A vision for the next phase of JRST

The Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) is in the midst of an editorial team transition. Every 5 years A Global Organization for Improving Science Education through Research (NARST) engages in a process to select a new editorial team for its flagship journal, and we are delighted to have been named as the editors for 2020–2025. JRST is a top journal for the field of science education and one of the leading journals across the education sector. It provides a crucial venue for sharing and highlighting the most important and impactful research related to science education. We are excited to move into the role of JRST Editors and recognize the awesome responsibility that comes with it. We extend our thanks to the Search Committee, chaired by Past President Gail Richmond and the NARST Executive Board, who selected our team to lead the journal for the next 5 years. In assuming this responsibility, we are joined by an accomplished group of Associate Editors who will serve with us through the duration of our 5-year term. We will introduce these scholars and the breadth of their expertise and perspectives in a future editorial. JRST also benefits from a standing Editorial Board which persists across individual editorships. Editorial Board members serve 3-year terms with about one-third of its members rotating onto the board each year. We will be working with the NARST Publications committee to recruit new board members each year, so look for an upcoming call to serve in these roles. To help manage the day-to-day operations of the journal, we have structured our team to include a Managing Editor and Editorial Associates, who are graduate students in science education. Dr. Li Ke is serving as our managing editor. Ke was a high school chemistry teacher in China before earning a Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctorate in science education from Michigan State University. In addition to his role as the managing editor, Ke serves as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is engaged in research related to scientific modeling and teacher education. He has been a member of NARST since 2015 and has experience conducting and publishing science education research. He also has a strong technology background which has been very helpful as our team learns to navigate the editorial side of ScholarOne Manuscript, JRST's online submission, review, and production platform. Throughout the 2020 calendar year, we will work with the outgoing editorial team, led by editors Fouad Abd-El-Khalick and Dana Zeidler, to transition editorship for the journal. The outgoing team will manage reviews for all manuscripts received through the end of 2019 as well as manuscripts that had been accepted pending revisions in 2019. Beginning in January 2020, our editorial team began receiving all newly submitted manuscripts as well as manuscripts that had received a revise and resubmit decision but had not been resubmitted in 2019. Our team is managing the review process and is responsible for publication decisions for these manuscripts. The outgoing team is responsible for publishing JRST volume 57 (2020); our team assumes responsibility for production with the first issue of 2021. Editors Abd-El-Khalick and Zeidler along with their Managing Editor Elizabeth Niswander have been fantastic partners throughout the transition. We appreciate all that they have done in the service of JRST as well as their efforts to make our transition as smooth as possible. JRST is a prestigious publication with an international reputation and a consistently high impact factor, the highest among the group of journals that specialize in the dissemination of science education research. JRST articles are accessed and cited widely around the world. The most recent annual statistics indicate that JRST articles are downloaded over 340,000 times per year, and this number is increasing every year (Wiley, 2019). More important than these metrics is the journal's standing as a venue for the open exchange of ideas and its support for a wide range of research based on diverse theoretical, methodological, and axiological commitments. The first goal of our editorial team is to maintain JRST's status as a leading journal in the field of science education. With that goal in mind, we are committed to improving the journal's quality and impact, expanding its reach and use around the world, and increasing the diversity of the JRST community. We will use a multipronged approach to advance equity and diversity among the JRST community. In highlighting the JRST community, we include the editorial team (Co-Editors and Associate Editors), the Editorial Board, reviewers, authors, and readers. Our equity and diversity efforts begin with the composition of our editorial team. We selected this team intending to maximize multiple dimensions of diversity and expertise. Our team comprises scholars of color, international scholars, ethnically diverse scholars, and multilingual scholars. This group also possesses varied research expertise and experience which spans a broad array of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological backgrounds. Taken together, we believe that this editorial team represents the most diverse group of Editors and Associate Editors that have served JRST. This is critically important because a more diverse editorial leadership group better represents the increasingly diverse membership of NARST and can carry important messages to the global science education community about our commitments to inclusivity and diversity. Under the past two editorships, significant advancements have been made in terms of the participation of international scholars in the JRST publication process. Last year, manuscripts authored by scholars from 59 different countries were submitted to JRST, and 18 articles with international authors were published which is 32% of the total articles published. Our goal for the journal is to continue being a top choice for international scholars to highlight their research. We hope to encourage an increase in international submissions and