Desk Rejects and Journals' Accessibility Awareness Gaps

As you can probably tell I am on a bit of a resources and resourcing theme these last few weeks. This is because I have been thinking deeply about information sources, digital resources being erased from the Internet because of policy and politics, and the overall culture of subscription over ownership when it comes to spaces that share information or help create information.

This week I want to talk about academic journals and the disservice academic journals do to disabled folk and folk who work in accessibility space. I have written previously about how academic editors have this tendency to try edit out "neurodivergent voice" or framing in journal articles and books and this is the same kind of editing discourse that has been part of generative AI conversations. Questions like whose voice is being echoed by these tools? What assumptions are being made when information is delivered? But there is a similar sort of editorial barrier and exclusionary thinking when it comes to journals and their scope of topics.

Submitting an article to a journal is not a simple task. And of course part of that task is looking at potential journals, looking closely at aims and scope, seeing the kinds of topics they tend to publish, and then when you feel a good fit is clear you send in the manuscript. I mention this because no one would randomly send a manuscript to a bad fit journal, because why would they waste time and energy like that? This is because that manuscript of course has been formatted individually to match the journal's style with a ridiculous amount of meticulous asks (not an accessible practice). Then you wait, and sometimes you wait a long time, or sometimes as is often the case of folk who do accessibility work, you wait a short time and get a desk reject.

Often the desk reject will say that something about how accessible pedagogy is not within the scope of a journal that talks about teaching and learning, or educational technology, and that this should be something better placed in a journal about student services or something like that. Because as folk who do accessibility work in post-secondary spaces have mentioned many times, when folk in HigherEd space see accessibility they immediately think that only has to do with the student accessibility support office and not say, inclusive design, or inclusive assessment strategies, or creating trust spaces in educational environments for neurodivergent students. 

A lot of this is actually a deep gap in accessibility awareness on the part of editorial boards and editors. They don't think about accessibility, they don't know about accessibility, so therefore it seems foreign to the scope of pedagogical journals. But the other part, and here I am saying the quiet thing out loud to make it really clear, is that those journals actually know no one in academic spaces who do accessibility work that they can send the manuscript to for review. There is no one in their reviewer space who does that work, so it is so much easier to desk reject and say that it is out of scope (when it isn't) than to admit they have a massive gap in reviewer knowledge.

This also happens to folk who do qualitative research when the majority of the reviewers at a journal are deeply quantitative people. The scope and aims of the journal page will happily say "all methodologies accepted" but when it comes to the review, it is the qualitative folk who are often told they are out of scope. I gave a conference paper this summer where I did a review of the conference schedules for work on accessibility and disability (as opposed to accessibility as opening doors and recruitment strategies) and the results of the review were of course deeply predictable. A similar thing is going on with teaching and learning journals. Their scope makes it very clear that accessible pedagogy research would very much fit with what they publish, but ultimately they don't because they don't know how to actually engage with that research. 

Even the suggestions of where to resubmit in terms of other journals are deeply faulty. It demonstrates that even their journal system algorithm doesn't understand where accessible pedagogy should be part of the conversation. This is why we are so lucky to have journals like the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, but is this seemingly one of the only places that accessible pedagogy could be considered without doubt. 

There is of course some clear ways to fix this, one is that teaching and learning journals need to expand their reviewer group to include folk who work in accessible and inclusive pedagogy space (acknowledging again that peer review as a system is really broken). This would mean also reviewing the assumptions that they are making about journal scope, but also about timelines and such which act as gatekeeper to who can participate in academic publishing either as an author or reviewer. The other is to have Taylor & Francis and all those Big Journal groups to review the kinds of not applicable suggestions they provide folk who do inclusive work or qualitative work. I promise you deeply that accessible pedagogy is not only a conversation for student services land, and it should not be the case that CJDS is the only space that wants to have articles that speak to accessible pedagogy applications in HigherEd. 

We need more places to share information right now, not less, and not having reviewers who can engage with the manuscripts you are receiving is part of what journals really need to reflect on the barriers and biases they are perpetuating. You can't hide your gaps in desk rejects, we know what is going on, it would probably be better for you to be honest about it and maybe expand the scope of the "cool kids" in your reviewer pool. The system as it is now excludes disabled folk in so many ways, from the formatting idiosyncrasies (and platforms that don't work with assistive tech), to timelines supportive of a neurotypical lived experience, to the hidden curriculum of publishing.  

So those of you doing this work, I see you, and I hope this helps in that you are not alone, and honestly it is deeply a them problem and not an us problem.