Advancing Science Education Research Together (2020–2025): A Final JRST Editorial

The December 2025 issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST; Volume 62, Issue 10) marked the official conclusion of our editorship. Our term as editors began in January 2020, at which time we assumed responsibility for processing and making decisions on all newly submitted manuscripts. The previous editors, Fouad Abd-El-Khalick and Dana Zeidler, remained responsible for producing the 2020 volume. The production side of the journal was passed to us in January 2021 (Volume 58). Transition to the current team of editors, led by Matthew Kloser, Edna Tan, and Dana Vedder Weiss, followed the same pattern in which the Sadler-Moore Mensah team oversaw production in what became our final year of editorship, and the Kloser-Tan-Vedder Weiss team guided reviewing and decision-making processes for new manuscripts. Over the complete six-year term of our editorship, we received 3416 manuscripts. Our team published 350 articles in 50 issues distributed in five volumes of JRST. We share this editorial as a final report of our editorship. We intend to highlight what was accomplished with the journal during this period and share insights from our roles as past editors. We highlight these goals as individual bullet points and headings as a way to organize this editorial; however, the goals themselves are necessarily interrelated. For example, advancing the quality and impact of the journal is linked to fostering equity and diversity of the scholars writing, reviewing, and interacting with the journal. There is no simple way to assess the quality and impact of academic journals, but there is a range of metrics that can be considered, including citation counts, impact factor, acceptance rate, and number of article downloads. Table 1 presents some of the metrics that we attended to over our five-year editorship. Throughout our editorship, we took the stand that these metrics are useful indicators of the journal's health, but that none of these provide an ultimate assessment of the journal's quality. As such, we monitored these data, but we did not shape journal policy, practices, or decisions to engineer a more favorable result on any of these metrics. Academic journals can, and sometimes do, take a different approach. For example, editors can set a particular target for acceptance rate and use that as a metric for guiding decisions on individual manuscripts. Or they can encourage authors to cite articles previously published in their journal to increase citation rates and ultimately, the impact factor (Fong et al. 2023). We chose not to employ these tactics and think the journal is better because of that decision. The JRST impact factor fluctuated somewhat over the course of our editorship, but overall, it remained high relative to other journals in the education sector. We do want to note that the dip in impact factor in 2023 corresponds with a change in the way that publishers calculate the factor. Impact factor is calculated based on the number of citations divided by the number of articles in a particular year. Prior to 2023, the number of articles was based on articles published in a volume. As of 2023, the number of articles was based on those published online. Because JRST had an existing queue of articles in “early view,” the divisor for the calculation of the impact factor was larger, resulting in a lower impact factor. Once this queue was accounted for in the 2023 calculation, JRST's impact factor rebounded in 2024. This pattern of a dip in impact factor in 2023 followed by an increase in 2024 was typical for many academic journals. Table 1 presents journal metrics, including annual acceptance rates and article downloads. These data were provided by Wiley, the journal's publisher, and data points for 2023 are not available. Acceptance rates fluctuated from a low of 6% in our final year of the editorship to a high of 19.6% in 2022. Overall patterns of online access of JRST articles increased over the course of our editorship, suggesting increased readership and usage of JRST published research. It should be noted that these figures represent downloads of articles published in any year. The increase likely reflects global trends around access as well as rises in the overall number of articles published and an increase in articles published as open access (see Table 2). Promoting equity and diversity of the JRST community started with the composition of the editorial team. Felicia Moore Mensah was the first African American woman co-editor for JRST, and her expertise and scholarship were a significant factor in promoting equity and diversity across the work of the journal. We established early a commitment to diverse perspectives, with co-editors having a wide range of expertise and experiences that complemented each other. Our managing editor, Li Ke, is a transnational Chinese scholar whose educational and professional experiences across China and the U.S. bring a global lens to the journal's knowledge production. We wanted the same for our editorial team by inviting associate editors who were scholars of color, international scholars, ethnically diverse scholars, multilingual scholars, and scholars who had a wide-encompassing range of theoretical and methodological expertise. At the time, being the most diverse editorial team—our associate editors, editorial board, and editorial assistants—represented the increasingly diverse membership we were seeing and interacting with among the global NARST membership. In addition, it was important for us to have our editorial board serve as ambassadors for the journal (Sadler and Mensah 2020). Indicative of this, the number of manuscripts submitted to JRST saw an increase in the number of international submissions (53% over 6 years) and acceptances. Though we do not have the capacity to report the number of scholars of color who submitted manuscripts that were