Special and Virtual Issues

During my time at Voluntas, we stewarded several special issues from volunteering (e.g., “Paradoxes within the Management of Volunteers,” guest edited by Anders la Cour, Lesley Hustinx & Nina Eliasoph) (la Cour, Hustinx, & Eliasoph, Reference la Cour, Hustinx and Eliasoph2023) to running two full issues about methodology in civil society and third sector scholarship, guest edited by Mirae Kim and Paloma Raggo (Kim & Raggo, Reference Kim and Raggo2022, Reference Kim and Raggo2023). We also continued with region-specific special issues, with “Civil Society in Latin America: Experiments, Resilience, New Utopias” which was guest edited by Humberto Muñoz Grandé and Patricia Maria E. Mendonça (Mendonça & Grandé, Reference Mendonça and Grandé2023).

The Latin America special issue was recognized by colleagues in the field in a recent piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Pallas et al., Reference Pallas, Domaradzka, Balboa, Bloodgood, Kumi, Kumi and Mendonça2024). Pallas et al. (Reference Pallas, Domaradzka, Balboa, Bloodgood, Kumi, Kumi and Mendonça2024) highlighted the special issue in Voluntas as an exemplary approach for promoting equity in scholarship. Voluntas has dependably taken concrete steps to support our colleagues outside of the Anglo-sphere and Europe. In this case, with the backing of ISTR and our publisher, we translated original articles written in Spanish and Portuguese into English to be considered for publication. Translation, coupled with a 2-day virtual workshop, resulted in an outstanding Latin America special issue.

We also rolled out virtual issues. We want these virtual issues to keep the scholarly conversation going in the journal and remind our community of the great work published in Voluntas. As noted, the topics were often selected based on the expertise of our editorial board and highlight the aims and scope of the journal. To date, we have commissioned the following virtual issues (found under “collections” on the Voluntas website):

• • Organizational Change in Nonprofit Organizations, December 2024 (Fehrenbach, Walk, & Greenspan, Reference Fehrenbach, Walk and Greenspan2024).

• • Philanthropy, October 2024 (Doan, Patil, & Williamson, Reference Doan, Patil and Williamson2024).

• • Civil Society and the Spread of Authoritarianism: Institutional Pressures and CSO Responses, March 2024 (Chimiak, Kravchenko, & Pape, Reference Chimiak, Kravchenko and Pape2024).

• • Comparative Civil Society and Third Sector Research in Voluntas, December 2023 (Holanda, Kim, & Appe, Reference Holanda, Kim and Appe2023).

• • Critical Scholarship on Global Civil Society: NGO-Funder Relationships, May 2023 (Eikenberry, Dodge, & Coule, Reference Eikenberry, Dodge and Coule2023)

• • Social Enterprise, February 2023 (Searing et al., Reference Searing, Lall and Knutsen2023)

• • The Previous Editors' Selection of Well-Recognized Papers, December 2022 (Simsa & Brandsen, Reference Simsa and Brandsen2021).

The Use of and Building on Theory

Surprisingly, at Voluntas, we see too many manuscripts submitted that do not use nor build on theory. The field being young (Voluntas started in 1990) is no longer a viable excuse. Voluntas alone has an archive of over 2000 articles spanning from 1990 to today. Other sister journals, whose numbers are growing, together have thousands of articles that can inform our research, not to mention the social sciences more broadly given the interdisciplinary of our field.Footnote ¹ There are no legitimate reasons to not engage with theory in the field, while still also making room for methodological rigor and innovation as well as practical and policy implications as appropriate. Many articles that are desk rejected are due to an insufficient use of theory that leads to a weak paper and one that we suspect will not make it through peer review. It also indicates a paper that does not make the effort to engage in conversations with research on civil society and the third sector. This leads the editors’ team to decide a paper is simply not a good fit for Voluntas. Desk rejects can be avoided if authors more deliberately framed their work around important questions and research in the field and used theory more effectively—by building, developing, expanding, and/or testing theory.

Write It More Concisely

An additional note is about word count—and in the spirit of conciseness, I will try to keep it short! Until my last day on the job as an editor I was getting push back from authors about word limits. To be fair, the exact optimal length of an academic paper was never fully reconciled among the Voluntas editors’ team. It was discussed a lot but we did not reach a consensus. I understand the challenges for authors with word count. As a qualitative researcher myself, I especially understood this concern, as most of my data are indeed words. I am certain that discussions on this will continue among the new editors’ team. There might be less pressure from the publishers for word counts given print versions are being phased out (Voluntas will not be “in print” starting in 2025, rather only published online moving forward).

My personal view, and the research shows, that there are diminishing returns of increasing article length/word count with respect to readership and impact. This has also come into conversation about the challenges of recruiting good reviewers (see below), and the role of article length in this (e.g., for a commentary on this, see Spector, Reference Spector2024). A compromise put forth by Voluntas (and done by several journals) was offering space online for supplementary materials. We accept supplementary files (e.g., appendices, additional tables, etc.) to be published online should the article be accepted for publication. However, I encourage the field (myself included) to work toward more conciseness.

