In July 2026, I will conclude my term as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. It is a strange thing to write, partly because JUTLP has been one of the defining professional privileges of my career, and partly because the journal has changed so much across that time. I began as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief in 2020, at a moment when higher education needed careful, open, evidence-based accounts of practice. We were learning the phrase “emergency remote teaching”, reading far too many manuscripts that opened with “in unprecedented times”, and trying to remind ourselves that, while COVID-19 was unprecedented in many ways, education had faced pandemics, disruption, distance, and technological change before.

Looking back, the editorial strategy that mattered most was the decision to place a larger burden of proof on incoming manuscripts. We worked to reshape JUTLP away from summaries of internal practice and reflective accounts that stayed too close to one local setting, and towards evidence-based learning and teaching scholarship that could speak beyond a single institution. That did not mean moving away from practice. It meant taking practice seriously enough to ask what it could teach others. In the current “age of AI”, which has rather quickly become the new common paper opener, I think that commitment matters even more. Open knowledge now informs policy, practice, future scholarship, and increasingly the large language models that will shape how people find, summarise, and reuse academic knowledge. Journals have to be serious about what enters that record.

My first editorial as Editor-in-Chief was written with Alisa Percy and Jo-Anne Kelder. It sat at a moment of transition. JUTLP had been founded at the University of Wollongong and, between 2004 and 2019, was largely led from that institutional home. Before the Editor-in-Chief role was created, the journal relied on a Senior Editor model, with Alisa and Jo-Anne co-leading a great deal of the work through expertise, care, and a lot of invisible labour. The creation of the Editor-in-Chief role acknowledged both the opportunity and the pressure of that moment: JUTLP had grown beyond one institution, and the sector needed the journal to lead with clarity.

The next major step came through Editorial 17.5, written with Alisa, Jo-Anne, and Kerryn Butler-Henderson. That editorial signalled the creation of journal sections, each led by a Senior Editor and supported by Associate Editors with subdisciplinary expertise. It was a structural decision, but also a philosophical one. JUTLP could no longer be a broad container for anything related to university teaching. It needed clearer spaces for scholarly conversations to develop. We named these sections: Theory and Practice of Learning and Teaching, Developing Teaching Practice, Student Experience, and Educational Technology. The original sections continued until 2024, when we renamed Theory and Practice of Learning and Teaching as Curriculum and Assessment, recognising that every section should connect theory and practice, and renamed Developing Teaching Practice as Academic Development.

From reflection to evidence-based practice

In 2021, the journal’s new sections began to build their own interpretation of our positioning around evidence-based learning and teaching practice, for practice. Alisa Percy, Nona Press, Martin Andrew, and Vikki Pollard gave the strongest early account of this shift in Editorial 18.4. That piece helped articulate JUTLP’s movement away from broad reflection and summary towards a more reflexive, theoretical, and evidence-based integration of theory and practice. It was one of the editorials that clarified what we were trying to become.

The same year, we published what became the most successful Special Issue in the journal’s history: the cross-cultural effects of COVID-19 on higher education learning and teaching practice. The idea was simple and human. Conferences had been cancelled or digitalised, and early career academics had fewer opportunities to meet people, form research connections, and build international collaborations. So we created a mechanism for authors to sign up, find others with similar methodological and thematic interests, and form cross-cultural research groups. It was one of those moments where the journal acted not just as a place to publish research, but as a place to create the conditions for research to happen.

We then saw each Section editorial team take ownership of the new direction. The Academic Development team, through Prue Gonzalez, Beate Mueller, Kevin Merry, Colin Jones, and Jo-Anne Kelder, explored the changing purpose of the teacher in higher education. The Student Experience team, through Ameera Ali, Leela Cejnar, Kristyn Harman, Kwong Nui Sim, and me, tackled the limits of student evaluations as evidence. The Educational Technology team, through Michael Cowling, Carmen Vallis, Rebekkah Middleton, Kwong Nui Sim, and me, clarified the difference between digitalisation, digital pedagogy, and technology-enhanced learning. These were no longer rehashed lists of abstracts now called issue summaries. They were intentional acts of editorial leadership pieces. I wanted the critical scholarship of Associate Editors to be visible in the journal’s intellectual direction, rather than editorials being the voice of lead editors alone.

