Paul Finch, MSc, PhD, DPodM,
Editor-in-Chief, IJTMB
Chair of Health Sciences, Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Kitchener, ON, Canada.
When the IJTMB was first established, I was excited when asked to act as the Education Section Editor. Although previously published as an author and active as a reviewer for a number of journals, I had no direct knowledge of the editorial role. New territory brings new learning. During my 3 years in the Section Editor role, I learned much about the mechanisms of journal publication and the challenges associated with bringing a submission or article “to press.” Some of these challenges have been related to communication, deadlines, reviews, mentoring, and working with competing priorities and imperatives. In the role of Section Editor, these challenges relate primarily (in my experience at least) to the relationship between authors and the Journal, and in many ways the role of the Section Editor is to pay attention to this relationship while simultaneously ensuring publication is associated with the level of rigor required of a peer-reviewed journal.
More recently, I was honored to be asked to step into the role of Editor-in-Chief, as the previous incumbent, Tom Findley, moved on to assume the position of Consulting Editor and Emeritus Founding Editor-in-Chief. The role of Editor-in-Chief is largely collaborative, working in conjunction with the Executive Editor to facilitate the organization and publication of the Journal, in a fashion appropriate to the level of scholarly work required. The role obviously involves liaising with the Section Editors, core to which is a coordinating function linking the overarching supervisory role of the Executive Editor with the efforts of our able section editors.
From an operational point of view, I see the short-term developmental priority as working with the editorial team to establish processes to better facilitate communication and projection of content for future issues. Over the coming months we will be discussing and advancing a number of initiatives, and while this will affect the readership through continued development of the Journal, the direct impact will be related to journal management.
In addition to operational matters, another aspect of the work of the Editor-in-Chief is consideration of the future of the Journal, and to chart a path accordingly. Of course, this is not undertaken unilaterally, but involves collaboration with all the members of the Editorial Board and, through the Executive Editor, with the Massage Therapy Foundation’s e-Journal Committee and its Board of Trustees. I look forward to this engagement and to the continued evolution of the IJTMB.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST NOTIFICATION
No conflict of interest exists.
COPYRIGHT
Published under the CreativeCommons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE AND BODYWORK, VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2011