Microsoft Word - The End or the Beginning (Proof 1).docx Journal of Urban Mathematics Education May 2021, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue), pp. 1–11 ©JUME. https://journals.tdl.org/jume Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 1 EDITORIAL The End or Beginning? Either Way, the Credits Are Not Rolling Yet! Editorial Team Robert M. Capraro Chance Lewis Eduardo Mosqueda Tarcia Hubert Hyunkyung Kwon Mary Margaret Capraro Melva Grant Jamaal Young Alesia Mickle Moldavan Michael S. Rugh Jacqueline Leonard Marlon James Ali Bicer Susan Ophelia Cannon Jonas L. Chang JUME Quick Facts New Leadership Term Began April 15, 2019 First Volume Delivered May, 2020 Current Acceptance Rate: ~11% Now a SCOPUS Indexed Journal (as of 2020) Average Time to Initial assignment: ~3 Days Average Time to Decision: ~36 Days Average Time to Publication: ~8 Months Double-Blind Peer Review: Yes Number of Reviewers Assigned: 2–3, Plus an Editorial Board Member Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 2 hank you to all our reviewers, editorial board members, authors, and those who chose the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education (JUME) as their outlet of choice this past year. JUME has had many recent successes, and we in the editorial team plan to release the salient performance data for the journal. For JUME to ad- vance its mission, we believe that accountability and transparency are essential. To this end, our readers will from now on receive an annual progress report about JUME in our first issue of each year. The editorial team has worked to bring timely issues to press as quickly as pos- sible without jeopardizing the review process. However, the review process has been tough at times. Given the very difficult year amidst the dual pandemics of racism and COVID-19, reviewers exceeded expectations. Our typical time to send manuscripts to reviewers was three days, and our average time to decision was 36 days. Unfortu- nately, some of the variation around those numbers has been less than laudable. The range for time to send to reviewers was 0–9 days, and the range for time to decision was 12 days to 101 days. We could never have imagined the difficulties we would face in moving manuscripts quickly through the review process. While these timeli- ness indicators are certainly not the best case, they are clear benchmarks for moving forward. We are starting here and hope that next year we are able to report improve- ments. In order to improve time to reviewers and time to decision, we have three fo- cuses. First, we will work to expand our reviewer pool so that we can select from a broader population of committed reviewers and burden the few much less. Second, we will seek to start a mentoring program for reviewers. A goal held by our team is to ensure every manuscript receives an excellent, positive, and productive review. Therefore, the team tended to rely on a few reviewers who excelled at providing a caring and respectful review even when their recommendation was to decline the manuscript. If we can get this mentality to spread, it has the potential to change the education publishing landscape as a whole. Our third focus is to ensure that each member of the JUME team feels accountable and empowered to make their own de- cisions and to move quickly and decisively for every submission on which they are the action editor. The number of submissions is already on the rise, but this will be a double-edged sword. Time to publication is slowly increasing, as is our backlog. We are concerned that the granularity of this first reflection will not be sustainable. The relatively modest number of submissions currently allows for a great deal of detail with regard to the important metrics in our JUME Quick Facts table, but as submis- sions increase, we are sure a much less fine-grained analysis will result and other issues related to circulation growth will creep into the process. For the next two years, we are committed to meeting our goals of publishing two issues per year with 2–3 research manuscripts in each issue. JUME will publish special issues as they align to the interests of our readership and mission of the jour- nal. We will not substitute special issues for a regular issue unless that special issue T Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 3 is of such importance that making it a regular issue makes a statement. When we assumed the mantle of leadership, there was at least one failed search for an editor- in-chief and the journal was closed to submissions for a year. Therefore, when we began our term, the manuscript flow was zero, as was the backlog. We have worked to build both. We are pleased to say that manuscript flow is steadily growing; a graph at this point would be gratuitous and the growth unsustainable. But if we just compare the first month of last year to the first month of 2021, we are on track to show an increase. If we were CEOs tasked with predicting first quarter numbers, we would expect a 10% increase for the quarter and a 20% gain year over year in manuscript flow. We are currently building a backlog, and we are actively working to manage that backlog to be no more than one issue. What this means is that no author should wait for more than one issue after entering the post-production phase for the publica- tion of their manuscript. We are pleased that JUME is both free and open access, and our goal is at some point to move to publishing when ready and moving away from issues. A backlog is important to this endeavor and to producing a quality