On transparent decisions and peer review

In 2022, I wrote On editor decisions, which remains my largest analysis of editorial work and the strategic positioning of the journal. I had clearly just finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing, and the title betrayed me. But the piece helped put into words something I had been trying to build into JUTLP’s culture: editorial decisions should be rigorous, clear, timely, and human.

By then, I had overseen more than a thousand manuscript decisions. I had seen how much damage generic rejection letters, performative peer review, and unclear editorial processes could do. The point was not that journals should accept more papers. Good journals need to reject a lot of manuscripts. The point was that rejection should still be developmental where possible, and revision should only be offered where there is a genuine pathway to publication. Editors are not just gatekeepers. They are stewards of scholarly knowledge. They decide which work moves forward, but also how people experience the process of trying to contribute.

Around the same time, we began a new series on peer review. The aim was to move JUTLP away from a pure reviewer-aggregate model, where an “accept” and a “reject” could too easily become a rejection by default, and towards a reviewer-informed editorial model. We introduced a four-person decision structure: a Senior Editor responsible for acceptance, an Associate Editor responsible for revision decisions in consultation with their Senior Editor, and reviewers positioned as disciplinary and methodological experts rather than final decision-makers.

This was also the period when we became more active in removing hostile, irrelevant, or predatory commentary from peer review. Thankfully, this was rare. But rare does not mean harmless. I recall inviting a methodological expert to review a quantitative-heavy paper, and receiving a word document back with one sentence to the effect of "The method was so flawed I stopped reviewing"; interestingly, the next method reviewer made substantial comments, but with greater respect. When a “Reviewer 2” comment included a pile of self-citations as an implied condition of acceptance, or when a review was unnecessarily cruel without adding scholarly value, we redacted the comment and explained the decision to the author. The reviewer record mattered, but so did the person receiving it. This was only a year or two before the Hindawi scandal that saw substantial retractions on account of manipulation during the peer review process.

Prue Gonzalez, Gail Wilson, and Alison Purvis helped us frame peer review as a gold standard that still needed to be earned through quality and integrity. Kelly-Ann Allen, Jonathan Reardon, Lucas Walsh, Lea Waters, and Michael Wehmeyer then pushed the conversation further through a person-centred, strengths-based, and self-determination perspective on peer review. Later, with Kelly-Ann Allen and Jason Lodge, I returned to these questions in the context of artificial intelligence. We argued against AI as a peer reviewer because parroting knowledge is not the same thing as making a critical, comprehensive, ethical judgement about whether a manuscript should enter the scholarly record. AI may support parts of publishing. It should not become the gatekeeper of knowledge.

In 2024, we also began offering more structured advice to authors about common causes of rejection and how to address them before submitting. The aim was not simply to improve submissions to JUTLP. It was to create open access resources for the field at a time when national and international learning and teaching resources seemed to be becoming more scarce. The author guidance page became part of that broader mission: if we were seeing recurring problems in submissions, then we had a responsibility to explain those problems clearly and publicly.

Alison Purvis, Victoria Nicholas, and Joanna Tai’s piece on research questions has been especially well used, including in research methods programs globally and in my own MBA methods course. I later wrote Systematic Literature Reviews: Why I Rejected Your Review, which became a popular inclusion in theory and research methods courses. Both pieces reflect the same editorial philosophy: if we are going to reject work for predictable reasons, we should also help authors understand how to make the work stronger before it reaches us.

Creating space for new conversations

In 2023, I wrote The Need for Good Leaders in Higher Education, which introduced two new areas of focus for the journal: educational leadership and management, and educational psychology in higher education. This was another scope decision, but again it was also a statement about what the field needed. Higher education is not only curriculum, assessment, technology, and student experience. It is also leadership, belonging, motivation, integrity, wellbeing, institutional behaviour, and the psychology of adult learning in complex organisations.

