Stewardship Without Succession: The Quiet Succession Crisis Inside America's Oldest Scientific Journals

In the conference halls of several mid-sized American disciplinary societies — the kind that meet annually in hotel ballrooms in Chicago, Atlanta, or Kansas City — a familiar anxiety is circulating among junior faculty. The flagship journal of their field, often the oldest continuous publication in the discipline, is edited by someone who took the post before these scholars were born. The editorial board roster reads like a retirement directory. And no one, apparently, has a plan for what comes next.

These publications — what some sociologists of science have begun calling 'gray journals' — occupy a peculiar position in the American research ecosystem. They are neither failing nor thriving. They persist, sustained by institutional library subscriptions negotiated decades ago, a small corps of volunteer editors working well past conventional retirement age, and the sheer inertia of disciplinary habit. Their continued existence masks a structural question that the fields they serve have largely avoided: who will steward the scientific record when the current stewards step away — if they step away at all?

The Demographics of Editorial Power

The pattern is not difficult to observe. A review of editorial mastheads across several long-established American society journals reveals board members appointed in the 1990s still serving in the 2020s. Turnover, where it occurs, frequently happens through resignation or death rather than through any deliberate succession planning.

The consequences compound quietly. Editors shape more than the queue of manuscripts; they shape the questions a field considers legitimate. A journal whose leadership was formed in a prior theoretical era tends to privilege that era's methods, its citation networks, and its sense of what counts as a contribution. Younger scholars describe a double bind: they are expected to publish in these venues to advance, yet they see little pathway into the governance structures that determine what those venues accept.

'I reviewed for the journal for eight years before anyone mentioned that an associate editor position even existed,' one early-career researcher at a Midwestern research university said, describing a dynamic echoed across multiple disciplines. 'The pipeline isn't blocked. It was never built.'

Why the System Resists Renewal

The economics of legacy publishing partly explain the inertia. Many society journals still derive a meaningful share of revenue from bundled subscription agreements with university libraries — agreements that reward stability and penalize experimentation. An editorial board that modernizes its review practices, adopts open-access models, or refreshes its leadership risks disrupting arrangements that keep the society solvent.

Volunteer labor completes the lock-in. The society journal model depends on senior scholars donating editorial time, and the scholars most willing to donate it are often those for whom the journal represents the culmination of a career. Recruiting mid-career editors requires the very resources — release time, recognition, compensation — that small societies struggle to provide.

There is also a cultural dimension. Succession in academic organizations is rarely discussed openly, because doing so implies mortality, retirement, and the diminishment of founders' legacies. Departments plan for sabbaticals with more rigor than journals plan for editor transitions.

What the Field Stands to Lose

The stakes extend beyond personnel. A journal is a discipline's memory and its gate simultaneously. When editorial leadership ossifies, several things follow:

• Agenda-setting narrows. Special issues, invited commentaries, and editorial essays tend to circulate within a stable network of the same senior voices.
• Methodological drift slows. Fields that publish primarily through legacy venues can be slow to absorb new statistical standards, replication norms, or computational practices.
• Equity gaps harden. Editorial boards that stopped refreshing decades ago reflect the demographics of the profession at that time, freezing historical inequities into present-day gatekeeping.

None of this is the product of bad faith. It is the product of absence — of systems that never required succession planning and therefore never developed it.

Models for an Orderly Handover

Some societies offer a counterexample. A handful have adopted staggered, term-limited editorial appointments, mandatory board rotation policies, and deliberate pipelines that pair senior editors with early-career associates who inherit real decision-making authority. Others have converted their journals to open-access models precisely because the disruption created an opening to rebuild governance from scratch.

Professional societies in fields like statistics and ecology have experimented with fixed editor terms of five to seven years, with transitions announced years in advance — treating the editorship less like a crown and more like a term of public service. The early evidence suggests that predictable turnover does not destabilize a journal's quality; it stabilizes the institution itself.

The Broader Lesson

The gray journal problem is, at its core, a problem of institutional design. Scientific publishing in the United States has invested enormous energy in questions of peer review integrity, open access, and reproducibility — while leaving the human infrastructure of editorial stewardship to run on momentum and goodwill.

Fields that fail to renew their gatekeepers will eventually have renewal imposed upon them, whether by market forces, institutional library boycotts, or the simple arithmetic of mortality. The choice before America's older disciplinary societies is not whether succession happens, but whether it happens by design or by default. A scientific literature deserves stewards who plan for the day they will hand it on.