Creating Interpretative Spaces in and with Digital Infrastructures: How Editors Select Reviewers at a Biomedical Publisher

Abstract

Digital infrastructures, such as editorial management systems (EMS), play a crucial role in academic publishing. However, despite their ubiquity, they have received surprisingly little analytical attention. Here, we investigate how EMSs are employed in practice and contribute to editorial evaluations. Conducting a case study of a biomedical publisher, we investigate the selection of peer reviewers by editors, using both qualitative and quantitative data. When looking at how interactions between editors and the digital infrastructures unfold, we observed three analytically different types of interaction: (1) editors and infrastructure jointly accomplish the acceleration of peer review, (2) editors mitigate the infrastructure when establishing a collective memory, and (3) editors disengage from the infrastructure when they evaluate potential reviewers. Through strategic disengagement from and mitigation of the infrastructures, editors create interpretative spaces for themselves. This way, most of the interpretative and evaluative work still remains in the domain of the human editorial staff. Our results furthermore highlight the importance of the specific spatial, social, organizational, and cultural conditions of the editorial office for editors’ ability to modulate their engagement with the infrastructures, create interpretative spaces, and shape infrastructural effects.