Editorial Team

  • Associate Professor John Guenther, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Australia (Chief Editor)
  • Professor Susan Ledger, University of Newcastle, NSW
  • Dr Melyssa Fuqua, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Dr Serena Davie, Workforce Policy and Coordination, Dept of Education, WA
  • Dr Bronwyn Relf, University of Newcastle
  • Natalie Downes, University of Canberra
  • Dr Laurence Lasselle, University of St Andrews
  • Professor Hernan Cuervo, University of Melbourne
  • Judy Gouwens, Roosevelt University
  • Gry Paulgaard, The Arctic University of Norway
  • Xin Fan, Durham University, UK
  • Dr Christopher Hudson, Federation University
  • Marnie O'Bryan, Batchelor Institute
  • Margeret Friel, Batchelor Institute

Editorial Roles and Responsibilities

General Principles

The Chief Editor is responsible for the journal's management, direction, and overall quality. The Chief Editor works with the editors in the editorial team to manage policy, review, copyediting and production. The Journal aims to be the number one international journal for matters about rural education—all editors assume responsibility for helping the journal achieve this goal. Furthermore, the Chief Editor will provide the editorial for one edition per year.

All editors will adhere to the principles of procedural fairness and ethical conduct. Specifically, editors will treat authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty, and transparency and ensure the confidentiality of the author's work is protected.

All editors are expected to manage at least 3 articles in a calendar year. They are expected to contribute to copyediting, production, sending out articles for review, and responding to authors where they are managing an article.

Specific responsibilities are outlined below:

Journal Manager

The journal manager does not assume responsibility, but works to support the editors.  The below descriptions assume no journal manager position.

Chief Editor/s Policy

The Chief Editor is responsible for matters about policy. It includes internal journal policy and procedures, compliance with external policy, quality assurance, managing the relationship with the publisher, and journal development.  Specific responsibilities include:

  • Internal policy and procedures. This includes the day-to-day management of the journal, internal communication, and ensuring other editorial responsibilities are met.
  • Assigning manuscripts to editors for review and copyediting
  • Compliance with external policy. This includes meeting the obligations of publication, such as the timely publication, copyright, misconduct, and indexing. This also includes ensuring all policies on the journal website are up to date including the guidelines to authors for preparing and submitting manuscripts.
  • Quality Assurance. This includes ensuring all articles, and all authors, meet the requirements for initial review and publication set by the journal. Quality assurance also includes ensuring all articles meet the requirements of high quality scholarship and meet the (Australian) national code for ethics in research. Also included here is the management of ethical issues and allegations or findings of misconduct by authors, and anyone involved in the peer review process
  • Managing the relationship with the publisher. In addition to general liaising, this area includes issues of financing, website hosting and IT support.
  • Journal Development. This includes promotion of the journal for both article submission and readership.
  • Liaising with the international advisory board in relation to the matters pertaining to journal direction, developments in the field, quality assurance and matters of policy.
  • Supporting editorial team members as needed.
  • Organising and attending editorial meetings.
  • All responsibilities not covered elsewhere.
  • The Chief Editor will normally be an academic in the field of rural education. Where there are two Chief Editors Policy at least one should normally be an academic in the field of rural education.

Editor/s Review

The Editor assigned to a manuscript is responsible for the management of the review process. Specific responsibilities include:

  • Ensuring the guidelines to authors for preparing and submitting manuscripts are followed.
  • Establishing and managing a system for effective and rapid peer review.
  • Appointing reviewers for submitted manuscripts.
  • Making editorial decisions with reasonable speed and communicating them in a clear and constructive manner. This includes providing authors with specific instructions regarding considerations for resubmission, or reasons for rejection.
  • Ensuring instructions for resubmission are followed by authors.
  • Establishing a procedure for reconsidering editorial decisions
  • Informing authors of solicited manuscripts that the submission will be evaluated according to the journal's standard procedures or outlining the decision-making process if it differs from those procedures
  • Ensuring that all communication and review is conducted through the journal portal, and that communication with authors is conducted through the official journal email account.
  • Editors may also help with finalising papers ready for publication (e.g. ensuring metadata is correct and up to date, uploading galleys, setting up issues)
  • Attending editorial meetings.
  • The Chief Editor/s Review will be an academic in the field of rural education.

Editor/s Copyediting

The editor assigned to Copyediting is responsible for the quality of the presentation of each paper before it is published. Specific responsibilities include:

  • (Following decision by the Chief Editors Review) Checking manuscripts for general editing, formatting and referencing.
  • Returning the article to the author for corrections
  • Attending editorial meetings.