participation of international scholars more generally by representing JRST at as many international science education conferences as possible to share writing and reviewing opportunities with diverse international audiences. We also plan to work with our Associate Editors, particularly those living outside the US as well as others who are working at US institutions but are originally from other parts of the world, as ambassadors for JRST. As NARST grows through the involvement of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other early career scholars, the community is becoming more diverse. As the journal of NARST, JRST has a responsibility to create pathways for these new community members to become active with the journal. The outgoing editors took up this responsibility by creating a program through which graduate students could gain some experience with the JRST review process. Students sign up with a mentor to conduct reviews for submitted manuscripts (whose authors have volunteered for their manuscripts to be a part of this program). The students' reviews are not used to make manuscript decisions, but the students and their mentors gain access to the other reviews and the publication decision. We will continue this program and while incorporating some adjustments with the goal of increasing participation and enhancing effectiveness. We plan to create a broader range of options for early career scholars to find mentors, including members of our editorial team, who can help them to navigate the review process. We will also work to advertise the program more broadly to encourage greater participation, particularly for early writers and researchers. For example, we look forward to collaborating with the NARST Graduate Student Committee and the Abell Scholars group to promote the opportunity for their development as scholars. The final aspect of our planned efforts to enhance equity and diversity across the JRST community connects with the next strategic focus area which addresses open access and open science. Over 6,000 institutions have full access to JRST, which represents a 20% increase in the past 2 years (Wiley, 2019). However, 61% of those institutions are in North America, Europe, or Australia. Access to JRST in Africa, Eastern Europe, and many regions of Asia is extremely limited. The publisher of JRST, Wiley, is working with institutions and, in some cases, nations around the world to provide greater access to its products including JRST. We will work with Wiley to continually advocate for open access particularly in regions with limited academic and/or financial resources. In addition to supporting these efforts, we will work with Wiley and JRST authors to create and promote mechanisms through which JRST articles can be shared more openly. Significant changes are taking place within scholarly disciplines, including scientific and educational fields, regarding the sharing of and access to multiple forms of information about research. These changes are based on arguments suggesting that at its best, research should be transparent, open, and reproducible, and that these characteristics will yield more trustworthy and ultimately more useful findings (Cook, Lloyd, Mellor, Nosek, & Therrien, 2018). “Open science” is widely used as a label for these changes and the assumptions underlying them. We view the open science movement as an important development for all research fields including science education and agree with many of the underlying tenets. For example, we embrace the goal of making research findings, and in some cases, data sets, and analysis plans more accessible to broader audiences around the globe. At the same time, we have reservations regarding some of the stated assumptions of open science. For instance, while the reproducibility of a study may be very useful in some research contexts such as quantitative evaluation studies of a particular intervention, it is not a useful criterion for other research contexts such as case studies designed to illuminate the nuances of a particular situation. Therefore, we need to be careful to avoid creating a circumstance wherein the extent to which studies are reproducible becomes a metric for evaluating the quality of all research. Regardless of individual reactions to open science, it is becoming an important factor in shaping the international research community. Open science is in its early phases and has yet to impact science education research in substantial ways, but we think it will influence the science education publishing world including JRST. Therefore, an important aspect of our editorship will be positioning the journal such that open science can be used to enhance the quality and impact of JRST without compromising the values and commitments that we hold as a diverse science education research community. Some research fields such as health science, which focus primarily on clinical trials, have embraced open science, and their journals have changed publication requirements including the sharing of data sets and preregistration of study designs. Other areas such as the psychological sciences have pursued open science at a slower pace but are moving in that direction (Eich, 2014). Some psychology journals, for example, have adopted badge systems that communicate the degree to which a study satisfies open science criteria. Science education as a field has not been actively involved in this leading edge of open science; however, we think that trends in open science will eventually impact science education research. Therefore, we feel strongly that JRST ought to be positioned to substantially shape the discipline-specific standards that will emerge. Our editorial team, in consultation with the NARST Publications committee, will need to establish standards, processes, and expectations for issues such as the sharing of datasets and research materials, research methods and analysis plans, preregistration of studies and registered reports. For JRST to maintain its status as a top journal in science education, we believe that it needs to become a leading voice in the field's response to open science. We see this