Democratizing publishing in communication/media studies: a case study of Communication, Culture & Critique

1 Introduction

The field of communication and media studies (hereafter “C/MS”) has been subject to various reflexive critiques concerning its structures of privilege and exclusion, particularly in its most elite spaces. These have highlighted insufficient diversity in gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, and global regions of scholars published in the field’s most highly ranked journals or serving on these journals’ editorial boards, as well as how the content of published work disproportionately cites and reflects a scholarly canon that emerged and solidified around Western and especially Euro-American scholarship. Such inequities arise from and perpetuate broader inequalities both within academia as well as broader cultural, economic, and political asymmetries that shape patterns of academic migration.

Chakravartty et al. (2018), discussing disparities between scholars of color and white scholars in C/MS with respect to their presence and citation in major peer-reviewed journals, has spurred additional research about the proportion of authors from groups marginalized in the academy and their representation on editorial boards. For example, examining C/MS publications from 2000 to 2019, Freelon et al. (2023) focused on 1,675 of the most highly cited scholars in communication research, finding that over 90 % of these were white, nearly three quarters were men, and over three quarters worked in the United States, with only minor longitudinal gains for women and non-U.S. scholars over the time period. Other studies have looked at the representation of scholars outside the Global North. Comel et al. (2023) and Comel et al. (2024) found substantial increases in journal publications by scholars in BRICS^[1] countries over a recent 10-year period (2012–2021), but – to some extent mirroring data from the Global North – these came from authors at a relatively small number of universities.

In terms of editorial boards, de Albuquerque et al. (2020) found that, of 76 communication journals in Clarivate’s Journal of Citation Reports, not only was the U.S. strongly over-represented, but a small number of U.S. universities dominated these boards; additionally, network analysis revealed that different journals shared some of the same members, thus making the collective composition of the editorial boards even less diverse. Also conducting network analysis, Goyanes et al. (2022) examined the editorial board membership of 281 journals across six academic fields, including communication, and reported that a disproportionate number of U.S. universities and Anglophone countries were represented for all of the fields.

Related to these kinds of quantitative approaches to the relationship between privilege and academic publishing in C/MS are critiques about the content and theoretical frameworks underlying much of the scholarship in the field. Over 20 years ago, Curran and Park (1999) argued for “de-Westernising media studies” beyond an uncritical perspective on globalization, and Shome and Hegde (2002: 267) made the case for using postcolonial theory to “deconstruct the colonial disposition in our intellectual work and initiate a more democratic reconceptualization of communication forms and practices.” Furthermore, as Waisbord (2022) noted, de-Westernizing C/MS has a long history in Global South scholarship, including Latin America. The call to decolonize/de-Westernize the field and center other frameworks and epistemologies has been made by many others, including from the perspectives of African media studies (Mohammed 2021; Moyo 2020), Asian scholars (Jin 2021; Wang 2011), and Latin American scholarship (e.g., Ganter and Ortega 2019; Waisbord and Mellado 2014).

Nevertheless, C/MS journals continue to favor Global North content in various ways, and within the Global North, U.S.-centrism remains evident. For example, Chan et al. (2021) investigated how scholars in eight prominent C/MS journals^[2] contextualized their research, with attention to the difference between those writing about non-U.S.-based projects and those writing about the U.S. Unsurprisingly, the articles overall were overwhelmingly about Anglophone Global North countries, and even countries/regions outside of North America and Western Europe were still mostly in what the U.N. classifies as the most economically prosperous Tier A category (e.g., Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan). Furthermore, scholars writing about non-U.S. research devoted more space contextualizing their studies’ rationales, results, and discussion section than those writing about the U.S., something Chan et al. labeled a “politics of contextualization,” involving discursive practices that may “reinforce ideological hegemony” (5275) even if the scholarship is examining non-Western phenomena, since such practices are premised on Western contexts being the familiar norm requiring little or less explanation.

One strategy to provide more journal space for content about, and scholars from, the Global South has been special issues (SI). Ekdale et al. (2022) examined the outcomes of this for five highly ranked journals in journalism studies^[3] (which is cognate with C/MS) with respect to authorship, SI editorship, and citation rates, and found that “publications in themed issues about the Global South or global topics comprise only 2 % of the total publications” of over 4,000 articles published over a 20-year span of 1990–2019. However, these issues did result in “a more geographically diverse group of authors” (1943), including those based in South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As for Global South scholars who served as SI editors, they were disproportionately more likely to be working on Global South/global-themed SIs compared to SI editors located in the Global North, pointing to a continuing disparity overall for such editorship. Furthermore, as Ekdale et al. noted, earlier research reporting higher citation rates for SI articles than regular issue articles had not distinguished between the topics of the SIs; however, Ekdale et al. reported that citations for articles that were part of Global South/global-themed SIs were far fewer than for regular articles in the same volume of the journal. Another caveat is that even if journals are publishing more Global South scholarship, this kind of diversity may not significantly change deeper structural inequities of power and resources (Waisbord 2022).

