This message was sent on 4/1/2020 to all current ASHE members and the Review of Higher Education's editorial board, authors, and reviewers on behalf of the Review's editorial team.
April 1, 2020
Greetings from The Review of Higher Education editorial team. As individuals and as a team, we are taking care of ourselves, family, graduate students, and communities. We believe that this care should be our first priority at this time. Our additional concerns right now are the health and well-being of editorial board members, authors, reviewers, readers, families and friends. We hope this letter finds you healthy and safe.
While our lives look and feel quite different, the journal continues to operate. However, we write to you today to share our plans.
To adjust to the current crisis, our first step was to check-in with one another and discuss if and how the COVID-19 situation is impacting our personal and professional lives, including our work at RHE. We think it is important to keep the journal functioning as best it can for many reasons; for example, some tenure and promotion clocks remain the same (Flaherty, 2020). However, we want to move forward as humanely as possible. Therefore, we have adopted new timelines for our authors and reviewers:
- We have automatically extended the deadlines for all reviewers and authors by two weeks. This means that if you recently accepted a request to review, we have added additional time to your timeline.
- If you accept a review anytime between today and May 1, 2020, we will ensure that you have this extended period of time to complete your review. Of course, when we extend the deadline for reviewers, we understand that there are implications for authors. Thus, authors should anticipate a slightly slower than usual turnaround time.
- At this point, RHE aims to return reviewed manuscripts to authors within 90 days of initial submission but given the extended review period, authors should anticipate at least 104 or more days for their reviews.
If you are not able to complete a review or revision in the timeframe established, please be in touch and
we will work with you. In addition, we have changed automated messages for authors, editorial board members, and reviewers accordingly. If you happen to receive a letter that does not cite an extended timeline, please email us at
rhe@ashe.ws. We have also paused on sending out rejection letters with reviewer feedback for a couple weeks but will resume soon so authors are able to send their work elsewhere.
We will constantly monitor the status of manuscripts and work to ensure authors receive the high quality, thoughtful reviews that you have come to expect from this team. Thank you to the reviewers, past, present, and future. Also, thanks in advance to authors for additional patience as we insert this much-needed flexibility into the system.
While it is important for us as scholars to take care during this time, it is also important for our scholarship to continue. We understand that some of us will be overwhelmed for the time being with obligations to our families, students, and/or with new or additional administrative duties. We also understand that some of us will have new space to concentrate on scholarship, particularly scholarship related to this crisis. That is important work as well. If there are any members of the higher education community that find themselves with the time and desire to help RHE out,
please sign-up to volunteer here. We greatly appreciate any and all volunteers.
Thank you to the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) office and Johns Hopkins University Press for ensuring RHE is always available online to all
ASHE members. However, currently, it is available free to everyone through
Project Muse. Despite the crisis, we are excited to share the field’s best research in this team’s first issue in Fall 2020 and the issues and volumes after that.
We wish you the best as you rework your lives and courses in the weeks to come. Do take care and stay healthy.
Sincerely,
Penny A. Pasque, Editor
Thomas F. Nelson Laird, Editor
Eddie R. Cole, Associate Editor
Rajeev Darolia, Associate Editor
Leslie D. Gonzales, Associate Editor
Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Associate Editor
Jessica M. Esch, Managing Editor
Tiffany L. Steele, Managing Editor
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