This afternoon, a student who I suggested should submit her paper to the Duke Journal of Politics informed me that she was ineligible to do so as a member of the editorial board. (A real shame, too, since it was a darn good paper, particularly for a first-year undergraduate.)

It was always my impression that the entire point of getting on the editorial board of a journal was to grease the skids for your own work to appear in print. Perhaps the logrolling potential is lacking in the case of this particular journal—it probably is more effective in the grown-up academic realm, where “put my stuff in The Journal of Spurious Correlations and I’ll put yours in Perspectives on Optional Statistical Controls” may be more rampant. Then again, most editorial board members in the “real journals” seem to be beyond the need for pubs at all, except as a tool for placing grad students through co-authorship.