The JAIC Editorial Board has gathered a list of common myths and misconceptions about our journal from public posts and private queries. Each question is in the form of a statement. Expand the statement to discover whether it is fact or faction, or something more nuanced.
Q: If you publish in an AIC specialty group postprints, you can’t publish the same work in JAIC?
FICTION. The copyright agreement used for postprints of any AIC specialty group is specifically written to allow future publication in peer-reviewed journals. One example of an article that has been published in both venues is “Foxy Underpants: Or the Use of Chelators and Enzymes to Reduce Foxing Stains on Early Nineteenth Century Men’s Linen Underpants,” by Laura Mina, that was published first in volume 26 of the Textile Specialty Group Postprints and was later published in JAIC issue 59(1): 3-17 (2020). Such manuscripts are subject to the same review process as articles not previously published and authors may choose to elaborate or expand the work published in the postprints.
Q: Publishing in a specialty group postprint volume is the same as publishing in JAIC.
FICTION. Specialty group postprints are an example of “gray literature.” This category of written material includes theses, conference proceedings, and in general is work that hasn’t gone through a peer review process. According to Taylor & Francis, JAIC’s publisher, “peer review is the independent assessment of your research paper by experts in your field. Its purpose is to evaluate [your] manuscript’s quality and suitability for publication.” By contrast, gray literature often isn’t indexed, electronically searchable, or sustainably archived, and the quality of the work can vary widely. Academic institutions will often not consider publication of gray literature to count towards tenure or career advancement because it has not been subject to the peer review process. Some specialty groups do incorporate some peer review, but it is often limited to one reviewer, not double blind (meaning that the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers and the reviewers are not given the identity of the authors), and the quality of the papers published varies widely due to pressure to include all contributions. However, gray literature IS valuable; many of us regularly consult papers published in specialty group postprints, so JAIC definitely supports AIC presenters participating in the postprint publications, but also encourages them to take the time to publish in a peer reviewed journal.
Q: JAIC charges publication fees
MAYBE. If authors choose to publish “normally” with JAIC, there is no publishing fee; there is no cost affiliated with including color images in a manuscript. However, journal publishers depend upon income from subscriptions. This means that online access to articles is often located behind a paywall. Paywalls restrict accessibility to articles and can therefore pose a significant economic burden to individuals.
Taylor & Francis (and many other journals) offers authors an option to allow open access to their paper, so the article will be available to all for free. To remain in business, publishers of open-access materials transfer the economic onus from the individual to the authors by charging them a publication fee. The publication fee varies based upon type of article and institutional country; for example, in December 2020, an author from the USA who wanted to publish an open access research article in JAIC would be charged US $2,995. While this is substantial, discounts and waivers for manuscripts with corresponding authors who come from developing countries are available. Also, some academic institutions, such as University College London, have signed an open access agreement with Taylor & Francis that may reduce or eliminate the fee. More information on the Taylor & Francis open access policy can be found at https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-open-access/#apcs.
Note: charging a fee for the option of open access does not make JAIC a “predatory journal.” A predatory journal publishes manuscripts with no control over (or real care for) the quality or accuracy of the content, in return for money. Some exposés on this practice are summarized in https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/08/16/journal-accepts-fake-story-about-scooters-and-hydroxychloroquine. These journals often have names very similar to well established journals in order to trick authors into publishing in them and may claim to be peer-reviewed, but they are not legitimate and should be avoided. A good paper describing this growing issue is: “Best Practices for Scholarly Authors in the Age of Predatory Journals,” The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 98(2): 77-79 (2016), https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1308/rcsann.2016.0056). If you ever receive a solicitation to submit an article (or an editorship, or a conference talk), please perform a background check first to make sure it is a legitimate institution or journal before responding. For a list of predatory journals, go here: https://predatoryjournals.com/journals. A searchable database of predatory publishers is available at https://beallslist.net.
Q: The quality of JAIC has declined.
FICTION. An individual reader may have their own opinion regarding “quality,” but most metrics used to assess the impact of peer reviewed journals across all fields calculate the ratio between the number of articles cited to the number of articles published (within a given time period). Citations per JAIC manuscript published over a two-year period have risen from 0.1 in 1999 to 0.679 in 2019 (https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=16300154700&tip=sid&clean=0). This is a substantial increase and indicates that more people are referencing – and therefore reading and holding in high regard – articles published in JAIC today.
Q: The acceptance rate of JAIC is low.
