Journal editors: How do their editing incomes compare?

Introduction

The number of academic journals continues to grow each year. In 2018, there were 5399 clinical journals tracked by Journal Citation Reports in comparison to only 3681 10 years prior¹. A rise in open-access journals is also evident; while in 2008 there were just 249 open-access journal titles in Web of Science, that number ballooned to 1431 in 2018¹. Growth in the journal industry comes with more opportunities to become a journal editor. Editors are often scientists, researchers, administrators, and clinicians who have expertise in a particular field and competencies in evaluating articles’ suitability for publication in scientific journals². Editorial work can be a very satisfying full-time career or part-time job in addition to a clinical, research, or administrative careers.

Within medicine, substantial evidence of gender inequity in academia exists, including disparities in compensation^3–5. For example, a 2012 US survey found that male physician researchers had higher average salaries ($13,399 USD; p=0.001) than females after adjusting for specialty, academic rank, and research productivity⁶. Other studies have shown salary deficits can be up to 12–28% for female physicians^7,8 when compared to male counterparts. Similar statistics can be found in the UK, where the average pay gap for consultant physicians, including professors, was 13% in favor of men⁹. Several countries have mandated pay transparency laws in recent years. Denmark¹⁰ and Austria¹¹ passed laws requiring companies to internally report gender-based wage statistics to it employees in 2006 and 2010 respectively. In 2018, the United Kingdom pushed for national pay transparency and equity by mandating public annual reporting of gender pay gap for any organization comprising more than 250 employees¹². France followed suit with mandatory reporting, while Germany and Iceland enacted pay equity and transparency laws.

While there is an expanding body of literature on pay gaps in of academia and of medicine in general^9,13, there is currently very limited literature that evaluates how journal editors are compensated for their work. An international email survey of 88 editors of nursing journals found that their mean annual salary was $12,749 USD (ranging from $0 to $56,000) for a mean of 13.4 hours worked per week¹⁴. A total of 8% of survey respondents (7 of the 88 editors) did not receive any monetary compensation and only 31% of participants felt that their compensation was adequate¹⁴. It is concerning that the critical job of editors to uphold the integrity of academic literature can be low-paid or voluntary. With mandatory data reporting, The Lancet reported gender pay gaps of 13–40% favouring men over women in major UK publishing companies in 2018¹⁵. Specific data for journal editors were not available but some of these data do highlight the potential gaps.

There is substantial heterogeneity among journals, such as publishing platform, scope, publication frequency, and Journal Impact Factor¹⁶. Though open access publishing comes at a large cost to authors, its popularity is supported by many benefits that may include faster publishing times and the ability to reach bigger audiences compared to subscription-based publishing. It is unknown whether a journal editor’s remuneration is affected by these journal variables.

With special interest in biomedical sciences, the objectives of this study were to quantify remuneration for journal editors from core clinical journals, determine if a gender pay gap exists, and assess if there are remuneration differences across publishing models (e.g., subscription-based or open-access) and other journal characteristics (e.g., publication frequency and Journal Impact Factor).

Methods

Results

A total of 2165 editors were identified in December 2018, with 1948 having publicly available email addresses; of these, survey invitations were successfully sent to 1844 without bounce-back. A total of 193 surveys were started, and 166 surveys were submitted (overall response rate of 9%). We received survey responses from journal editors at 69 of 111 journals (62%). 140 completed surveys were included in our analyses (Figure 1). Data that had small cell counts (n<5) were not reported to preserve the privacy of participants. A de-identified version of the dataset is available as Underlying data¹⁸. This was composed of 95 male and 45 female editors. All respondents identified as cis gender. A total of 50 (36%) editors did not receive remuneration for editorial work; 111 (79%) and 29 (21%) editors worked for a subscription-based journal versus an open/hybrid journal, respectively. A total of 90% of editors held an academic position. The median 2017 Journal Impact Factor was 4.9 (Interquartile range [IQR] 3.5-6.6 for males and 3.5-7.5 for females). There was a larger proportion of female survey respondents who were fulltime journal editors compared to male counterparts (10 females [22%] vs. 4 males [4%] p=<0.01). Details on baseline characteristics are provided in Table 1.

Figure 1. Diagram of study recruitment.

In univariate analyses (Table 2), journal editors received more remuneration if the journal was open/hybrid access rather than subscription-based (OR 3.06, 95% CI 1.39-6.75), if the editor was not primarily a health care provider (OR 3.67, 95% CI 1.7-7.91), if the issues were weekly/biweekly rather than monthly/bimonthly (OR 2.07, 95% CI 1-4.28), if the editors held senior editing positions (OR 4.5, 95% CI 2.16-9.59), if the editors spent more than 10 hours per week editing (OR 16.7, 95% CI 7.02-39.76), and if the editors had worked for more than 5 years at the journal (OR 2.28, 95% CI 1.13-4.62).

In multivariable analysis (Table 2), there was no gender pay gap detected or remuneration differences identified between publishing models. We found that editors who were not primarily health care providers were more likely to have higher editing incomes (adjusted OR 2.96, 95%CI 1.18-7.46). Editors who worked more than 10 hours per week editing earned more than those who worked 10 hours or less per week (adjusted OR 16.7, 95%CI 7.02-39.76).

Discussion

In addition to a recent study by The Lancet highlighting the presence of a gender pay gap of employees at major academic publishing companies¹⁵, numerous studies in the past have highlighted similar inequities across academia^3–8. In our study of part-time and full-time journal editors from a focused subset of core clinical journals, we did not detect a gender pay gap. We found that annual remuneration for editing was higher for editors working more than 10 hours per week and if their primary occupation was not a health care provider. Full-time journal editing positions were disproportionately more likely to be held by a woman. While we hypothesized that the different revenue structure of subscription-based versus open access journals may translate to a difference in editor’s remuneration, we did not find it to be true after adjusting for predictor variables. A journal’s Impact Factor did not affect an editor’s remuneration. Although 36% of editors surveyed reported no direct earnings from their editorial work, there can be other benefits including subsidies for scientific meeting registration fees and travel costs.

Conclusion

We conducted an international survey of journal editors from core clinical journals to understand how remuneration varied across editor’s demographics, professional experience, and journal characteristics. We did not detect a gender pay gap or a difference in remuneration between editors who worked in subscription-based publishing vs. open access journals. More than a third of editors surveyed were not remunerated for their work.

Data availability