The SPSSI Publications Committee, co-chaired by Luis Rivera and Jessica Salvatore and also comprising Nicole Overstreet, Stacey Williams, and Jan Yoder, welcomes this opportunity to highlight a few of our recent and upcoming activities.  

We will shortly be reviewing submissions in response to the current call for Editor(s)-in-Chief for the Journal of Social Issues and making a recommendation to SPSSI’s executive committee. The term will be four calendar years, beginning in January 2026, and we aim to make a recommendation in mid-2025 to allow for some overlap with the end of the term of current Editor Martin Ruck. One thing to keep an eye on is the new opportunity for a co-editors model. SPSSI’s other journals published by Wiley – Social Issues and Policy Review and Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy – both now have editorial teams, so we are open to this possibility for JSI’s next editorial term as well. We also want to highlight that we are interested in seeing vision statements that speak to the unique ability of JSI – especially given its specific and unusual format – to respond to the present historical moment. For more information, please see https://www.spssi.org/ and consider applying or sharing the call with someone you think would make a good editor.

Not all members may be aware that SPSSI maintains active contracts with multiple presses.  Our committee recently facilitated the renewal and extension of the book series contract with Cambridge under the continued leadership of Brian Christens. In the meantime, Wiley has rolled out a number of changes and updates for SPSSI’s journals that members may be interested to hear about. Some of these are clearly positive, such as upgrades to manuscript handling platforms, and some are more mixed, such as a switch from APA style to Chicago style for references (we connected the journal editors to facilitate discussion of this and a response if warranted). Sometimes it is hard to tell whether we should feel excited or dismayed about a change, such as with Wiley’s intention to move journals to ‘continuous publication’, under which papers would be published immediately upon acceptance instead of waiting to be grouped into issues. Our committee is charged with facilitating discussions with and between editors about whether the benefits of starting to accumulate citations faster for the version of record might be counterbalanced by any unforeseen negatives. To ensure discussions like this are happening systematically, at our monthly meetings, we typically liaise with one or more editors-in-chief in a regular rotation. 

We also typically sponsor an event at SPSSI’s conference each year – in Portland this year, we are sponsoring a panel with representation from the editorial teams of most of the organization’s publications.  We hope to see many of you there!

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