published, knowing this number could serve as an additional metric for promoting equity and diversity within the journal. Promoting equity and diversity was also evident in our special issues, giving attention to the scholars and topics that were highlighted. We wanted to build upon the previous editors' work to create a systematic process for special issues. We invited three Guest Editors—Heidi Ballard, Angela Calabrese Barton, and Bhaskar Upadhyay—to develop the first special issue under our editorship, Community-driven science: Evidence of and implications for equity, justice, science learning, and participation (Volume 60, Issue 8, 2023). Our second special issue had three Guest Editors—Greses Pérez, María González-Howard, and Enrique Suárez—for Translanguaging in Science and Engineering Education Research (Volume 62, Issue 1, 2025), and our third special issue, Learning and teaching in times of science denial and disinformation (Volume 62, Volume 6), with Guest Editors Doug Lombardi and K. C. Busch. We also participated in the Wiley Gender Equality in Education Multi-journal Special Issue Collection/STEM Education (December 2023). We selected two of our associate editors, Lucy Avraamidou and Julie Bianchini, who served as Guest Editors. This special issue included contributions from several participating journals and was the first special issue in a wider Wiley series on Inclusivity. Manuscripts accepted were published in a special virtual issue and promoted via Wiley social media channels. The volume compiles research aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, addressing persistent obstacles for women and girls in education and STEM. Key themes include reducing gender bias in teaching, closing STEM achievement gaps, and analyzing interventions to improve female participation, such as dismantling stereotypes and addressing underrepresentation in high-tech fields. JRST was one of 24 journals that participated in this Wiley Special Issue. The volume is located here. Because community and inclusivity were also important components in establishing our editorship and ensuring the quality and impact of JRST, we were focused on involving graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career researchers. Our initiative, the JRST Early-Career Reviewer Pathway Program, was developed to create pathways for new community members to become active with the journal and offer a form of professional and career development for learning about reviewing, writing, and publishing in JRST. We collaborated with the NARST Graduate Student Committee, the Abell Scholars, the Early Career Institute, and the Equity and Ethics Committee Basu Scholars to hold online and in-person workshops at the annual conference. We invited assistance from associate editors to join us in delivering these workshops, where attendees have an opportunity in advance to review an author's manuscript, write a quality review, have it scored, and then talk with the author or author team, associate editors, and editors about the review process. Participants who completed the process (i.e., reviewing a manuscript, writing a high-quality review, participating in a workshop) were invited to create a profile and were added to the regular pool of reviewers for JRST. This process has mutual benefits for the participants and the journal, adding to the participants' understanding of the review process and building capacity for extending the diversity of reviewers for the journal. More than 300 scholars registered for the Early-Career Reviewer Pathway Program. Because our term co-existed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we, like other editorial teams leading journals, navigated challenges during this time. For instance, we allowed extra time for the return of reviews, authors to submit revisions, and delays in the review process by giving reviewers and associate editors additional time for conducting reviews and sending out letters. We, on numerous occasions, served as associate editors, moving our associate editors into the role of reviewers so that authors would have the two required reviews and not delay the review process. We added three to four additional associate editors each year to account for the increasing number of submissions and to ease the burden of the number of manuscripts that our associate editors had to manage as we all adjusted to academic and personal lives amid a pandemic. As we took on leadership for JRST, the push for “open science” was well underway (Cook et al. 2018). The movement generally espouses greater transparency in research, more access to data and data analysis strategies, increased attention to replicability, and open access to published research. The assumption is that open science processes will lead to higher quality and more usable research. Some research communities, such as the health sciences, have fully embraced open science principles (Foster and Deardorff 2017), and other communities, some of which are closely related to science education, such as educational psychology, seem to be moving in the direction of open science (Fleming et al. 2021). Our initial plans for the editorship included working toward a more deliberate focus on and integration of open science for JRST. Early in our term, we made some headway on this goal, such as exploring infrastructure for broader data sharing for JRST-published research and badge systems for incentivizing open science practices. However, by 2021, serious conversations began unfolding about a new contract for the journal, and this new contract ultimately shaped the focus of our efforts around JRST and open science. The NARST Board of Directors and its Executive Director handle the publishing contract for JRST. As editors, we shared our perspectives and consulted on the process, but contract negotiations occurred between NARST and the publisher, Wiley. The contract, which was renewed between NARST and Wiley for the