FICTION. The acceptance rate of JAIC varies year by year, but tends to be between 40-60%, compared to ~50% for scientific journals (Ware, Peer Review: Benefits, Perceptions and Alternatives, PRC Summary Papers 4:4-20 (2008)). For comparison, the Journal of Cultural Heritage has an acceptance rate of ~25%, Science is ~7% and Art History is ~9%.
Q: JAIC has thin issues because no one publishes in it.
FICTION. The journal is contractually limited to a certain page count per year. Since 2013, the annual limit has been 288 pages spread across four issues. We cannot exceed this limit without incurring costs and therefore we must restrict the number of articles published.
Q: JAIC only publishes the work of AIC members.
FICTION. Since the journal uses a double-blind peer review process, it is not possible to determine membership for any party involved in the process. Anyone is welcome to submit an article and in fact, many published JAIC authors are not AIC members. We do not ask if authors are members or factor this into editorial decisions. More information about the Taylor & Francis peer review process can be found at: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/peer-review.
Q: Short articles aren’t published by JAIC.
FICTION. Short communications and technical notes are welcome! Manuscripts falling in this category should be no more than 3,000 words including abstract, captions, and references, and are limited to four figures. A full description of this type of article was published in AIC News 40(6): 10 (2015).
Q: Articles related to conservation treatments aren’t published by JAIC.
FICTION. Some special issues such as the collections care issue (56(2)) or the reflectance hyperspectral imaging issue (58(1-2)) may not have treatment components in the included papers, but over the last five years up to 40% of the papers published in a given year have included a treatment component. Part of the scope of the journal is to publish treatment case studies. We strongly encourage individuals having interesting, problematic, and/or inventive treatments, as well as treatments involving understudied material types, to submit their work.
Q: Review articles aren’t published by JAIC.
FICTION. One of the most cited articles published by JAIC is “A Review of the Classes, Structures, and Methods of Analysis of Synthetic Organic Pigments” by Lomax & Learner, 45(2): 107-125 (2006). Reviews like this, or “So Delicate Yet so Strong and Versatile –The Use of Paper in Objects Conservation” (Artal-Isbrand, 57(3):112-126 (2018)) are extremely useful to the field, particularly when they collate dispersed information. Papers that document historic recipes or manufacturers are also quite valuable; two very recently published examples include “Commercially Manufactured Plain Papers in the United States, 1860–1900” (Mintie, 59(3-4): 148-158 (2020)) and “The Evolution of Salted Paper Printing During the 1850s: Published Recipes” (McElhone, 59(3-4): 211-271 (2020))
Q: “Big Picture” articles aren’t published by JAIC.
FICTION. JAIC welcomes contributions that examine broad aspects of the conservation field, conservation education, and history of the profession. Three recently published articles that exemplify this type of work include “Understanding and Improving Gender Equity in Conservation” (Davis, 58(4):202-216 (2019)), “Collecting Collections: Negotiating Material Value at the National Park Service” (Bottkol & Campbell, 58(4): 260-273 (2019)), and “Teaching Sustainable Collection Care” (Pearlstein, 56(2): 113-125 (2017))
Q: If your article doesn’t have spectra in it, it won’t be published by JAIC.
FICTION. Scientific analysis is not a requirement for publication. Examination of articles published or accepted for publication between 2015-2020 reveals that the number of articles from a given year containing spectra or scientific results based upon spectra varies widely, between 35-85%. Articles such as “Conservation of Photodegraded Asian Lacquer Surfaces: Four Case Studies” (Coueignoux & Rivers, 54(1):14-28 (2015)) or “Conservation of Christo/Paik Wrapped TV (1967): Documentation and Treatment of a Collaborative Artwork” (Delidow, Pace, and Meier, 55(1): 228-236 (2016)), both of which only focus on treatment, were published. Also, science does not necessarily have to involve expensive instrumentation; “Mineral Spirits-Based Microemulsions: A Novel Cleaning System for Painted Surfaces” (Ormsby et al. 55(1): 12-31 (2016)) assessed cleaning efficacy through visual inspection alone.
Q: Your project needs to be ground-breaking to be published by JAIC.
FICTION. The most cited article published by JAIC is the holistic “Salts in the Deterioration of Porous Materials: An Overview” (Charola, 39(3): 327-343 (2013)). Manuscripts must be interesting to our readers, and while this does mean JAIC publishes papers featuring new analytical techniques, the journal also publishes papers that contribute to an understanding of understudied types of objects, critically assess treatment approaches, or summarize historical recipes. For example, a submission that only uses macro-area XRF to study a painting may not be of great interest to the readership even though it features high tech, expensive, and rare instrumentation. Acceptance of such a manuscript would likely require additional factors, including a focus on an understudied artist, contextualization of the results with other technical studies, comparison of the results to findings obtained through more traditional approaches (x-radiography, multispectral imaging), or a discussion of new pathways for information dissemination.
