2022 reflects a cleared backlog.

Beginning in 2023, there has been a rapid increase in uses of generative-AI-enabled scholarship and more submissions (many from India and China). These two distinct (and sometimes overlapping) forces have led to increases in submissions. To wit, in 2023 the Journal received 735 new manuscripts. Counting revision and final versions, we processed about 1150 manuscripts that year. 

We are six months into 2026 as I write and the Journal has received 918 new submissions and processed more manuscripts than in all of 2023.  This was not something I had planned for when I took on the editorship and this growth in submission volume has reshaped what is possible with EIC time. It is not clear what will come of this: There are many great things happening with AI in scholarship. But, it is easy to miss these given the AI-generated slop that is also being submitted. 

During my term, the Journal has moved from print-based to digital (though it is still possible to order printed issues).  This means there is no cap on the number of manuscripts that can be accepted. Every manuscript that meets the Journal’s editorial remit and aligns to the author guidance is considered for review. All that thrive through peer review can be published.

Despite the growth in submissions, the number of manuscripts entering peer review continues to be about 400 per year. And, the Journal is now publishing about 100 manuscripts each year. Just fewer than 50% of published manuscripts are covered by one of WIley’s open-access (OA) transformational agreements. This is up from the 10% published as OA when I began – and lower than I expected based on trends from the first several years of my term.

Accepted manuscripts appear online about 230 days after initial submission and about 30 days after the acceptance letter.  Delays in this timing are often due to the authors needing more time to make revisions. The average time to first decision is about 15 days for initial rejections and 80 days for those going through a full round of peer review.

Manuscripts that enter peer review get careful attention: Review editors and reviewers add value and most authors take seriously the guidance provided.  Over the past five-plus years there has been a modest increase in the average number of rounds of revision per acceptance. This is partly due to the developmental nature of the review effort, partly due to authors not working through the revision guidance, and partly due to other factors. In 2024, I summarized what we have learned about getting published at JASIST. The only thing I would add to that is guidance on using and acknowledging generative AI.

There is no penalty to authors for submitting out-of-scope, under-developed, and disinteresting manuscripts.  There is a cost to the editorial staff to process them.  And, reviewers rightly complain when asked to review sub-standard or blatantly AI-driven material. The load of substandard manuscripts acts like a denial-of-service attack to editorial offices: Something will need to change.

What comes clear from being EIC is the scarcest resource in peer review are reviewers. The realities of contemporary scholarly life make it ever harder for Journals to secure reviewers. This puts a premium on editorial offices to be gate-keepers of quality and value even as the flow has become a flood.  This gatekeeping relies on human intervention to identify the many ways in which some authors seek to advance their interests at the cost of contributing to science.

In 2022, we revised the author guidance, updating it three times since. We did so to provide more clarity on the editorial remit – making clear the importance of connecting to relevant information science scholarship; the criteria for assessing manuscripts, then aligning these with the questions we ask of reviewers (with special thanks to Stephann Makri for driving this revision); providing an informative cover letter; requiring clarity on data sharing; requiring authors provide an ORCID number; and, most recently, requiring a declaration on the uses of generative AI.  We have maintained the word limit to encourage both topical focus and careful editing. Only authors seek longer manuscripts: Reviewers and readers seek clarity and quality.  We hosted multiple workshops each year and I published multiple editorials on these needs. Still, too many of the submissions fail to adhere to the guidance, alas.

In 2025, the Association sought bids for publishing the Journal, then renewed the contract with Wiley to publish JASIST (and ARIST).  This was important for the Association but delayed the Journal’s move to a more useful manuscript management system.  That will happen as the new EIC’s term begins.  This new infrastructure – research exchange – developed by Wiley, should be helpful to the editorial office’s role as a gatekeeper because it offers more pre-screening tools.

The value of the Journal is editorial review. Peer review serves as a certification of scholarly quality.  There were 70 members of the Journal’s Editorial Board (EB) in January, 2021: An amazing group of scholars and people who give their time to our colleagues and the Journal.  Thirty have left and 25 also-amazing scholars have joined, leaving a 65 person EB in June, 2026.  In addition, we have had about 40 guest editors across the 11 Special Issues that have been published (with another being developed as the editorial transition happens).

In 2024, the Association supported the creation of several Senior Editor positions (thanks to Mike Thelwall and Heidi Julien for their service in this role). Doing so allowed for more expert oversight of the scholarly space and to recognize the need to manage the greater number of submissions, This combination of stability, turnover, special guest editors, and expanded editorial oversight is what makes the Journal such an important venue for Information Science and the informational perspective.

The current EB reflects ever-more the scope, range and reach of the Journal.  A journal is a voluntary organization. I chose to spend as much time as possible interacting with them as possible:  Next to sharing news of an acceptance, interacting with the 95 scholars who have been part of the EB while I served as EIC has been my greatest privilege.

With support from the Association, in 2022 we began an Advisory Board (AB). The purpose of the AB was to gather scholars who have a stake in the Journal and the broader intellectual space to serve as a source of guidance and perspective for the EIC. Their counsel has been invaluable in both big and small ways.

In the face of all the realities of the world and pressures on scholarly engagement, papers published in JASIST are being read nearly 1,000,000 times per year. And, while journal metrics are a curious thing, trends suggest the articles published in the Journal are being cited. To wit, in 2020, the Journal’s impact factor (JIF) was 2.7 and the 5-year JIF was 3.9.  The 2025 JIF is 5.1 and the 5-year JIF is now 4.4.  The Scimago rankings for 2020 had JASIST as the 86th (of 162) journals listed in Computer Science /Information Systems, and 38th (of 86) journals ranked in Information Science/Library Science.  In the just-released 2025 rankings, JASIST is the 69th (of 266) journals listed in Computer Science /Information Systems and 27th (of 172) journals ranked in Information Science/Library Science. It is in good hands. The Journal continues to be a Q1 venue in several scholarly fiends. And, JASIST is ranked highly in multiple country-level and institutional-level ratings of key information science venues.

Mostly, thank you to the authors, reviewers, editorial and advisory board members, and to the Association, for helping make this the best job I have had in academia.

Sincerely;
Steve Sawyer
Syracuse University

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