There have also been efforts by academic organizations to more effectively expand meaningful participation of scholars outside the Euro-American sphere, particularly the International Communication Association (ICA; e.g., see Gardner 2018; Livingstone 2007; Ng and Gardner 2020), which has historically revolved much more around the Global North in terms of membership and conference venues than its counterpart organization, the International Association for Media and Communication Research. For example, Ekdale et al. (2022) noted that although ICA’s Journalism Studies division was established in 2005 with one explicit goal of being international, neither its membership (55 % US in 2005, 48 % in 2019) nor awards (100 % to scholars in Global North from 2011 to 2018, including 65 % to US scholars) reflect this.

ICA does have several public documents that speak to issues of internationalization and inequity. The mission statement notes (amongst other items) a goal to “[f]acilitate inclusiveness and debate among scholars from diverse national and cultural backgrounds and from multi-disciplinary perspectives on communication-related issues” (International Communication Association n.d.a). ICA’s current roster of committees includes a six-person Membership and Internationalization Committee, charged with recommending and monitoring policies and practices “regarding the internationalization of ICA” and “the needs of non-US members of ICA” (International Communication Association n.d.b). Its Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access statement acknowledges “historical patterns of structurally-ingrained power and resource imbalances and systems of oppression” in the field, and pledges to implement changes to increase equity and access, including around “awards, editorships, membership, employment, grants, fellowships, research, publications, leadership roles, conference participation” (International Communication Association 2021). Nevertheless, as our paper will also discuss for one ICA journal, these efforts are yet to yield substantial progress.

Although multiple problematic threads regarding privilege and marginalization in C/MS have been identified, there have not yet been many accounts of how specific sites of academic gatekeeping can address the issues. It is here that our paper seeks to intervene, with the two authors writing as part of the editorial leadership of Communication, Culture & Critique (CCC): Melissa Click as editor-in-chief and Eve Ng as one of the associate editors. In addition, while previous data-based research about journals has looked across multiple journals, including across different academic fields, this paper provides a detailed account of the strategies implemented in one specific C/MS journal.

The editorial term for CCC is four years, so the time span we focus on is our team’s editorship from January 2021 to December 2024. Click noted in her initial editor’s essay that CCC’s mission statement explicitly “describes it as a space for scholarship that places ‘questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry,’” and that the journal should aim to “better reflect the global mission of the International Communication Association” (Click 2021: 2). On CCC’s website, the journal’s mission is also summarized as “prioritiz[ing] qualitative scholarship that engages with wider historical, economic, cultural, and political dynamics” and “providing a space for scholarship on, by, and/or about people and topics underrepresented in academic publishing” (Communication, Culture & Critique n.d.). In this vein, Click identified three lines of action for our editorial term: expanding and diversifying the editorial board; soliciting special issues and special Forum sections (for shorter essays) that would cover a larger range of “topics, communities, and methods,” including those focused on media cultures of people of color and communities of the Global South; and initiatives to facilitate publication of scholars from traditionally marginalized groups or regions. We discuss these three endeavors in Sections 3, 4, and 5 respectively, and in Section 6, also present additional information on (i) CCC’s acceptance/rejection rates by country and (ii) CCC submitter demographic characteristics compared to other journals from Oxford University Press (OUP, CCC’s publisher) as these data relate to the topic of Global North/South authorship.

As the forthcoming sections show, we made only modest inroads towards the goals outlined by Click (2021), with a number of challenges persisting for reaching and publishing scholars located in the Global South, and a need to reexamine normative assumptions about the format of journal articles. Furthermore, it is apparent from our examination of CCC data that a significant portion of published scholars or editorial board members who originated in a Global South country end up studying and/or employed in the Global North, reflecting the “academic capital” that Global North institutions confer (Demeter 2019), even though North-South movement is not completely unidirectional (e.g., see Mendoza et al. 2020). While the focus of this paper was not academic migration, for which there is another rich literature, it is worth noting that in studies such as Chakravartty et al. (2018) and Freelon et al. (2023), a non-white Global South migrant working in a U.S. institution would not be distinguished from scholars of color born in the U.S. However, delineating the asymmetrical global movements of scholars in a more systematic way was beyond the scope of this paper; rather, for our analysis, we made particular use of data available to Click as CCC’s editor-in-chief, alongside some information which is publicly available, as the next section outlines in more detail.