Q: JAIC favors papers on white material culture.
MAYBE. To be absolutely clear: this is neither a goal nor a focus of the journal. However, JAIC can only publish work that authors submit; in turn authors can only submit manuscripts related to projects and materials that they have worked on. This work is usually dictated by an institution or a client. Data shown in the graph below was compiled from papers published or accepted by JAIC from 2015-2020; if a paper focused on a specific object, artist, or class of materials it was noted whether that material/artist was from European or Western cultures. Some years, like 2020, skewed heavily towards Western/European materials due to the special issue dedicated to salted paper prints (59(3-4)). Other years, including 2019, had no special issues but still focused primarily on European/Western materials or artists. This suggests that more research, time, and resources were dedicated to these objects and indicates that institutional biases played a role in the focus of manuscripts being printed by JAIC. However, we look forward to and welcome submissions on material culture from other areas and encourage proposals of special issues dedicated to other topics. Please note that anyone can suggest a special issue topic; if you have an idea, contact the JAIC Editor-in-Chief, Julio del Hoyo-Meléndez, to discuss your suggestion (jdelhoyo@muzeum.krakow.pl).
Q: JAIC favors white male authors.
MAYBE. Many recent studies seem to indicate, across publications from all fields, that racial/ethnic and gender biases result in fewer manuscripts published by women and people of non-White race/ethnicity relative to their White male peers. For instance, see Lundine et al., “The Gendered System of Academic Publishing,” Lancet, 391: 1754-1756 (2018); Lerback, et al., “Association Between Author Diversity and Acceptance Rates and Citations in Peer-reviewed Earth Science Manuscripts,” Earth and Space Science, 7(5), p.e.2019EA000946 (2020).
Unfortunately, both biases are difficult to assess due to the lack of tracking; like many journals, JAIC does not record the gender or race/ethnicity of its authors. To interrogate the racial/ethnic diversity among authors we would have to retroactively survey them, so cannot address bias of this sort at this time. However, by going through the biographies of the authors whose manuscripts were published or accepted for publication between 2015-2020 and noting the gender pronouns used by authors, we compiled data to assess the authors’ gender. The percentage of women (she/her) authors varies across those years from 54-77%. One interesting aspect of the 2015-2020 data is that more than twice as many articles had all women authors (38) than articles where the authors were all men (14). In the 2019 AIC membership satisfaction survey, 77% of the respondents identified as women. While the gender breakdown of authors is lower than that of the AIC membership as a whole, many authors are not AIC members, conservators, or allied professionals and so some contribution to this difference may arise from participation by individuals from other disciplines (including many sciences) that are less dominated by women.
That is not to say that there are not inequalities or inequities that contribute to this disparity. The difference in publication numbers between men and women occurs in many fields and is often known as the “productivity puzzle.” Many studies suggest that this is due in part to inequalities of time dedicated to household and childcare responsibilities, but other studies have identified a variety of other insidious influences on publishing rate disparities between men and women (www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/08/study-finds-male-phd-candidates-submit-and-publish-papers-significantly-higher-rates, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41304-020-00250-5).
Q: Foreign authors are not held to the same standards as authors from the USA.
FICTION. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are held to the same editorial and peer-review standards. Further, JAIC does not ask about the nationality of the corresponding author. Quality of English language is considered during review and often favors native English speakers. We cannot assess the relative acceptance rates of articles written by native English speakers and those written by non-native English speaker as this metric is not recorded. However, all articles submitted to and published by JAIC list authors’ addresses, allowing us to retroactively assess their geographic location, with the caveat that a foreign affiliation does not necessarily signify a non-native English speaker. The graph below, of papers published or accepted for publication between 2015-2020, shows that the number of authors working at locations outside of the USA varies widely; some years have significant numbers of international authors while other years show relatively few. Published authors come from a variety of countries, with more from Canada and European countries including England, Norway, and Italy; and fewer from more diverse locales, including: Iran, Denmark, Egypt, Austria, India, and Australia.