as an opportunity for JRST to continue shaping our discipline as well as charting a path for education research and education journals more broadly. Our response to this challenge will be one that embraces many of the goals of the open science movement including increasing access to information, improving the trustworthiness of research, and enhancing the usability and impact of scholarship. However, we also appreciate that not all of what has been characterized as open science is consistent with the values of science education researchers (such as the example of replicability highlighted previously). Therefore, we view balancing the goals of open science with the values of science education researchers with diverse methodological and axiological commitments as a critical, albeit, challenging task for our editorial team. The internet and modern media, including social media, have drastically altered the flow and exchange of information. Never in history has information been so readily available, and never has there existed a greater need for the receivers of information to exercise critical judgment in the processing of that information (Helfand, 2016). Unfortunately, the seemingly unfettered flow of information made possible by new media does not incorporate mechanisms for elevating evidence-based information such as the research reported in the pages of JRST. In fact, recent findings suggest that social media can propagate inaccurate information more rapidly than well-justified information (Conti, Lain, Lazzeretti, Lovisotto, & Quattrociocchi, 2017). Journals like JRST, which present trustworthy research well grounded in theory and conceptual frameworks and that employ peer review for the vetting of study designs, data quality, alignment of data with claims, and the validity of inferences can serve an instrumental role in the modern information environment. JRST and other sources of rigorously tested, peer-reviewed research should be the go-to sources for information on discipline-specific practice (science education in the case of JRST) as well as policies that relate to the field. While it is true that JRST is widely recognized as a leading research journal among science education scholars, broader communities engaged in science education and creating policies that impact science education do not make enough use of JRST as a source of reliable information. JRST is one of the most important tools of the science education research community for the dissemination of research and theory; however, we see great potential for the journal to make substantial impacts beyond the science education research community. From our perspective, JRST could and should take steps to become a more frequently tapped resource to inform efforts to improve teaching and learning practices and policy. We think that these steps include adopting a more active strategy for disseminating the ideas reported in JRST. In the current model, JRST largely relies on its reputation to drive readership to the journal. Science education researchers around the world know the journal and look to it for new research findings. However, individuals working in science education and/or making decisions that impact science education but who do not identify with the science education research community are likely not regularly accessing information from JRST. We think that the journal can do more to promote the findings and insights emerging from JRST research as opposed to relying exclusively on the more passive strategy that is currently used. We will work toward this goal with multiple strategies. We plan to create a social media presence for the journal and to use that presence to create a dissemination network including audiences that currently do not access JRST extensively (e.g., teachers, administrators, and policymakers). Another strategy for achieving broader spread and uptake of JRST research will be to explore new avenues for sharing the findings featured in JRST. For example, we are considering the development of a research brief associated with each article that could target audiences beyond those that typically read full-length manuscripts. Successful pursuit of all three of these strategic foci (equity and diversity, open science, and dissemination), as well as the broader goal of ensuring the quality and impact of JRST, will require the contributions of many. We have assembled a talented editorial team including Associate Editors, a Managing Editor, and Editorial Assistants who are committed to taking up this work. However, we need the assistance and support of the whole JRST community. We see the vision for the journal's next phase presented in this commentary as the starting place for a conversation among the JRST community on the direction and vision we share. We invite you to join this conversation. We ask that you share your reactions to the strategic foci that we have identified as well as the tactics we have articulated. We look forward to hearing other ideas for advancing equity and diversity among the JRST community, positioning JRST as a leading voice for the science education community in navigating the open science movement, building a stronger presence for JRST within the modern media environment, and generally strengthening our journal. In addition to the vision that we have expressed for the journal, we have another goal for our editorship. This goal is to create and maintain open communications and transparency with the JRST community. We commit to being as open and honest as possible with the decisions we make for the journal and the policies and practices we enact. We further commit to carefully considering the requests, critiques, and other forms of feedback that community members share with us. Along the way, we will undoubtedly make decisions or do things with which you disagree. We cannot guarantee that you will always approve of the actions we take as an editorial team, but we do guarantee that we will consistently strive to be open, fair, inclusive, and receptive to your feedback. We look forward to working with you as we all strive to improve science education through research.