journal; it means we are able to select the highest quality manuscripts while providing time to nurture authors through the revise and resubmit phase. When we attached the targets to our chests, and unfortunately to our backs as well, one tenet on which we stood was that everyone who can make a decision understands and is committed to nurtur- ing every manuscript on which there is a revise and resubmit. It is a fact that even when all the best things happen some authors decide, for what are often deep personal reasons, to not resubmit. We stand ready to help. In our first year of leadership, we sought to bring relevant editorials to the field and allow our readers and authors to determine the research direction for the journal. Our planned range for 2020 was 4–6 research articles, and there were five research articles published. We also published editorials that we believe help readers to decide into which sections of the journal to submit their work. Those editorials also help to provide clarity about what is expected in those sections and how to best situate their work to fit into a section that best fits an author’s research agenda and scholarly mis- sion. Additionally, we provided guidance in some editorials about our expectations for quantitative rigor and have the same planned for qualitative methods. Our Inter- national Research section is receiving a large number of submissions, and there is a great deal of interest in that section. Our publication range for 2021 and 2022 for research articles will continue to be 4–6. We will work to move to a publish-when-ready format and move past any arbitrary limit on the number of research articles we publish in each issue. However, citations to our articles are essential to our metrics both for those published in JUME and in articles submitted to other journals as well. In doing so, we will continue to get the message out about the impactful research published under the JUME mast- head recently and historically. Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 4 The path to acclaim starts with ensuring that authors receive recognition and reputational prestige from their association with the journal. To accomplish this, we have retroactively applied digital object identifiers to every article and enabled credit for reviewers through the ORCID system. This allows the proliferation of third-party indexers, speedier distribution, and access through the digital cloud. We continue to be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and to comply with their very high standards. Now every article has a graph indicating its online, direct access read- ership (see Figure 1). We also have a new interactive Artificial Intelligence Agent that examines the keywords for all the articles published in JUME, compiles the most common, indexes them, and creates an interactive word jumble. That jumble allows a reader to click a keyword, after which the agent retrieves all the articles that used that keyword (see Figure 2). This same system, through ORCID, is linked to Google Scholar and automatically updates an author’s Google Scholar Profile and directs readers to their work published in JUME directly without the need to have library or university credentials when accessing articles through our other third-party indexes. Now this is what we mean by being truly open access. Figure 1. Sample Graph of Direct Access for an Article Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 5 Figure 2. Example of Interactive Keywords Our success this past year has been remarkable. Our acceptance rate for 2020 was ~11% (see Figure 3). When comparing the rate to historical data, the trend is declining. However, we do not have information to make a fair comparison based on flow per year. Several updates to the Open Journal System software prevents this metric. Despite this, we believe that moving forward we will be able to report the flow rate and acceptance rate over time and to be able to chart this information. While flow was sufficient to exceed all our first year’s goals and to achieve a comparable acceptance rate to high-quality journals, we hope that eventually moving to a publish- when-ready format will both increase the acceptance rate while improving the time- liness for publishing manuscripts. The end result will be that some years we may publish more articles and in other years less. We are in our first year of being a SCOPUS-rated journal, and we look forward to our first metrics being posted. It will be important to carefully scrutinize how the journal fits in the urban mathematics landscape and to be sure that we are citing JUME appropriately and working to make sure that JUME articles get the best possible publicity. We have additionally reestab- lished the journal’s Facebook account. We have also installed an ORCID plugin to ensure that an ORCID link is listed for every author. These changes allow each author to have the necessary tools to get the word out about their publications and to help generate citations of those works. Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 6 Figure 3. Acceptance Rate by Year We have discussed our successes of this past year, but let us now look forward to the year that is to come. We at JUME have long sought to be disruptors, both in mathematics education and at national funding agencies more broadly. This role re- quires foresight, transparency, and a proactive mindset, which we seek to bring to a growing conversation regarding discrimination and prejudice in the publication pro- cess. JUME is not without fault, but one of our goals is to make our weaknesses as well known as our strengths, to look within and without, and to seek assistance in remediating where we fall short. We are excited to join our peer editors in mathemat- ics education and urban education should they decide to follow suit, and we hope to issue unified and univocal stances to reduce discrimination and prejudice in publica- tion, funding, and access to publication outlets. Every endeavor, however, must have a beginning, and these often are com- posed of small steps. Discrimination and prejudice in the publication process is com- plex, and clear data is a necessity for understanding the myriad issues involved, par- ticularly if we, as a field, wish to understand whether major problems arise in the role of the reviewer, as is so often cited to be the case, or in the role of the editor. To this end, we at JUME join the American Psychological Association (2021) in the mission “to better understand the demographics of our participants, and to identify and im- prove any gaps in representation across our network of authors, reviewers, and Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 7 editors” (para. 1). As such, JUME will soon initiate a plan to collect demographic information for published articles inclusive of ALL authors and reviewers and to publish this data in each year-end review, for authors who wish to disclose such in- formation. In discussing this decision, it was suggested that we have all submissions include demographic information; however, there was a concern that authors might be worried about how such information would be used and whether or not requesting demographic information at the submission stage would influence the publication process. Instead, we are going to pilot the voluntary submission of demographic in- formation of published authors, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orienta- tion, disability/ability status, rank or graduate student status, institution one graduated from, and terminal degree graduation year as well as if authors have ever received international funding or funding from the author’s home nation’s national funding agencies as a PI or Co-PI. We believe this last category of information is important to collect because funding is nearly essential for most of us in the academy to do our work. Without that demographic variable, it is impossible to know if any group is underrepresented because they are omitted from the funding stream. The decision to collect this voluntary information is not without cause. The JUME editorial team understands that there is a problem in the editorial process; we know that there are too few faculty of color and too much service work required of these few individuals who are often disproportionately taxed with culture- and eq- uity-related tasks. How do we know this? We know this because we performed a careful review of our own practices and because we have looked at the demographic information currently available for our past publications, which is presented in Table 1. We feel it is necessary here to state that this information has gaps, as it was our goal to avoid misrepresenting any scholars while compiling the data presented in this table. To this end, we only included those scholars who the members of the editorial team are familiar with and are certain of how they would identify themselves. We did not categorize any scholars whose self-identity we were not certain of. We were confident in doing so due to the many years of experience collectively represented by the members of the JUME editorial team and the resulting familiarity that these members have with most major and upcoming scholars in the field of urban mathe- matics education. This method also resulted in a minimal loss of data, with each col- umn of the table losing less than four percent of its original pool of scholars. Yes, there are many flaws to this approach to data collection, but some practice toward wokeness is better than none, even if a few steps are made in error. Again, major systemic changes must begin with small steps, and we will reiterate that the demo- graphic information collection policy of JUME is changing in order to fill gaps and minimize inaccuracies in the available data. The information presented now, how- ever, we believe to be satisfactory to discuss larger historical trends in JUME’s own publication process and to justify the need for collecting more accurate demographic data. Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 8 Table 1 Demographics of JUME Authors and Reviewers Demographic Authors 2008–2020* Reviewers Who Completed a Review 2016–2020 Reviewers Who Declined to Conduct a Review 2016–2020 Reviewers Who Accepted to Conduct a Review and Later Remitted 2016–2020 Asian 5.3% <1% <1% <1% Black (non-Hispanic) 41.0% 5.0% 79.0% 9.0% Latin or Hispanic Descent or Origin 36.0% 11.0% 21.0% 9.0% White (non-Hispanic) 14.0% 84.0% <1% 82.0% Note. All numbers in this table are estimates based on editorial team members’ familiarity with the author or reviewer. *This includes both primary authors and co-authors. The demographic survey will not be limited to the broad categories presented in Table 1. Authors and reviewers will be able to provide their own demographic information with more fine-grained insights into their classifications or place of origin. For example, categorizing the initial data presented in Table 1 was compli- cated by the act of describing certain geographic regions as subsets of larger ones (e.g., Should “Asian” be inclusive of everyone with roots going