2 Definitional and methodological considerations

As we were concerned with addressing the underrepresentation of certain groups, it is important to specify how we determined the relevant identity categories of scholars. First, of course, the definitions of Global North versus Global South do not map exactly onto geographical Northern and Southern hemispheres. Since the key factor is differentiating levels of sociopolitical privilege and disadvantage, we referred to the classification of countries that ICA uses for determining membership/conference registration rates, which is taken from the United Nations model of “A,” “B,” and “C” countries (see International Communication Association n.d.c). Generally, Tier A countries are those that are commonly considered Global North. These include the usual countries of North America, Western Europe, and Australia/New Zealand, but also a number of economically well-off countries or autonomous regions elsewhere, such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in Asia; Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in North Africa; and Chile in South America.

In previous studies, the current location of a scholar has frequently been used to classify their Global North versus Global South status (e.g., Comel et al. 2024); this can usually be determined via a scholar’s institutional affiliations (at the time of a publication or as provided by an editorial member), though these do occasionally change and become outdated. For CCC’s editorial board membership, we follow this convention as well, deriving our data from publicly available information about these scholars. Scholars who submitted manuscripts to CCC’s ScholarOne submission system (whether for regular issues or SIs) were asked for the lead author’s country of citizenship and the country from which the manuscript was being submitted. This information was accessible to Click as editor-in-chief. For a pre-submission review program we established for scholars from groups underrepresented in academic publishing (see Section 5), the scholar provided their institutional location and sometimes their citizenship information as part of an initial expression of interest via email to Click’s editorial assistant.

In upcoming sections, we also discuss additional data to which Click had access as editor-in-chief: reviewer feedback, via CCC’s ScholarOne system; statistics and rationales for desk rejections of submissions, from Click’s own records; overall acceptance/rejection figures of submissions by country of submission, compiled by OUP and shared with Click; and how CCC compares to certain other OUP journals in terms of submitter demographics, shared with Click by ICA staff. In addition, we examined two metrics of reach published by OUP on each CCC article’s public URL: its Dimensions citation number and the number of views.^[4]

As two members of CCC’s editorial team, we acknowledge that we are both the agents of the strategies and initiatives discussed and scholars seeking to evaluate their effectiveness. Therefore, we cannot claim to present an “objective” assessment, but at the same time, we offer something few if any published papers have: behind-the-scenes access to the team’s editorial decisions and various kinds of submission data for the four years of issues we edited. Editorial work is typically isolated and clandestine, even inside a large international organization with multiple journals, like ICA. Thus, we see the unconventional methodological approach of this paper as helping to bring greater visibility to conventional Western editorial practices, offering insights into our decision-making as we guided the journal, and some distinct quantitative data bearing on the impact of our actions.

3 Editorial board composition

Previous research on the composition of journal editorial boards has generally not discussed the specific processes of how members end up on the boards, so it is worthwhile to briefly make note of this here, before turning to CCC’s processes to diversify its board. Based on the experience of the authors and in consulting with other colleagues,^[5] we believe that it typically involves the editor reaching out to specific scholars based on one or more of the following:

1. A scholar who has reviewed for the journal, especially if the reviews were deemed to be well done and submitted on time.

2. A scholar who is already known to the editor-in-chief and/or other members of the editorial team (e.g., associate, subject, or book review editors) for their work, regardless of their history of reviewing for the journal.

3. Recommendations made by existing members of a journal’s editorial board.

In other words, there is not an open call or process of election; rather, scholars who are already known to the journal’s editorial leadership or board are those most likely to be invited. It should be clear why this perpetuates existing disparities, including the preponderance of Global North scholars.

Furthermore, an intersecting set of factors concerns why a scholar might be recommended for an editorial board, especially if they have not previously served as a reviewer for the journal. In this case, scholarly reputation plays a significant role, and thus those who have already published (in an area of review need for the journal) are best positioned to be identified. Mitigating against only the most well-known scholars being invited is the fact that those who are mid-career or senior often have too many similar commitments to take on another such responsibility. Nevertheless, the specter of “merit” hovers over considerations of who to ask, even as peer assessments of academic merit are deeply entwined with privileges of gender, race, class and other axes of difference. Occasionally, underlying assumptions about who is “worthy” of the field’s recognition are thrust into open contestation, such as in 2019, when a senior white male scholar, Martin J. Medhurst, at the time editor of the journal Rhetoric & Public Affairs, opposed the National Communication Association’s (NCA) decision to have a separate awards committee choose nominees for their Distinguished Scholar award, instead of existing Distinguished Scholars making these nominations. In a broader dissent, Medhurst (2019: n.p.) argued that NCA’s attempts to diversify would lead to “identity [being] prioritized over intellectual and scholarly merit,” with journal editors and reviewers no longer those most “competent” but instead, there would be “editorial boards … filled with the ‘right’ number of people from the ‘right’ categories.”

