Latitudes

Mass resignations rock publication on international students

The editor in chief and three quarters of the editors of the Journal of International Students have resigned amid an abrupt transfer of the publication’s management to an unknown third party and questions about its continued commitment to open-access academic publishing.

The mass resignation of the volunteer editorial team this month has led to confusion about the future of the 12-year-old nonprofit journal, which is credited with advancing international-education research and spotlighting the work of a diverse collection of scholars.

In a letter to the journal’s founding editor, Krishna Bista, a professor of higher education at Morgan State University, current and former editors decried the lack of openness in the transition and questioned whether Bista had the sole legal authority to transfer management rights without consulting the editorial team or editorial advisory board.

Many are also alarmed by the journal’s sudden shift to charging article-processing fees to the authors of scholarly articles, which they said could make publishing less accessible to early-career scholars and those from the global South.

“I know many of us volunteered so much time and care because we believed firmly in the cause of having an open-access, free-to-authors, high-quality, truly inclusive and diverse journal,” said Nelson Brunsting, an assistant professor of special education at the University of Florida, who resigned as special-issues editor. “And we did. And it was beautiful. To unilaterally move the journal to new fee-based management without informing the editors or author community flies fully in the face of the mission and purpose that so many of us worked to make happen.”

The dispute highlights issues around both scholarly equity and financial sustainability as open-access publishing has expanded. In a series of email messages to The Chronicle, Bista said the changes were made to ensure the continuing financial viability of the journal.

He said he could not name the new management team “for now” because of a nondisclosure agreement.

Chris R. Glass, a professor of higher education and educational leadership at Boston College, and the editor in chief who resigned, is among those who signed the letter to Bista. In an interview, Glass said he had been aware that Bista had been in talks with an organization about running the journal, but that he had not been part of negotiations and did not know the group’s identity. He had separately discussed stepping down as editor after five years in the volunteer role.

Glass said he became alarmed when he was contacted by several authors who had submitted manuscripts to the journal and received confusing messages that he knew nothing about. One author was emailed a document with edits and an offer to publish her article as a “stand-alone book” — despite the fact that Glass had been handling her manuscript and had sent it out to three scholars for review. It also was not the journal’s policy for editors to contact authors by email but instead through its online-management system, Glass said.

Another pair of authors were taken aback to receive a message that said the journal would publish their previously submitted manuscript if they paid a £2,500 (about $3,177) article-processing fee. In addition, Glass said he was locked out of journal’s website and submission system without notice.

Glass said he decided to resign when “I realized I had lost editorial control, and our editorial guidelines were not being followed. I was tired of learning about decisions and actions being taken secondhand by confused staff, authors, and editors.”

Glass also said the journal does not appear to be complying with commonly adopted ethical principles of academic publishing, including listing information about management and ownership and alerting researchers to potential changes in author policy. The journal’s new website said it does abide by the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines.

In an email to Glass, Judith Barnsby, the head of editorial at the Directory of Open Access Journals, noted the “enormous” article-processing fee to be charged by the Journal of International Students and said her organization would be conducting an “urgent review” to determine whether the publication meets open-access best practices to be listed in its index.

Dispute over charging authors

Article-processing fees are not unheard of in open-access publishing, which unlike traditional academic publishing does not charge hefty subscriptions to college libraries or one-time fees to obtain articles from behind paywalls. The processing fees typically cover operational costs such as formatting, coordinating peer review, and digital storage.

But such fees can be difficult for scholars at small colleges, in less-developed countries, or in underresourced fields to afford.

Jason E. Lane, dean of education at Miami University, in Ohio, was unexpectedly told he and his co-author Jessica Schueller, a doctoral student, would be charged a fee by the Journal of International Students for an article on transnational students. While Lane said he could probably afford the fee, he said he viewed such fees as “historically associated with predatory journals.”

He said it was also deceptive for the journal to levy article-processing fees without previously disclosing them. In addition, he and Schueller were told in a message from unnamed editors that they would be charged a £500 fee (about $635) if they later decided to withdraw the article and that they would not be able to publish it elsewhere. They decided to pull their manuscript.

In a statement posted on the journal’s website on Monday, Bista, who is listed as founder and editor in chief, wrote that processing and withdrawal fees would not be charged to articles submitted before November 1. He also said the journal would provide “humane letters grants” to help cover publication costs for scholars facing financial barriers, although details about the grants were not provided. He noted that “prestigious publications such as the AERA Open or Sage Open” already charge article-processing fees.

In an email exchange, Bista said he was “empathetic” to concerns about the new fees and cast the move as “difficult” but necessary to continue to be able to make the publication free to readers. “While I was able to bear the cost of the platform by reaching out to generous donors and oftentimes dipping into my own personal savings (with joy and grace!), at some point, I saw that it was not going to be sustainable,” he wrote.