publication of JRST, placed new emphasis on one particular dimension of open science, that is, open access. Historically, JRST, like most major journals in education, has operated with a subscription model; people or their institutions pay to read journals. The open access model changes the dynamic such that people and their institutions pay to publish in journals, which, in turn, creates open access and relieves the financial burden of potential readers. Open access is great for readers who otherwise would not be able to read a journal; however, a pay-to-publish system creates potential challenges for authors who do not have the financial resources to cover article publication costs. This was a concern we had for our NARST members, particularly scholars who do not have or have very limited funding, and scholars from universities and countries registering low on the Human Development Index (https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI), which NARST uses. Under both the former and current publishing contracts, JRST is a hybrid journal. Many institutions around the world pay for subscriptions to the journal, and scholars affiliated with those institutions or current NARST members can access JRST content. Authors, who are NARST members, can publish in the journal free of charge, and access to their articles is governed by the publisher. The journal also has an option for authors to pay an Article Publication Charge, which makes the article accessible to any readers, regardless of institutional affiliation or subscription (i.e., open access). The new contract does not change the hybrid nature of JRST, but it does change the financial terms of the relationship between Wiley and NARST such that the value of the journal is tied to its publication of open access articles. Given these changes, our attention related to open science really shifted to open access for the last several years of our term. During that time, the journal's publication of open access articles has increased by over 400% (see Table 2). Whereas we originally intended to make much more progress for positioning JRST with respect to the broad open science movement, we ended up focusing on the more immediate issue of open access and did not realize the progress toward broader principles of open science that we had envisioned. JRST could and should take steps to become a more frequently tapped resource to inform efforts to improve teaching and learning practices and policy. We think that these steps include adopting a more active strategy for disseminating the ideas reported in JRST. (Sadler and Mensah 2020, 151). We took a multi-pronged approach in pursuing this goal. First, we worked to expand the places where JRST research could be seen and who might interact with JRST findings. As a part of this effort, we created social media accounts for sharing JRST-published findings and showcasing people who make up the JRST community. We created JRST accounts on Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook. Across these accounts, we amassed over 3700 followers and made over 1800 posts. These numbers pale in comparison to metrics for popular accounts such as influencers, but we contend that these efforts resulted in a much broader audience interacting with JRST content than those who would have only seen JRST research on the pages of the journal itself. We also note that this strategy of leveraging social media platforms is not without potential problems. When Twitter was taken over by a new owner and adopted policies that we thought ran counter to the values of the JRST community, such as downplaying fact-checking and essentially encouraging the spread of misinformation, we pulled back from use of the platform. Once we had some places to share JRST research, we initiated a campaign to encourage authors to create summaries of their JRST articles for consumption by broader audiences. We created two such formats: research briefs and visual abstracts. Research briefs are one-page summaries of the research presented in a JRST article. As a part of each brief, we encouraged authors to share a one-sentence overview, articulate a bulleted list of key points, and identify potential audiences who might be interested in the findings, such as K-12 teachers, administrators, policy makers, and so forth. We also asked authors to craft a brief narrative including an introduction, findings, and takeaways. The other broader audience format that we adopted was a visual abstract. The purpose of a visual abstract is to capture the essence of an article (or a part of an article) in a slide or infographic. We created a slide template that authors could use, and many contributors came up with their own designs. Both the visual abstracts and research briefs were shared through the journal's social media sites. Once we had some of these broader audience materials in hand, we wanted to create capacity for sharing them on the NARST website. We worked with the website coordinator, Paul Kemp, to create a space on the NARST website to showcase the materials. As the collection of research briefs grew, it became apparent that the site needed tools for searching through the materials that were available. By the end of our term, the NARST website included a page dedicated to JRST Research Briefs (https://narst.org/research-briefs) organized by year of publication and searchable by potential audiences (e.g., Assessment Developers, Grant Funders, and Teacher Educators) and keywords (e.g., Climate Change, Policy, and Standards). By no means have we solved the information crisis and the under-representation of evidence-based knowledge. However, the steps we have taken have moved the journal in a positive direction in terms of helping to surface JRST-published findings beyond the relatively limited of who access the journal. we have focused on the goals we for the journal at the of our editorship. 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