The ensuing debates included rigorous criticisms of this (hardly new) position (e.g., see Rodriguez et al. 2019) but also cautions not to reduce the goal of democratizing NCA and C/MS overall to token gestures. As Andrade and Cooper (2019: 27) wrote, “we urge our peers … to not rely on piecemeal solutions for problems, such as changing editorial boards or focusing on diversity initiatives that do not attend to the needs of Black and Brown people” with respect to broader structural inequalities beyond academia. In outlining below CCC’s actions to expand and diversify its editorial board, we recognize that these are necessarily limited in scope and effect, yet we also see them as important steps to take. We will return to the question of what remains to be addressed in our concluding section.

Prior to the start of her term, Click, a white woman working in the U.S., chose a team of five associate editors on the basis of their involvement with ICA, their backgrounds in academic publishing, and their scholarly reputations. Their identities and location were also a consideration. Four of these associate editors identify as people of color and two are queer. Four grew up outside the U.S., and three worked at universities outside the U.S., though only one of these – the Philippines – is a Global South country (of the other two, Chile and New Zealand, Chile is non-Anglophone). In comparison, the previous associate editor team of four were all at universities in North America, with three people of color and one queer.

In the first year, Click asked the associate editors to help develop a list of possible scholars with the express purpose of diversifying the editorial board, paying attention to gender, sexuality, academic seniority, race, and nationality. She also emailed the existing board members to ask for suggestions. We were especially interested in developing a board that is less U.S.-centric and with greater representation from non-Anglophone and Global South countries. This generated a list of 61 scholars working in Tier A locations, five scholars working in Tier B locations, and four scholars working in Tier C locations. Click and the associate editors met to discuss the scholars, reviewing their academic websites, and decided to add 28 new members to the editorial board, giving weight to their demographics as well as how their areas of expertise could contribute to the kinds of diverse scholarship we expected board members would review. Subsequently, Click also wrote to a number of CCC’s editorial board members thanking them for their service and letting them know that they would be cycling off the board to make room for new members. We repeated these tasks in each year of our four-year term. The results to date can be seen in Table 1, where figures in the left column represent the board as of September 2024 (91 members total), and those in the right column are for the board from May 2020 (68 members total).

As can be seen, members from the U.S. were and are still the majority (though only barely, 51.6 %, in 2024), but the current board is more geographically diverse than before. Of particular note are increases in members resident in countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In 2024, there were seven in Southeast, East, South, and Central Asia, though this included three in UN Group A countries/regions (Hong Kong and Japan); six in Latin America; and three in Africa. This constitutes a total of 16, versus only three total from countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in 2020.

We do not wish to overstate things – scholars resident in North America, U.K., Western Europe, and Australia/New Zealand still constitute over four fifths of the board (82.4 %) – but this is down from over 95 % in 2020. Also, some of the board members resident in the Global North were originally studying or working in Global South countries, but we did not systematically determine who these were, so have not distinguished this in the data. However, for scholars who submitted manuscripts to the journal, we had access to author-provided information about their citizenship and location, which provided important information with which to examine CCC’s special issues, as we discuss in the next section.

4 Special issues

As noted in the Introduction, one of CCC’s strategies was soliciting special issues (SIs) that could (i) be more intentionally focused on scholarship about contexts outside the Global North and/or (ii) include authors working in the Global South. CCC publishes four issues a year, and each issue comprises either a number of full-length papers, or those full-length papers plus an additional themed “Forum” section of shorter (typically 1,000–2,000 word) essays. SIs can consist of full papers only, Forum papers only, or a combination of both. As Table 2 shows, over the four-year term of our editorship, there were SIs of full papers and/or Forum sections every year. SI articles comprised a minority of the pages for 2021 (36.4 %), 2023 (37.1 %), and 2024 (42.0 %) and a majority of pages in 2022 (66.5 %). Averaging over the 16 issues from 2021 to 2024, SI article pages have been 45.9 % of total pages, so less than regular articles, but not drastically so. By this measure, the SIs were not marginalized or substantially tokenized.

An examination of the 10 SIs published during our editorial term points to some achievements with respect to content focused on Global South contexts, but much more limited success for featuring scholars currently working in the Global South, even though a significant proportion of authors for some issues identified a Global South country of citizenship. We followed the convention of various previous studies (e.g., Chakravartty et al. 2018; Ekdale et al. 2022) in counting only first authors.^[6] Table 3 shows each SI during our term, the SI’s topic, along with information about the first author’s citizenship and location from where they submitted their paper as provided by this author at the time of submission.