We also introduced a new genre of contribution: commentaries. The purpose was to strengthen JUTLP’s connection to industry expertise, applied judgement, and timely scholarly argument. Some of these commentaries have become among our most cited and most practically used works, both in the traditional academic sense and in the quieter world of reading lists, methods courses, editorial training, and professional development.

In 2024, we built our own Association to continue publishing when we learned that the University of Wollongong was no longer willing to fund the journal. That sentence makes the transition sound neater than it felt. In practice, it was a large, difficult, and necessary move. Professor Michael Cowling and I, the inaugural President and Vice President, spent countless hours in Zoom meetings trying to make an open source publishing platform work, and to rollover thousands of manuscripts and review records. JUTLP had become too important to simply drift because its original funding model had changed. Creating a new publishing home through the Open Access Publishing Association allowed the journal to continue its diamond open-access mission, while also giving us a platform to think more deliberately about editorial development, reviewer training, metadata, indexing, and the infrastructure that serious open publishing requires. We now share our editor and reviewer training program that was once exclusive to JUTLP with more than 100 incoming editors and reviewers across offerings in Australia and the United Kingdom annually.

Growth, citations, and scale

One of the practical challenges of leading JUTLP was helping the journal grow to a meaningful and sustainable size. In the early Scopus years from 2016 to 2019, JUTLP published an average of around 36 papers per year with a CiteScore between 0.2 and 1.2. That was a strong foundation, but not yet the scale needed for a journal seeking to provide broad international leadership across university learning and teaching practice. Across my term as Editor-in-Chief, we published around 600 papers, with a long-term strategy to stabilise the journal at approximately 100 to 150 papers per year. That growth was never simply about publishing more. It was about creating the editorial structures, section leadership, reviewer systems, author guidance, and publishing infrastructure needed to support more good work without lowering the burden of evidence. And our focus to broaden the international team away from Australia-dominant has drastically strengthened our position as a leading higher education journal.

The citation indicators followed that strategic growth. JUTLP’s CiteScore moved from 1.1 in 2020, to 1.8 in 2021, 2.7 in 2022, 3.6 in 2023, 6.2 in 2024, and 8.8 in the latest 2025 update, with final CiteScores still imminent. Citations are only a basic measure of impact, and never the whole story of whether a journal matters. But the pattern does suggest that JUTLP’s growth aligned with its strategy: to publish learning and teaching scholarship that was open, useful, rigorous, and visible enough to shape the field. In Google Scholar, we emerged in the Top 20 higher education journals for the first time during this period, and increased in 12th on last count. For me, the achievement was not the number alone. It was that the number reflected a broader shift in the journal’s role, from a valuable practice-based outlet to a leading international venue for evidence-informed higher education scholarship.

What I hope remains

Across my term as Editor-in-Chief, JUTLP became larger, more international, more structured, and more explicit about our standards. But the part I hope remains is simpler than that. I hope the journal remains open, developmental, and serious about the basis for evidence. JUTLP ought to be the source of truth for Deputy Vice Chancellors and Pro-Vice Chancellors of education and teaching, and for scholars aiming to extend their practice. I hope it keeps publishing work that helps universities teach, assess, support, include, and lead with greater clarity. I hope it continues to make space for emerging scholars with novel ideas. And I hope it keeps remembering that publishing is not only a system of manuscripts, metrics, platforms, and decisions. It is a human system designed to advance a field, and improve the lives of our students and our colleagues.

Serving as Editor-in-Chief has shaped how I think about scholarship, peer review, academic leadership, and the responsibility that comes with open publishing. I leave the role with deep gratitude for the editors, reviewers, authors, readers, production teams, institutional supporters, and friends of the journal who helped build JUTLP into what it is now. It has been a privilege to lead the journal through this chapter. I am proud of what we made, and I am excited to see what its next editors make possible.