Tips for first-time journal (guest) editors?

In our October "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am a first-time journal guest editor. I'm wondering if anyone has recommendations for sources on the practices and ethics of editing philosophy journals. In particular, I'm wondering what to do about a paper that has received both 'accept' and 'reject' recommendations. It seems to me be worthy of an 'accept asking changes,' but I don't want to seem disrespectful to the reader that suggested rejection.

One reader submitted the following response:

I guest edited a journal issue. My perspective is this: It is your job, not the referee's, to decide which papers to publish. You alone have that authority, and that responsibility. The referees are there to advise you in your task. But you do not owe them anything other than gratitude for their important, unpaid work. If you have read both reports carefully, plus the paper, and your judgment is that conditional acceptance is appropriate, that is what you should do. I've refereed papers that I thought were great, recommended "acceptance", and the editor rejected them. I've refereed papers that I thought were disasters, recommended "reject", and the editor accepted them. I think the editors made mistakes in these cases, but I don't feel "disrespected" by them.

Although I haven't served as a journal editor, this response seems right to me. But let me add a couple of thoughts.

First, I think the quality of the referee reports might be relevant. As an author, I once had an article accepted despite a negative verdict from a referee--and my sense is that it is probably because the good report was detailed and overwhelmingly positive, whereas the negative report was short, vague, and gave the impression that the referee might not have read the paper very carefully. If I was a journal editor in a similar situation, I could easily see myself reading the paper myself and determining which referee to trust (and, if I couldn't decide, perhaps try to send the paper out to a third referee). Second, I've always been a bit puzzled by the assumption I've sometimes seen that each referee report should be positive to merit an acceptance. After all, suppose different experts respond to a single paper differently, with one expert thinking it makes an important contribution and the other expert not. Many influential works (both books and journal articles) seem to me to have been influential precisely because the were particularly provocative and divided readers, raising good questions or new arguments that later readers thought it important to debate and get to the bottom of. Disagreement on the merit of a work, then, shouldn't by itself merit rejection. It should (to echo the second reader's response above) lead the editor to decide whether the piece is worth exposing to the journal's readers!

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? And, to those with experience as journal editors, do you have any other tips for a first-time guest editor (including but not limited to guest-editors)?

Comments

[Reviewer #3]

I guest-edited a special issue of a journal that had an explicit policy of inviting a third reviewer to break ties, or when one report was insufficiently detailed. I had to implement that policy several times, and I always felt like it added to the rigor of the overall process. I think that's the most straightforward fix for the reader's situation.

[triple anon]

Thanks for the advice! It really helps.