Five of the SIs addressed the Global South explicitly or were on specific media/cultures of the Global South. The digital cultures of South Asia were the focus for the Forum section of 14(3). For 15(3), women on Chinese television was the topic of the full papers and global representations of female masculinity the topic of the Forum section. Issue 16(2) examined digital activism occurring in the Global South or involving Global North/South alliances, and 16(4) discussed digital technologies and cultures from the perspective of the Global South. Issue 17(2) featured articles on feminist movements and their political communications across the Global South. For two other SIs, global or transnational themes in the topic were central, though the Global South itself was not: 15(2) on digital migration practices and 17(3) on transnational queer cultures and digital media. The other three SIs covered academic life during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (14(3) Forum section), mentoring women of color in C/MS (14(4) Forum section), and the South Korean Netflix series Squid Game (15(4) Forum section).

This range of topics for these 10 SIs resulted in many articles that centered the Global South. Particularly diverse was 17(2), featuring papers about feminist political communication in Argentina, Brazil, China, Iran, and Nigeria. At the same time, the majority of Global South contexts concerned the two largest BRICS countries, China and India, although other articles examined Palestinian activism (16(2)), Indonesian digital propaganda (16(4)), Ghanaian women’s use of digital media (16(4)), and queer websites in Africa (17(3)). However, in terms of the location of first authors, six of the SIs had only one or none in the Global South. This included two with significant content about the Global South, 16(2) and 16(4), both of which had only one author submitting from a Global South country. The SI with the highest proportion of first authors located in the Global South was 15(3), with five out of 10 working in China. Issue 14(3) had three out of eight located in India, while 17(2) had one in China and one in Nigeria out of eight first authors. Over all the special issues, only 15 out of 111 first authors, or 13.5 %, were located in a Global South country at the time of submission. For authors located in the Global North, the U.S. comprised a slight majority, 51 out of 96 (53.1 %); other Global North locations included 14 in the UK; eight elsewhere in Western Europe (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway), seven in Australia, five in Canada, five Hong Kong, and one in New Zealand.

In contrast, the citizenship of first authors revealed more geographical diversity compared to author location. For 16(2), three out of eight first authors were citizens of a Global South country (India, Ghana, Nigeria), while for 16(4), six out of nine authors were (Brazil, China, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Mexico). Issue 14(3) had the highest proportion: nine out of 11 first authors were citizens of India or Bangladesh. The majority of first authors for 17(2) (five out of eight) were citizens of a Global South country (China, Nigeria, or Venezuela), although only three first authors were located in a Global South country. Also notable was 17(3), which had no first authors located in a Global South country, but seven out of 13 with citizenship in China, India, Morocco, South Africa, or Turkey. Over all of the special issues, 42 out of 111 first authors, or 37.8 %, were citizens of a Global South country.

Worth noting is that the geographical diversity of both author location and citizenship for regular issues was significantly lower: no issue had more than two authors located in a Global South country and six of the 10 issues had none. Over all 87 first authors of regular issue articles, only five (5.7 %) were working in a Global South country (3 China, 2 Philippines) and 14 (16.1 %) were citizens of a Global South country (3 China, 2 each for India and Philippines, 1 each for Brazil, Ghana, Iran, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey). For authors located in the Global North, most, 68 out of 82 (82.9 %), were in the U.S.; the remaining 14 were in Western Europe (5: Belgium, Czech Republic, Sweden, UK), Canada (4), East Asia (4: South Korea and Hong Kong), or Australia.

By such comparison, CCC’s SIs provided more space for scholars located or originating from the Global South. Yet the goal of publishing Global South scholars is not just for their work to appear in the journal, but for it to be read and cited. As mentioned earlier, Ekdale et al. (2022) found that in journalism studies journals, articles in SIs with Global South or global themes had significantly lower citation rates than articles in regular issues. Ekdale et al. calculated citations over a five year period, but since we only have data from 2021 onwards, we cannot replicate that time span. However, data for the 2021 and 2022 issues provide suggestive comparisons, with a more mixed picture for the two most recent years.

Table 4 shows the citations and views per article for each SI, with Global South-themed SIs highlighted in blue: 14(3) Forum, 15(3), 16(2), 16(4), and 17(2). For both 2021 and 2022, the Global South-themed SIs had lower citations per article, though the views per article data were more mixed. In 2021, citations and views per article in the SIs overall were 2.23 and 671.09 respectively, while for the 14(3) Forum, these were 1.55 and 561 respectively. In 2022, citations per article in SIs overall was 3.98, but it was 2.60 for 15(3); however, 15(3) had 1,334.9 views/article, comparable to the 2022 average of 1,352.05. For 2023, both SIs were Global South-themed, so there were no other 2023 SIs with which to compare these with; we will simply note that 16(4) had higher average citations and views per article than 16(2). For 2024, the articles are too recent to have accumulated many citations, but as of December 2024, the citations per article for the Global South-themed 17(2) was 0.13, which is slightly higher than 2024 SI average of 0.11.

