We are honored to officially start our editorship of the American Political Science Review. We do so with great excitement, but also with some solemnity. When we began to prepare for this transition almost a year ago, we could not have predicted that we would take the helm in the midst of a global pandemic and a mass political uprising. The past three months have seen rapid transformations of almost every sphere of life. This period has brought with it a great deal of pain and much uncertainty, and we know that serious challenges remain in the months — and possibly years — to come. While much has changed for each of us and for our communities, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the collective goals and guiding principles that brought us to this endeavor, some of which have become even more relevant and pressing in the context of the current crises. These goals and principles, which we share with you below, will guide our vision for and our stewardship of the journal over the next four years.

We intend to build on the successes of the American Political Science Association’s flagship journal, while broadening its readership, relevance, and contributor pool. To do so, we will publish problem-driven scholarship that is well-conceptualized, ethically-designed, and well-executed; research on topics and by scholars the discipline has been slow to engage; and work that uses a range of methods and approaches to address both timely and timeless questions about power and governance that are central to the study of politics everywhere. We will represent the diversity of subfields, geographic areas of study, identities, methods, and approaches that are encompassed within the pluralistic discipline of political science.

To achieve these goals, our editorial vision emphasizes six principles:

Our first principle is editorial transparency. We have designed our decision-making processes to meet the highest standards of transparency across several dimensions. We are, for example, collecting and will make available data about our workflow as well as about the demographic composition of our reviewer pool, readership, and submitting and published authors. These efforts are particularly important in light of preliminary reports that the pandemic has exacerbated many existing disparities within the academy.

Our second key principle, checks and balances in editorial decision-making, guides several practices that are intended to ensure that the journal publishes the highest-quality original work. We are committed to respectful communication among editors, reviewers, and authors, and to ensuring that our review process provides thoughtful consideration of work that falls outside of traditional or mainstream scholarship. Editors will employ a common rubric to guide decisions about desk rejections and will employ pre-publication checks and safeguards to ensure the originality and validity of all published work. We have also set up a straightforward appeals process to address authors’ concerns about editorial decisions.

Our third principle is a commitment to research ethics. We are instituting new measures to ensure that all published work is based on ethically conducted research, including the establishment of an Advisory Board for Ethical Research, comprised of six members of our Editorial Board who have particular expertise on research ethics. We expect all authors to comply with the ethical and transparency obligations described in APSA’s A Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science (2012) and in its Principles and Guidance (approved by the APSA Council, April 4, 2020). When submitting manuscripts drawing on research that directly engages with human participants (see Principles and Guidance), authors will be required to either affirm their adherence to the 2020 Principles and Guidance or to provide a reasoned justification of exceptions to those Principles.

Fourth, we will pursue substantive, representational, and methodological diversity. We pledge to broaden the range of research topics published in the journal. As a measure of excellence, a political science journal must engage a global audience on questions related to the fundamental, foundational, and constitutive roles of, inter alia, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in structuring power, politics, and policy. In addition to pursuing substantive diversity, we seek to diversify the subfields, geographic foci, and methodological approaches represented in the APSR. By using the journal’s full page allocation, we can broaden the range of topics it addresses without sacrificing attention to the sorts of work that it has traditionally published. We will thereby also address our aim to increase the diversity of authors, reviewers, and citations along various lines, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and scholar’s type of home institution.

Active engagement with the APSA membership, our fifth principle, will help us increase representational and substantive diversity and will also help us connect with scholars, evaluate concerns, and promote the journal. Team members will engage with a wide variety of research sections and caucuses, participate in the APSA’s annual meeting and hold an annual meet-the-editors session at the conference. We will also participate in as many regional conferences and as many field and subfield conferences as we can in efforts to invite engagement with the journal and, to the extent possible, demystify the publication process. We recognize that engagement through academic conferences may be curtailed or transformed in light of the pandemic and its effects, and we will actively seek to use alternative means to ensure that we are connected to APSA’s membership.

Our sixth principle, modernizing communications and expanding outreach to broad audiences, follows from the fifth. We are working with APSA and Cambridge University Press to reach new readers and to raise the visibility of research published in the APSR through multiple platforms. We plan to follow other journals’ successful leveraging of social media with new Twitter and Facebook accounts, facilitating blog posts featuring our authors’ research, and providing ungated early access to articles. We have established this Editors’ Blog as part of our effort to increase transparency and communication with authors and readers.

As we undertake the responsibilities of the APSR editorship, we will work diligently to confront and respond to new and existing challenges, and we will be thoughtful in our efforts to address them and move forward. Our success will depend on the active engagement and contributions of scholars from across the discipline’s subfields and approaches, and we welcome suggestions and feedback from our colleagues as we forge a partnership with the discipline to sustain a leading journal that publishes excellent, engaging, and ethically-designed scholarship.

– The new Editors of the American Political Science Review.

– Meet the new Editors here.