From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission. Typically as a result of some serious dissatisfaction, the editorial board resigns en masse to set up a new journal, the publishers of the original journal build a new editorial board from scratch, and the result is two journals, one inheriting the editors and collective memory of the original journal, and the other keeping the name and the publisher. Which is the “true” successor? In practice it tends to be the one with the editors, with its sibling surviving as a zombie journal that is the successor in name only. Perhaps there are examples that go the other way, and there may be examples where both journals go on to thrive, but I have not looked closely at the examples I know about.
I’m mentioning this because recently I have been involved in a rather unusual example of…
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