In sum, based on the years with the most data, 2021 and 2022, Global South-themed SI articles on average have garnered fewer citations, but we would need to see how the SI figures overall bear out over the next few years, especially for the later issues, to say anything definitive about how being focused on the Global South affects a SI’s reach as measured by article views and citations. We did, however, find that averaging across all SIs (without distinguishing topic focus), citations per article were lower than for regular issues published the same year, with more mixed results for views per article. Table 5 shows the average citations and views per article for all SIs (highlighted in yellow) and all regular issues within a year. For 2021, the difference between SIs and regular issues is quite high; citations per article averaged 2.23 for SIs versus 5.65 for regular issues, and the average views per article were 671.09 versus 934.76. For 2022 and 2023, the differences in citations per article for SIs compared to regular issues were not so stark (3.98 versus 4.95; 1.50 versus 1.61). Views per article were lower for 2023’s SIs than regular issues (539.34 and 724.71 respectively), but in 2022 and 2024, were actually higher for SIs than regular issues (1,352.05 versus 936.11; 436.64 versus 421.54).

The data in this section only provide insights into articles that appeared in CCC, but earlier challenges occur in terms of authors getting their articles through the review process and published, and the next section discusses an endeavor that sought to address these processes.

5 The pre-submission review program

In 2022, CCC launched the “pre-submission review program,” an initiative designed to mentor authors underrepresented in academic publishing, especially scholars in the Global South. The program was developed from conversations with the editorial staff of two journals also published by OUP, International Political Sociology and Foreign Policy Analysis, and with the Outreach and Equity co-editors of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, all of which have similar initiatives. The initiative limited participation to graduate students and early career scholars who have completed dissertations within the past two years and required authors to submit a manuscript for consideration along with a statement about their eligibility. For submissions approved after the editorial team assessed the manuscript for its alignment with the journal’s focus and the author’s eligibility, the editor selected a mentor whose expertise aligned with the focus of the submission (typically from the editorial board) to provide a review within eight weeks. The author was then asked to revise their manuscript for anonymous peer review, with the expectation that this revision would be submitted to CCC. While participation is not a guarantee of publication, the aim was that receiving detailed mentor feedback would increase the chances of the revised manuscript obtaining favorable peer reviews and being published.

To publicize the initiative, we added information about it to the journal’s instructions for authors page (previously up at https://academic.oup.com/ccc/pages/General_Instructions) and promoted the initiative through ICA’s communication channels with members (including social media). Additionally, for two years in a row, members of CCC’s editorial team visited the business meetings of many of ICA’s sections during ICA’s annual conference, giving quick oral presentations and distributing paper bookmarks to attendees. We also shared the initiative with the journal’s editorial board both at the conference and via email. By December 2024, 10 submissions had been received. Out of these, three manuscripts successfully became publications after program participation. The author of another submission was advised to submit directly into the journal because the manuscript was quite strong (and their paper has since been published). A different manuscript went through the pre-submission review, but the revised manuscript was rejected by peer reviewers. The other five submissions were not accepted because the author was ineligible for the program, or the manuscripts were not yet sufficiently developed (in those cases we encouraged the authors to revise and resubmit to the program).

The program has yielded some success in serving graduate students and early career scholars, but it has not resulted in as many submissions from the Global South as it was intended to. We received only one such submission, from a Tier B country, and it did not make it to publication, despite detailed mentoring feedback. The mentor, who was working in a Tier C country at the time, provided a 1,200-word review that identified revisions required in five areas, also noting that the paper read as “a jumble of many ideas” that needed “to focus on its specific intent and develop the relevant overall argument.” After the author submitted the revised manuscript, it was assigned to two reviewers with expertise in the subject area, one who worked in a Tier C country and one in a Tier A country. Both reviewers recommended that the submission be rejected, with a common thread remaining the paper’s lack of sufficient theoretical clarity.^[7] Click then asked the original mentor to review the revised submission, and the mentor also agreed that the manuscript should be rejected despite showing improvements, due to the amount of revision still required.

There is certainly a need to support scholars marginalized in Tier A countries, and the pre-submission review program did assist a few emerging scholars, particularly in the U.S., to publish in CCC. However, in order to make a meaningful impact on Global North/South disparities, endeavors like these, at a minimum, must more successfully recruit participation from scholars in the Global South; our outreach efforts likely reflected the Global North skew of ICA conferences, membership, and social media followers. Furthermore, we recognize that the program may also perpetuate standard Western expectations for academic writing, including the format and flow of journal articles, and that despite our intentions, the framing of the program has a colonialist tenor, with scholars in the Global South requesting and receiving assistance from mentors.