back to the continent of Asia despite the many different contexts present within the landmass?). With the implementation of our new demographic survey, JUME’s authors and scholars will be able to more accurately self-identify their ethnicities and heritages (e.g., “South Asian” or “East Asian” rather than “Asian.”). Our desire is that collecting such de- mographic information will capture nuances of identity with great accuracy and that doing so will promote discussion of urban mathematics within an international frame- work and additionally enable and empower discussion of how each author’s mathe- matical identity is shaped by unique mathematics education experiences. Another goal of the editorial team is to better understand the representation of authors of all gender identities and sexual orientations in urban mathematics educa- tion and to recognize their contributions. It is for this reason that the voluntary de- mographics survey will allow contributors to indicate their gender identity and sexual orientation. Additionally, we recognize the unique experiences of LGBTIQ+ stu- dents, teachers, and mathematics education scholars and seek to make the journal a space where conversations and studies rooted in such experiences can be shared. Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 9 Our mission to strengthen the inclusive nature of JUME’s scholarly community will be further supported by the voluntary demographics survey allowing contribu- tors to indicate and specify their disability/ability status. Scholars in the field of urban mathematics education have long studied how best to support the mathematics achievement of exceptional learners, and such learners who enter the academy must be able to share their unique research perspectives, developed from their own math- ematical identities and experiences, with their peers. We will strive for JUME to be a space where such scholars know their work fits and will be fairly represented. As we implement these changes, we recognize that our path is not without faults, but it is important to keep in mind that most journals are reluctant to provide this level of transparency. As such, there is no long-standing model for transparent editorial practices for us to follow, though we find the recent guidance of the Amer- ican Psychological Association and the implementation of its own demographics sur- vey a good place from which to start. The best we can do for JUME, for the field and community at large, and for urban mathematics students is to provide further trans- parency of our own editorial practices. For these reasons, we believe that collecting demographic information for authors and reviewers is the correct course of action to take in order to improve the representation of all scholars in JUME. With all this being said, the editorial team agrees that without there ever having been a previous discussion about demographic characteristics or opportunity with the journal, it ap- pears that the people doing the work in urban settings are represented well within our authorship pool. We feel this is a strength of the journal and of the team historically. We have discussed our desire and reasoning for collecting new data with our demographics survey, but what do we have to announce regarding our current data in the first annual progress report for JUME? In answering this question, let us first ask one that is essential for discerning an equitable editorial process: “Who is doing the reviewing?” Often, reviewers act as the gatekeepers to publication. Additionally, it is often the reviewers who tend to favor their own paradigms and topics and who approach reviewing myopically. At least, this tends to be the scapegoat for when editors and editorial teams are questioned about publication decisions. So what are the characteristics of a JUME reviewer? To answer this, we reviewed the last four years of reviewer information. We were limited to four years because software up- dates made reviewer information older than this unreliable. Additionally, we do not have sufficient information on reviewers for manuscripts that were not published. When considering the last four years in which manuscripts were published, of those reviewers who completed a review, the ethnic/racial breakdown appears to be the following: less than 1% Asian, 5% Black, 11% Latin or Hispanic, and 84% White (see Table 1). We were also interested in knowing more about reviewers who either decline or remit a review. Of the 62% of those who declined to conduct a review, less than 1% appear to be Asian or White, 79% Black, and 21% Latin or Hispanic. For reviewers who accepted to conduct a review and who remitted that review, 82% Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 10 appear to be White, 9% Black, 9% Hispanic or Latin, and less than 1% Asian. What this means is that when an author of color submits a manuscript, they have an ~80% chance to have White reviewers. On the surface, these trends may appear problematic, but with context, they are signs of the health and utility of JUME. Considering that the National Center for Education Statistics confirms that 77.5% of Full and Associate Professors are White Americans (McFarland et al., 2018), we fully expect that the vast majority of our reviewers would reflect these demographics. In fact, given our focus on the education of youth from disenfranchised communities and schools, it is inspiring to see that so many of our senior White professors are supporting, strengthening, and facilitating the publication of research by JUME’s diverse authors. More