The call for papers for Code4Lib Journal‘s special issue on static websites ended very recently and the results have been exceptional. The guest editors for the special issue have clearly done a good job conceptualizing and promoting their call. Likewise, the call for the first issue Humanities Methods in Librarianship closes on Friday, and while it’s still too soon to guess at final numbers, the progress so far is encouraging.

These are certainly two very different publications, but in some ways the challenges are the same. What I’ve learned is that it is hard to put out a call for papers and to have an accurate sense of what will happen. C4L Journal has been around since 2007, and these things are still mysterious to the editors.

Of course, credibility is the currency here. But credibility is iterative. It can be steadily built or lost, and the editors need to decide how they want to navigate this. To complicate, there are multiple kinds of credibility. Of course there are purportedly “objective” metrics like impact factor and the like. But publishing what you want to, without much concern for quantified measures of prestige, is another strategy, and that is, imo, legitimate if not outright virtuous. Journal of Creative Library Practice and In the Library with the Lead Pipe are my go-to models for this type of journal. Nonetheless, even this mindset does not exempt you from the credibility game. Drawing in the articles you want still requires credibility according to the yardstick you’ve set for yourselves.

What’s the upshot? Editors need to be clear about their goals. Journals are complex things to keep in motion, and meeting the goals is certainly not easy. But iterating constructively is the way forward.