Another facet of the barriers faced by Global South scholars is evident from data about CCC’s acceptance/rejection rates, including desk rejections, as the next section discusses.

6 Additional data: CCC acceptance rates by country and CCC submitter information compared to other Oxford UP journals

As Click noted in the 2023 CCC annual report, “We are heartened to see a difference in the diversity of submissions’ foci and topics that were accepted in 2023; that difference has yet to result in an improvement in the representation of submitting authors’ origins” (Click 2024: 5). CCC had an overall acceptance rate of 20.1 % in 2023, with a large degree of variation tied to which country the scholar was submitting from. Of the 174 submissions in 2023 for which there was acceptance/rejection data (see Table 6), the manuscripts came from 39 different countries, but CCC published articles by scholars in only nine countries, with the U.S. comprising the single largest contingent. Of 74 submissions from Global South countries, only one (from China) was accepted (1.4 %). There was also variation within Global North submissions, in favor of the U.S.: out of 59 submissions from U.S.-based scholars, there were 24 acceptances (40.7 %); from the U.K., 10 submissions with three acceptances (30 %); and from Global North countries besides the U.S. and U.K., 31 submissions yielded six acceptances (19.4 %).

Indeed, while scholars in the Global South are submitting, many of these were rejected by the editor-in-chief without being sent out for peer review. To provide additional context for the desk rejections, we analyzed the submission logs kept by the editor-in-chief for all of the articles rejected in 2023 (119, out of the 174 total submissions for that year). Just over half, 60, were desk-rejected because they were not focused on critical C/MS scholarship. 23 (19.3 %) were desk-rejected because they had a limited analytical scope; for instance, making claims based on only one episode of a television series or on a few interviews. 20 (16.8 %) were desk-rejected because they utilized quantitative methodology without any critically oriented analysis. Finally, 16 (13.4 %) were desk-rejected because of length; for example, one article submitted in 2023 was 18,000 words and another was 3,100 words (CCC’s maximum is 7,000 words). The other “reject” decisions seen in Table 6 were generated when reviewers returned a “reject” decision for submissions sent out for peer review, with rationales frequently pointing to a submission’s lack of alignment with the journal’s scope or the manuscript’s contributions being unclear. Global North submissions were also desk-rejected for these reasons, but at a lower rate.

While the discussion so far underscores how Global South scholars are still significantly underrepresented as CCC editorial board members and authors, we have some preliminary data showing that the journal compares favorably with similar journals along several other dimensions of privilege/marginalization. In April 2024, preliminary figures from the demographic data collection gathered through CCC’s ScholarOne submission site was shared with Click by ICA. Tables 7–9 show how the most recent new CCC ScholarOne accounts (387 total at the time of this data) compare with other OUP journals classified as “social sciences.”

In comparison to those OUP journals, CCC’s (new) ScholarOne users were less white, and more likely to identify as Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic or Latino/a/x, and Middle Eastern or North African (Table 7). In terms of ethnicity, these CCC ScholarOne users were less likely to identify with an ethnicity rooted in Western or Eastern European heritage; they were more likely to identify with an ethnicity rooted in South and Southeast Asian, North American, Sub-Saharan African, South American, and Central American and Caribbean heritage (Table 8). Users of CCC’s ScholarOne system were also more likely to identify as women and also as non-binary or gender diverse (Table 9).

Although the difference in CCC’s data versus other social sciences journals is small, the observed trends suggest that the changes we made at the journal during our four-year term may be starting to have an impact. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that these are incremental shifts, and given the length of time that the field of C/MS has been aware of multiple disparities, effecting more significant changes should be a more urgent imperative. In our concluding section, we summarize some of the persistent challenges and underscore the structural conditions that must be addressed.

7 Concluding reflections: persistent challenges and possible ways forward

To take a broader lens for a moment, it is important to note that, collectively, many Global South scholars face a disproportionate amount of structural constraints, as Ekdale et al. (2022) pointed out, such as working at institutions that have fewer research resources, higher teaching loads, and lower relative income that may lead scholars to pursue non-research-related income-earning activities, as well as “broader political and economic constraints that can reduce opportunities for scholars to maintain active research agendas, ranging from political instability to limited academic freedom in their home countries” (1956–1957). Within these conditions, even the most successful efforts of any single journal towards greater North/South equity will only be a small piece of what is required; as Waisbord (2022: 30) notes, “Dewesternization … is a multifaceted process” that must operate “in multiple registers.”