than eight in 10 authors for JUME are faculty of color publishing work concerning mathematics education for an equally diverse population of students in urban schools. Moreover, our data also note a relatively low rate of reviews by faculty of color (16%); specifically, only 5% of reviewers are African American. Yet, within an appropriate context, these data should be expected. Only 5.5% of Full and Associate Professors are African Ameri- can in the United States (McFarland et al., 2018). On the other hand, Latin and His- panic scholars only account for 4% of Full and Associate Professors in the United States (McFarland et al., 2018) but represent roughly 11% of JUME’s reviewers, which we recognize and applaud. JUME also fully recognizes that faculty of color are faced with a “minority tax” (Baez, 2000; Trejo, 2020), asked to perform diversity work and support underrepresented students in addition to their academic and admin- istrative duties. Black and Brown mathematics education faculty are often too over- burdened to be able to accept every extra task asked of them. It is also a reality that Black and Brown faculty are trying to navigate the tenure and promotion process in a typically White institution, devised by White faculty, and governed by White ad- ministrators. Therefore, many faculty of color find themselves making choices be- tween their personal missions and those for which they receive credit toward promo- tion, tenure, and recognition. Given all of this, JUME will continue to focus our sup- port for equitable access to a research publication that advances minority scholarship and research to improve mathematics education in urban schools and classrooms. We hope that the steps being taken in 2021 will advance this goal and that the JUME editorial team’s decisions allocate the effort necessary to raise JUME to the prominence of other major journals both within and beyond our field. We expect that being included in SCOPUS, working on our author metrics, adopting ORCID iden- tification, and getting the journal’s social media accounts active will have a positive impact that will allow faculty of color to more easily prioritize JUME for their service to the field and to become active reviewers. These steps already appear to be bearing fruit. We are pleased that every one of our inaugural editorial board members decided to extend their service. We were also able to add one new international board member who is interested in our collective work. Editorial Team Editorial Journal of Urban Mathematics Education Vol. 14, No. 1 (Special Issue) 11 There are some other prejudicial considerations in the publication commu- nity, far too many to detail here, but they range from the notion that great mathemat- ics education research comes from only a small number of universities or from those graduates who come from them to the idea that urban mathematics education is a niche and not a mainstream educationally scientific area of interest. We have not completed our review of institutions represented in our author and reviewer pools. Too many years, as well as faculty tendency to move or change universities, make this work arduous to complete with a high level of dependability. Therefore, we in- tend to collect these data moving forward so that we will have accurate information to determine if any institutional bias exists, and we will report this information in the 2021 JUME report that will be published in the first issue of 2022. We would like to conclude this introduction to this issue of JUME by thanking the many wonderful scholars who will join the journal in bettering the editorial pro- cess and strengthening the voices and representation of all urban mathematics edu- cation scholars, especially those in the most vulnerable positions within and outside of the academy. We believe that JUME is well positioned to make a meaningful con- tribution to our field and to provide a high-quality outlet suitable for graduate students and junior faculty looking to break ground on their research agenda and establish their reputation as well as for senior scholars looking to make powerful statements about the teaching and learning of mathematics in urban contexts, at home, across the street, or across the globe. While this editorial summarizes our first year of pub- lication as the new editorial team, it also welcomes in the new year with all the hopes and dreams it brings, but make no mistake, this editorial team is still working hard, reevaluating our procedures, and establishing new benchmarks by which to make thoughtful decisions moving forward. References American Psychological Association. (2021). APA journals demographics survey 2021. Baez, B. (2000). Race-related service and faculty of color: Conceptualizing critical agency in aca- deme. Higher Education, 39(3), 363–391. McFarland, J. Hussar, B. Wang, X. Zhang, J., Wang, K. Rathbun, A., Barmer, A., Forrest Cataldi, E., & Bullock Mann, F. (2018). The condition of education 2018 (NCES 2018-144). U.S. Depart- ment of Education, Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018144.pdf Trejo, J. (2020). The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: The minority tax. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 31(25), 2752–2754. https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E20-08-0567 Copyright: © 2021 Capraro, Capraro, Leonard, Lewis, Grant, James, Mosqueda, Young, Bicer, Hubert, Moldavan, Cannon, Kwon, Rugh, & Chang. This is an open access article distributed un- der the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.