Bista, whose work on the journal grew out of his own experience as an international student from Nepal, also shared an email thread from over the summer that showed he and Glass had met with and considered the possibility of acquisition of the journal by a traditional academic publisher, Taylor & Francis, but had rejected that direction. “I would hate to see that what we co-created would be behind the firewall of payment,” Bista said. He added that his “commitment to open access remains intact. I promise to do everything I can to ensure that no scholar is left behind just because of financial barriers.” (Glass, who confirmed the meeting, said he thought it worth exploring whether it would be possible to work with a traditional publisher to maintain a fully open-access model.)

While he declined to provide details about the new ownership, Bista said the arrangement would allow the journal to continue, as well as undertake new projects, including the possibility of a full academic press.

But the long-term fallout for the typically collegial world of international-education research is not clear. Lane, the Miami University dean, noted that the journal occupies a “unique and important niche,” publishing innovative and diverse scholarship on international-student issues. “To see the whole thing unravel as it has is tough,” he said.

New effort to get more Black men to study abroad

The Center for Access and Equity at the Institute of International Education will work with a nonprofit group, Leaders of the Free World, to increase participation in study abroad by Black male students.

Although Black students make up about a third of all American college students, they account for just 5 percent of those who go abroad, the institute said.

The partnership will focus on creating and enhancing efforts, such as mentoring and offering grants to obtain passports, to get more students from underrepresented minority groups to study abroad. It will also support research into the barriers to international study for such students.

Research has found that international study improves educational outcomes, including on-time graduation and grade-point averages, particularly among underrepresented students and those on need-based aid.

Throwing cold water on global mobility?

Recent data document a healthy post-pandemic rebound in international enrollments, with the number of foreign students in the United States logging the biggest increases in four decades. The U.S. Department of State this week announced that it issued more than 600,000 student visas between October 2022 and September 2023, the most since the 2017 fiscal year.

But a trio of new essays urges colleges to temper their celebrations, noting that there could be a host of challenges to global-student mobility on the horizon. Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education point to the recent upset election of a right-wing party in the Netherlands that campaigned on limiting international students. The United States could see a resurgence in similar isolationist sentiments, they warn, if former President Donald J. Trump were to win re-election. “The fact is that the world in 2023 is a highly unstable place,” they write.

The other pieces narrow their focus to China, long the top sender of international students to the United States, until it was overtaken by India this year. Yingyi Ma, a professor at Syracuse University and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institute, said that when she returned to China this summer she found that American government policy and political rhetoric that is seen as hostile to China has diminished the interest among young Chinese in studying here: “The United States has increasingly lost the heart of China’s best and brightest.”

And Xiaofeng Wan, an associate dean of admission and the coordinator of international recruitment at Amherst College, argues that whether Chinese students will continue to prefer coming to America could hinge on their perceptions of safety, including gun violence.

Wan joined me and several other experts before the Thanksgiving holiday to dissect the latest international-enrollment trends. If you missed our discussion, you can still watch it on demand.

Around the globe

President Xi Jinping has called for welcoming 50,000 young Americans to study in China over the next five years.

The chairman of the U.S. House science committee has accused the Department of Justice of striking a “sweetheart” deal with Stanford University over its failure to disclose researchers’ foreign ties when applying for federal grants, calling the $1.9-million settlement a “slap on the wrist.”

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the U.S. secretary of homeland security, has asked an academic advisory panel to set up a special subcommittee to examine foreign malign influence on American higher education, including the development of guidelines and best practices for colleges. Mayorkas has called attempts by overseas interference on campus a “persistent and increasing” problem.

The U.S. Department of Education announced new efforts to promote multilingual education even as foreign-language enrollments fall at American colleges. Related: Why fewer Americans studying a foreign language is a national-security risk.

Eight universities are working with the State Department on research, analysis, and data aimed at anticipating, preventing, and responding to conflict globally.

A former graduate student from China has been found mentally unfit to be tried on charges of killing his professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A U.S. government strategic assessment said that China’s educational system is making strides but also found significant disparities in quality between a handful of world-class universities and the rest of the system.

I wrote about some of the headwinds facing Chinese higher education, including youth unemployment and tightening government oversight. It’s a follow-up to a chapter I contributed to a book on neonationalism and its impact on higher ed around the globe.

Researchers in Australia could face jail time if they share details about sensitive technologies with foreign scientists. British and American research collaborators would be exempt from the proposed legislation.

New regulations for setting up branch campuses in India lack clarity about how foreign colleges will be allowed to collect tuition revenues, experts in Indian higher education and tax regulations said.

The president of an Iranian university is said to have resigned after a graduation ceremony in which female students did not wear religious head coverings.

More Jewish students are reportedly enrolling at Israeli universities, citing antisemitism abroad.

A shake-up in the British Cabinet has led to the dismissal of Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who put in place a policy that barred some international graduate students from bringing dependents with them during their studies.

A new poll found that a majority of Quebec residents support a proposal by English-language universities to improve French-language instruction for students from outside the province as an alternative to a government plan to double tuition for international and other nonlocal students.

The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities has recognized three colleges for their international impact.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on X or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.