Comparative Study

When Taco Brandsen and Ruth Simsa wrapped up their editorship, they published an editorial that among other observations, lamented that comparative work, specifically cross-national research, in Voluntas was still “rare” (Simsa & Brandsen, Reference Simsa and Brandsen2021, p. 2). I think we made some headway in the past five years, but this is a direction Voluntas will and should continue to encourage. With two doctoral students taking the lead, I co-guest edited a virtual issue for Voluntas on this very topic. Our introductory editorial to a selection of 10 comparative articles published in Voluntas sought to highlight that Voluntas is a key outlet in the field for comparative approaches since its start in 1990 (Holanda, Kim, & Appe, Reference Holanda, Kim and Appe2023). We were inspired to do this virtual issue due to Helmut Anheier’s keynote speech at the 2022 ISTR conference in Montreal, which was later published in Voluntas Anheier (Reference Anheier2023). Voluntas’ commitment to comparative work is in the spirit of fostering a global community of scholars who study civil society and the third sector. Please submit your best comparative work to Voluntas!

(Lack of) Systems of Accountability

One of the clear trends across the five years, and I think many of the editors in our subfield would agree, is the growing difficulty to finding reviewers. There are four points during the peer-review process where reviewers are nothing shy of critical. The challenges for an editor in the review process are:

1. 1. Having a solid roster of potential reviewers (diverse perspectives, geographic locations, expertise, methods, etc.)

2. 2. Getting colleagues to accept an invitation to review

3. 3. Getting the now reviewers to submit their reviews on time

4. 4. Receiving a constructive, helpful, high-quality review (for me the editor and the author[s]).

Should the paper go on to a round of revisions, #5 on this list would be keeping those reviewers engaged and having them accept to review the revised version(s). I was regularly surprised when reviewers did not accept reviewing a paper they suggested deserved a revise and resubmit decision. It is not a favor to the author, nor to new reviewers, when a manuscript is being reviewed by someone new midway in the process.

I call for systems of accountability here because I am worried with how many reviewers ignore or decline invitations to review; even those who regularly submit to and publish in Voluntas.

Posted on then-Twitter, Amanda Murdie (Professor in Department of International Affairs at University of Georgia and past editor-in-chief of International Studies Review) provides an honest take, from the perspective of an editor, about the peer-review system being in “trouble” (her word) in a series of posts on August 16, 2022. She wrote: “I asked 21 people to review the piece, and 20 turned us down (most of whom didn't even bother to hit accept/decline)” (Murdie, Reference Murdie2022). For Voluntas, our record is 26 declines before getting two reviewers to accept.

Though Murdie does not just describe the problem, rather she made some suggestions as well, and many of them resonated with me. She posted: “So, what do we do? … We need a formal tit-for-tat system. You can't submit until you do three reviews, for example.” She also wrote “… We need to train people to be good/efficient peer reviewers” (Murdie, Reference Murdie2022).

I tend to agree that we should uphold a suggested rule: for every submitted article, you accept to do three reviews. We should promote this in the field, however, I am not sure how we can enforce this as editors and journals. But it should be a professional practice that is, well, actually practiced. Another important path to solving these problems (namely, that the system of reviewing is on the brink of crisis) is training our colleagues and PhD students coming into the field about the significance of reviewing. It is not only crucial to the entire enterprise of academic publishing but also to their own development as scholars. We must socialize our colleagues and PhD students to be reviewers. For example, for PhD students, by their 2nd year, they should be signed up as reviewers for at least three journals. When we train people to write good and efficient reviews (as Murdie notes), editors will be more confident about managing the 1–5 critical points of the peer-review process listed above. We will have better scholarship published on the pages of journals like Voluntas.

In my post-editor life, I have committed to help socialize and train the field to do better in regard to reviewing. I look forward to having good conversations and teaming up with other colleagues in the field who also share this interest. At the 2024 ISTR conference in Antwerp, Dyana Mason (University of Oregon, USA, associate editor to Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly) and I teamed up to conduct a professional development session about reviewing. To my delight, it was well attended and had a high level of participation. It was a great discussion. This gave me some hope, hope I needed as the day-to-day tasks of securing reviewers and the challenges bring me great worry for the field.

The Golden Rule

As the face of a journal, editors receive the brunt of the dissatisfaction about academic publishing. We experience this when authors are frustrated about editorial decisions or the length of time in which those decisions are taking. We hear from reviewers when they think papers should not have passed a desk review. In addition, the Voluntas email account has a lot of activity around authors and reviewers alike complaining about the functionality of manuscript submission system. I would ask you to remember that editors across most all journals are doing the best they can. They juggle a lot with the day-to-day of running a journal while also expected to be entrepreneurial and strategic about increasing quality scholarship in the field. Since being an editor, as an author and reviewer, I have gotten a lot more gracious toward editors.

Indeed, one of the most effective ways I employed for turning down the temperature around annoyances of the publishing process, was to remind colleagues that editors are also authors. We all have our stories of at least one paper not going the way we wanted with a journal we were targeting. Sometimes it was for valid reasons, other times arguably there was some human error, or likely unintended, bad judgment by reviewers and/or editors. Fortunately, there are other journals, and we have all had to retool and move on. I have been there. My hope is that as a field we understand the shortcomings of the peer-review process but also understand that this is the process we have for now, and we need to participate in it to continue to make it better.

I also remind people that editors are also reviewers, for many journals outside the journal they edit. While it is fair to say when you are editing a journal, you have a good excuse to not accept invitations to review for other journals. In my case at least, I was experiencing so intimately how hard it is to get reviewers, there was a perverse incentive for me to accept, even as I was desk reviewing sometimes up to a dozen of articles weekly for Voluntas. Moving forward I will continue to review given I know how central it is to our knowledge production.