CZ:Managing Editor/2012/004 - Approval of Editor-authored articles when no appropriate nominating Editors available

Statement of problem

Existing policy regarding article approval does not take into consideration the not uncommon circumstance in which an Editor has predominantly authored an article to a stage ready for consideration of Approval but no other Editor is available to consider nominateing it for Approval, owing a dearth of truly active Editors in any of the article’s Workgroup categories.

The question: Until Citizendium grows to the stage when the mentioned dearth of Editors no longer exists, or no longer is of severity to present a serious problem finding appropriate Editors to nominate articles for approval, should Citizenium allow Editors with established track-records nominate for Approval the articles they predominantly authored, with following provisos:

1. The Approvals Manager judges the Editor's responses to comments from authors-at-large to be satisfactory in terms of edits to the article and rebuttals to critiques.
2. The Editorial Council concurs with the Approvals Manager's judgment.

Existing applicable policy

Charter

• Article 36

• The Managing Editor has the following duties:

1. to ensure by means of executive decisions that the principles and policies of the Citizendium are effectively and coherently observed; such decisions shall be based on established policy where defined;
2. to make interim decisions on behalf of the Editorial and Management Councils when established policy does not provide guidance; these decisions shall be overridden by the establishment of relevant policy;
3. to represent the Citizendium in its relations with external bodies, such as the mass media, and academic or non-academic institutions.

Decisions by the governing bodies

Editorial Council

From "CZ:Approval process" (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Approval_Process):

“If the editor has worked on it [an article] herself as an author, he/she asks another editor to approve it; or, if there are several editors all doing significant work as authors on the article, then at least three of them can agree to approve it. (These rules are to prevent a single person from approving his or her own work without involving review by experts who were not authors.)”

Those rules do not take into consideration the circumstance described above, under "Statement of the problem".

Seeking outside reviewers is unsatisfactory at the present time (July 2012) inasmuch as the prestige ranking of Citizendium is not high enough to offer incentives to busy and career-oriented specialists to peer-review articles for Citizendium. In the future, the use of outside reviewers may be a practical option.

The Editorial Council’s regulation, EC:R-2011-027/ Approval process (http://ec.citizendium.org/wiki/EC:R-2011-027) likewise does not set policy for the particular circumstance described above, under "Statement of the problem".