I have been associate editor for the Array journal of Elsevier for 4 years. I have been happy to do this work but it is now the time for me to move on and focus on other things.
What is Array? It is a quite new journal that is multi-disciplinary and focus on computer science, and is open-access. It can be viewed as a journal similar to IEEE Access but less well-known. It is currently indexed in ESCI (Emerging SCI index) in the second quartile but still has a low volume of published papers (about 50 per years according to statistics from LetPub).
I have joined that journal in 2020 as one of the associate editors as I thought that it is a promising journal and I wanted to get more experience in this type of work. I did get some good experience with this journal but it did not grow as much as I would have expected. However, that is not the reason for me to leave this job. I am leaving simply because I am more busy than before and I want to focus on other things that I think are more important.
At this stage of my career, I find that the work of associate editor is less interesting because let’s be honest, it is extra work that I don’t need to do, it takes time, and it is unpaid. In general, a publisher can earn quite a lot of money from authors, especially for open-acess journals, and typically only the editor-in-chief might receive a part of that money. That’s just how it work.
Having said that, I wish the best for the Array journal, though, and am happy to have worked with them for a few years.
