Editors’ Report 2022

• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12507

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 156–157 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.12507

Editors’Report 2022

1. The Publishing Environment

A significant change occurred in 2022 with

the introduction of open access to articles

authored by Australian academics, following

the agreement between the publisher, Wiley

and the Council of Australian University

Librarians. The agreement is of particular

benefit to the Australian Economic Review

with its emphasis on empirically based policy

articles which are relevant for a general

audience outside academia. A majority of

articles in the Review are now open access.

The number of downloads of Review

articles in 2022 was 92,000. The Impact

Factor rose to 0.934. In a change to the

method of calculating the Impact Factor, date

of publication is now the year an article first

appears online under ‘early views’.

The December issue of the Review was the

last one published in hard copy by Wiley.

While sales of hard copy continue to fall, an

important factor in the decision to move to

online‐only was the growing gap between the

online version of articles and the printed

version: colour reproduction is online only as

is supplementary information.

Nicholas Héraut and Ian McDonald left

their positions as co‐editors towards the end of

the year. Ian held the position for 38 years.

The new co‐editors are Susan Méndez and

Viet Nguyen.

The ‘For the Student’section of the Review

was replaced by ‘Perspective’, which covers a

broader range of topics of interest to all

practitioners.

2. Articles and Submissions

A summary of the composition of the

articles published in the Review over the

past three years is given in Table 1. Table 2

provides information on the number of

articles received and their disposition. The

number of new submissions of Articles was

83, similar to that of recent years. The

acceptance rate was 15 per cent for submis-

sions in 2021. Nearly 60 per cent of

submissions were rejected within two weeks

by the editors without going to referees.

This enables a quick response to authors of

unsuitable papers, and referees are spared

unnecessary work. Rejection was based on

either subject matter or quality.

As befits a policy‐oriented journal, we aim

to keep the time between acceptance of

articles and final publication in an issue of

the Review to around six months, but ‘early

views’means that the articles are publicly

available on the internet much sooner.

3. Referees

At least two referees are used for submissions

to the Article section that proceed to the

refereeing process. We also use referees for

the other sections of the Review. The integrity

of the system of peer review is crucially

dependent on the work of our referees. We

thank our referees warmly for their contribu-

tions in providing constructive comments,

both to the authors and the editors. The

referees in 2022 were:

Mohsen Bahmani‐Oskooee, Oguzhan Batmaz,

Harry Bloch, Robert Breunig, Michael Coelli,

Les Coleman, Diana Contreras Suárez, John

Creedy, Henry Cutler, Creina Day, Janine Dixon,

Robert Dixon, Neil Foster‐McGregor, John

Freebairn, Frank‐Ulrich Fricke, Ross Garnaut,

Mathew Greenwood‐Nimmo, David Hayward,

Joe Hirschberg, Stephen Howes, Hae Won Jung,

Stephen King, Rainer Kotschy, Sudhanshu

Kumar, Peter Lloyd, Gary Magee, Leandro

Magnusson, Bill Malcolm, Susan Méndez,

© 2023 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, Faculty of Business

and Economics.

Published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd