Journey of a Thriving Journal

Since 2005, when the Brownstone Journal emerged from a three-year publishing hiatus, the annual publication of Boston University undergraduate scholarship has been on a roll.

“We’re growing every year,” says Danielle Nadeau (CAS’08), senior editor of Brownstone, a collection of student research, analysis, and translation that has been published on and off since 1982. Last year, Brownstone expanded into the online realm, publishing three pieces in its new Web-only supplement. According to Nadeau, Brownstone received about 150 submissions last year for 11 slots in the table of contents, up from about 100 in 2005. The submission deadline for the 2008 edition is December 31, although late submissions will be considered until mid-February.

The 2007 edition, published last spring, included an assessment of the water quality in Little Pond, in Falmouth, Mass., a study of how middle school students understand plagiarism, and a report on the rise of right-wing extremist political parties in Europe. The journal also publishes works of translation, photographs, and illustrations by students.

Brownstone’s editors and staff advisor Zachary Bos, administrative coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum, attribute the journal’s resurgence to the leadership of former executive editor Rachel Eyler (CAS’06), who built relationships with faculty to extend the journal’s reach, recruited freshmen and sophomores to bolster staff continuity, and met with University administrators to win sponsorship by the Office of the Provost, via the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which fosters participation by BU undergrads in faculty-mentored research university-wide.

“She made the case that if we want to be a serious research institution, we should have this dimension of academic work,” says Bos. “And now, with that institutional support, the students on staff feel like they’re stepping into something established, rather than having to create something out of whole cloth. I think they take it more seriously.”

The journal’s staff includes several section editors, who secure faculty readers and solicit research papers from the University’s colleges and departments. This year, Nadeau says, the staff has been making a greater effort to get submissions from BU colleges beyond its traditional core of research from students in CAS and the University Professors Program.

“We have students working with CFA, COM, and CGS, making presentations in classes,” says Nadeau. The staff has also been working to solicit more papers from students who’ve done research with UROP grants.

Each submission is read by three staff members during an intense week and a half in February and given a ranking from one to five. A select number of papers are passed on to the volunteer faculty readers for further comments, questions, and requests for information, such as expanded footnotes to help explain research to nonexpert readers.

Last year, about 10 faculty members read papers for Brownstone. Nadeau hopes to secure between 15 and 20 volunteers this year. Once the final lineup of articles is decided in March, production work begins, and a new Brownstone Journal is typically completed and ready for distribution by late April.

“The journal offers students a way to demonstrate what they’ve been working on throughout the academic year,” says Nadeau. “It also gives them the opportunity to learn what it means to work with a scholarly publication.”

Being on staff is also a learning experience, says Bos, giving students with an interest in editorial work an introduction to the world of publications. Staff arrange for seminars on such skills as proofreading and the publishing software Quark.

“They learn things like how to make suggestions without imposing their will on the writer,” Bos says. “They learn diplomacy.”

Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.