Country affiliations vary more widely for rejected papers than for accepted ones, and include authors working in Italy, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Ukraine, Tanzania, Netherlands, and England. This suggests that by upholding the same standards for all manuscripts, non-native English speakers are published less frequently. Note that if the content of the work is deemed acceptable by the peer reviewers but the quality of the English is not, JAIC suggests that authors seek assistance either from colleagues or editorial assistance services. Taylor & Francis offers in-house services (www.tandfeditingservices.com), but many other companies are available.
Q: A “major revision” decision on my paper means that JAIC is not interested in publishing it.
FICTION. A “major revision” decision means that the work is not fundamentally flawed but that the article needs more than minor changes to address the perceived issues. If the work was fundamentally flawed, it would be rejected or given a reject-and-resubmit recommendation. We acknowledge that receipt of “major revision” decision can be emotionally difficult. However, we encourage authors to accept reviewer remarks constructively and not as personal attacks; this is one reason the process is double blind. For some manuscripts, the reviewers will recommend additional work, experiments, or a significant reorganization of the manuscript. Sometimes the associate editor in charge of the paper will also recommend specific changes or potential ways the authors might address the reviewers’ comments. We recommend reading each reviewer’s comments carefully and thinking carefully about why each change is suggested. In some cases, reviewers may recommend work that is beyond the scope of the current project or that the authors feel is unjustified. Although not every change suggested by reviewers has to be made, authors should address why reviewer’s requests are not being accommodated in a letter to the editor that accompanies a resubmission. The letter should address the reviewers’ suggestions and comments point by point, explaining what has been done or not in response to the reviewers’ comments. For questions or concerns regarding the reviewers’ comments, please feel free to discuss concerns with the associate editor handling the paper.
Q: My paper was rejected by JAIC, but it was published later in another journal, proving that the JAIC editors dislike or are biased against me.
FICTION. A rejection from JAIC does not mean that your work should not be published. The manuscript may simply not match the scope or aims of the journal and might be a better fit elsewhere. One study showed that ~85% of authors who have a manuscript rejected chose to send the manuscript to another journal (Rotton, et al., “Publication Practices and the File Drawer Problem: A Survey of Published Authors,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 10(1): 1-13 (1995)) and other studies suggest that ~20% of manuscripts initially rejected by one journal are eventually accepted by another (Weller, Editorial Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses (2001)). Another factor to explain publication in another journal may be that the authors utilized reviewers’ comments from the JAIC submission to revise the manuscript, and the revisions helped improve the quality of the work for submission to the different journal. The peer review process plays a major role in which articles are accepted or rejected by any journal, and it is an imperfect system; see for instance, Weller 2001, and Kelly, Sadeghieh, & Adeli, “Peer Review in Scientific Publications: Benefits, Critiques, & A Survival Guide,” EJIFCC 25(3): 227-243 (2014). If you feel that the peer review process has resulted in an inappropriate decision on your manuscript, you may write a letter of appeal to the Editor-in-Chief of JAIC.
Q: I have note published anything before so JAIC is more likely to reject my work.
FICTION. Peer review at JAIC is double blind, meaning that the peer reviewers (theoretically) do not know the authors of the article or whether the authors have published before. However, learning to write is a life-long process and with more experience, your manuscripts will improve. JAIC has resources available online to help guide manuscript preparation (www.culturalheritage.org/contribute-to-the-journal). If you are a first-time submitter and are unsure about manuscript preparation, submission, and review processes, what editorial decisions mean, or how to respond to peer reviews, please feel free to reach out to the JAIC editorial team. Our email addresses are available at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=yjac20. Please feel free to email any us to set up a time to answer your questions, talk about the process, and provide more tailored advice on preparing your manuscript.
Q: JAIC editors rejected my article.
MAYBE. The editorial team does reject some papers without sending them out for peer review. This is due to fundamental flaws in the manuscript, including: inappropriateness for the journal, evidence for copying or plagiarism, fundamental flaws in methodology or ethics, not following the submission/layout guidelines of the journal, or poor quality of English language (rendering the manuscript unreadable). The number of articles rejected without review varies by year, from 10-27% of submissions between 2005-2020. Over that same time period rejections through review accounted for 16-62% of the articles, indicating that the majority of rejected articles went through the review process and were not rejected outright. These statistics are not uncommon in academic fields; it is estimated that 20% of articles are rejected without review due to issues with quality or scope and an additional 30% rejected after peer review (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.214.9676&rep=rep1&type=pdf).
These questions first appear in an article in AIC News, March 2021, Vol. 46(2). Corina E. Rogge, PhD, JAIC Associate Editor, wrote the article with help from the JAIC Editorial Board, especially Catherine H. Stephens, PhD.