Scholarship, Money, and Prose: Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal by Michael Chibnik (review)

Author Michael Chibnik is an economic anthropologist (now emeritus) who studies work. His last ethnography, in 2005, concerned the decorative wood-carving industry centred in Oaxaca, Mexico. His new book is about the four years (2012–16) he served as editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist (AA), the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. In the introduction, he characterizes his book as partly an ethnographic account (12), but it lacks the theorizing, citing, and disclosing of positionality that I would expect from ethnographic work. I would call it a focused memoir, one that covers the time shortly before he applied for the editorship through the completion of his term. Where the memoir does resemble ethnography is in Chibnik's interest in describing AA's operation systemically. In his account he includes all the stakeholders who had a part in generating AA, and there were many of them, while still colouring his account with his own subjective take. Chibnik claims to know of no other book-length first-hand account of what editing a scholarly journal involves (7). I think he is right about this. That fact alone makes his book a worthy contribution, but I myself did not need much enticement to pick it up. I have been the co-editor of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing for nearly five years, so I came to the book looking to compare notes from my own experience doing similar work.

Early in the book Chibnik describes the unusual economics of publishing AA. (I would have expected no less from an economic anthropologist.) AA belongs to the American Anthropological Association, but it is published by giant commercial publisher Wiley-Blackwell, which has a revenue-sharing agreement with the association. The association did not pay Chibnik a salary, but he was able to negotiate a course-load reduction with his school, the University of Iowa. The association did pay the salary of a managing editor living in California and split the cost, with his university, of hiring an editorial assistant at Iowa. Like Chibnik, those who agreed to be his associate editors, book review editors, editorial board members, and manuscript peer reviewers all worked as volunteers and were scattered across the country and abroad at different institutions. Anyone who is familiar with the strange labour economics of scholarly journal publishing will find nothing especially surprising about this complex arrangement: a hybrid operation of non-profit and for-profit partners staffed by geographically dispersed paid employees and volunteers. Chibnik returns to the topic of journal economics in chapter 7, in which he recounts a push from members of the association to move its journals from a subscription model to gold open access. He contends that open access was not a feasible model for AA, an important source of revenue for the association, and his from-the-editor column where he expressed his pessimistic view became his most talked-about column, principally for the criticism it attracted.¹

Chibnik recounts his experience as editor-in-chief in a narrative mode, but the story itself does not have much of a plot. That is because Chibnik did nothing radical or revolutionary in his term as editor-in-chief. Quite the opposite, in fact: he retained almost all the practices of his predecessor, who, he believes, had piloted the journal ably. Chibnik says that he suspected his proven track record for delivering promised work on time was decisive in getting him chosen for the editorship. His predecessor had written an editorial extolling the 'bread-and-butter' habits of promptness, organization, and reliability as what were needed most in AA's new editor-in-chief (2–3). And this is exactly what Chibnik brought to the job, for which his objective was to continue the good results of his predecessor. For this reason, his story lacks the excitement of a visionary overcoming opposition...