Substance, Commentary and Compromise:  JFR's  New Approach to Academic Publishing
Channel: Robert Bloomfield
Date: 2017-02-06

This video lays out the new approach to publishing academic research being used by Journal of Financial Reporting, the journal of the Financial Accounting & Reporting Section of the American Accounting Association.

Transcript:
On behalf of my fellow editors, I’m asking you to submit your best work to Journal of Financial Reporting. Starting a brand new journal gives us a chance to make some real changes in how papers are written and published.  

Tell me if you’ve heard these common concerns:
• Journals ask for novelty, but they don’t treat it kindly.  They distort new ideas to fit old thinking, or simply reject them.
• Journals ask for rigor, but don’t re-examine prior claims. They leave the first word the last word.
• Journals promise a level playing field, but authors without connections and prestige find it hard to publish good work.

These problems aren’t secrets, but journals have little incentive to change once they are well established.  That’s where JFR comes in, and here’s our fix.

First, we recognize that every paper must compromise on some goals to achieve others.  It’s hard to explore new ideas and test old ones; it’s hard to identify causality and generalize across samples and settings.  It’s hard to address deep issues and provide useful applications.  

We’re fine with compromises; in fact, we encourage them.  We’ll let you pursue a limited set of goals, as long as you do it well and report honestly about what you did and didn’t achieve.

Second, we’ll base publication decisions on the substance of your work—what you actually do and find.  How do you gather data? How do you analyze it?  What narrow conclusions do you draw? We’ll hold substance to the highest standards.  

But most papers also include a good deal of commentary.  What makes the study interesting?  How does it address big questions?  How does it test or extend existing theory?  How might it affect practice or policy?  

These issues are important, but they’re so hard to evaluate that a lot of good papers get rejected on the basis of reasonable disagreements about highly subjective matters.  We think that’s wrong, and that this is one of the big reasons peer review is so tough on new work and unknown scholars.  We won’t use reasonable disagreements as a basis for rejection.  Instead, if need be, we’ll hash them out in published discussions. 

By allowing compromise and reasonable disagreement, we at JFR can make a much stronger push for innovation. Gather data however you see fit.  Hand-gathered data, experiments in the field or lab, field studies, surveys….  Draw your theories from any discipline: economics, psychology, marketing, sociology, political science….Draw your conclusions from Bayesian analysis, machine learning, qualitative interpretation….Exploratory analyses, replications, null results—we are open to all of it, as long as you do it well.

We’ll also push for a broad definition of what constitutes accounting research.  As the late Anthony Hopwood said, people think they know what accounting is, but how wrong they are.  
Accounting is what accountants do, and that changes every day.  Financial markets care more about nonfinancial information than they did yesterday, and reporting plays a growing role outside financial markets.  

Who knows what will matter tomorrow? I see big roles for reporting in health care, worker safety, education, sustainability, product markets, international trade, foreign policy and politics.  But who knows?

Anyway, here’s the bottom line.  Send your best work to JFR. We’ll help you publish a good article quickly, keep it true to your goals, and keep it true to what it actually does and finds.  If you have questions, let me know.

If you’re struggling to push your paper forward with another journal, consider JFR.