This paper has reviewed a set of strategies implemented by CCC’s editorial team over 2021–2024 to diversify the journal’s editorial board and the journal’s content, particularly in terms of publishing more work by Global South scholars and about Global South contexts. We made modest inroads in terms of changing the composition of the board, making it less dominated by scholars in the Global North and especially in the U.S., although these members are still the majority of the board. Still, the editorial team and board functioned as gatekeepers of membership, since they came up with the recommendations for who to invite. We believe this practice is common, and yet is likely to at least partially replicate the existing geographical slant of the editorial team and board. Click recently received a query from a scholar who grew up in a Tier B country (though now working in a Tier A country) asking whether there was an application to join the editorial board. There is not, but having more transparent and open calls or application procedures for serving on editorial boards could be an effective element for diversifying them, and we encourage editorial teams to consider this.

In terms of journal content, CCC published a number of special issues (SIs) of full papers, shorter Forum essays, or both, and our examination of the topics and authors of the SI articles pointed to some successes in featuring Global South-themed scholarship and Global South authors. We found, as did Ekdale et al. (2022) for a different set of journals, that SIs provided opportunities to feature Global South-centered topics, and had a higher proportion of authors who were citizens of and/or located in Global South countries. Although the majority of CCC’s SI article authors were located in the Global North and a majority were also citizens of a Global North country, the proportion of SI authors who were located in the Global South and/or citizens of a Global South country was significantly higher than was the case for authors of CCC’s regular issue articles. This is no doubt tied to the fact that half of the 10 SIs focused on Global South media/cultures. However, citation data suggests that articles in CCC’s 2021–2024 SIs had lower rates of citation than its regular issues, and that across just the SIs themselves, the ones focused on Global South topics had even fewer citations, though the relatively short time span for this data means it should be considered preliminary.

We wish to underscore that citation metrics themselves (and the need to quantify citations in general) are a problematic component of measurement and prestige concerns originating in Global North contexts that continue to favor Global North institutions, especially U.S. ones (de Albuquerque et al. 2020). Crucially, the standard numerical definitions of “impact” presume an association between frequency/longevity of citation and a publication’s significance and “quality.” Given what we have discussed in this paper, we suggest serious reconsiderations about ways to meaningfully collect and share data on other forms of impact, including the degree to which a journal is a space for authors, reviewers and editorial board members with Global South identities – or how such scholars experience their review/publication processes.

Additionally, while we did not conduct detailed analysis of the content of CCC’s articles, previous studies have noted that having Global South scholars be published does not eliminate other forms of North/South structural inequality. Besides the “politics of contextualization” that Chan et al. (2021) identified, which we mentioned earlier, Jin (2021) noted that many scholars from non-Western countries do not read or cite publications written in the languages of their home countries, perhaps in part because English-language articles published in Western journals are accorded more prestige – another facet of what Demeter (2019) discussed as the “academic capital” associated with Global North academic institutions – though reviewer comments or journal policies regarding citation of non-English sources may also be at play.

Indeed, none of the strategies taken by CCC address language limitations, given that submissions to CCC, as to most top-tier journals of the field, must be in English, a serious constraint discussed in previous literature (e.g., Suzina 2021). We cannot help but notice that Online Media and Global Communication (OMGC) itself has this requirement, although in publishing article abstracts in multiple languages, OMGC offers a degree more linguistic accessibility to readers globally. Beyond the Anglophone realm, as Comel et al. (2023) and Comel et al. (2024) discuss, there are centers of academic activity in BRICS countries, though with considerable variation amongst these; furthermore, a greater degree of South-South collaboration should be fostered in order to prevent “the concept of ‘de-Westernization’ … turn[ing] into another category domesticated by the academic agenda of the Global North” (Comel et al. 2024: 90), where the Global South becomes more a topic that benefits Global North scholars who examine it, rather than comprising multiple regions that develop more autonomously vis-à-vis the Global North.

Finally, we also discussed the low rate of submission and acceptance of manuscripts from Global South scholars, compared to submissions from scholars located in the Global North. The pre-submission review program that CCC launched and ran from 2022 to 2024 was not exclusively targeted to scholars in Global South countries but was intended to attract a substantial proportion of submissions from them, yet it failed to do so. Furthermore, from the mentor and reviewer feedback for the one submission from a scholar working in a Tier B country, we concluded that the program would likely reinforce standard Western norms for academic writing. The incoming CCC editor-in-chief (Paula Chakravartty) has suspended the program while the editorial team considers how to better incorporate Global South scholars in the journal, with possibilities that include featuring translations of articles originally published in languages other than English; publishing formats other than empirical research articles, such as interviews with Global South scholars; and curating other work that highlights the expertise of Global South authors.^[8] An important shift for editors of Western-originated journals (including this paper’s authors) would be a stronger focus on what Global North scholars can learn from existing Global South scholarship and initiating more collaboratively based North-South endeavors, towards a meaningful “academic cosmopolitanism” (see Ganter and Ortega 2019; Waisbord 2022) that tilts the balance away from historical centers of power.