Co-Editor-in-Chief

What the co-editor-in-chief model means

A co-editor-in-chief arrangement is an editorial structure in which two or more individuals jointly hold the editor-in-chief role for a journal, sharing final editorial authority rather than one person holding it alone with others reporting beneath them as associate or handling editors. This is distinct from the more common single-editor-in-chief structure described on the journal editor page, where one person holds overall responsibility for the journal and delegates day-to-day manuscript handling downward through a hierarchy of associate and section editors who do not share the top decision-making authority itself.

In practice, journals use the term inconsistently. Some genuinely split the role into co-equal partners who each carry full sign-off authority across the journal’s scope, dividing the work by subject area, submission volume, or geography, with either able to act as final decision-maker on a given manuscript. Others use co-editor-in-chief (or the related title co-chief editor) for a senior deputy who assists the editor-in-chief with policy formulation, editorial-team selection, and high-level manuscript decisions, without holding fully independent, co-equal authority. Because the title is not standardized across publishers, the operative question for any given journal is not the title itself but what its editorial policy or masthead documentation says about who can independently make a final accept/reject call, and who has final say when co-editors disagree.

Why journals adopt a co-editor-in-chief model

• Workload distribution. High-volume journals, or journals with a broad scope, split what would otherwise be an unsustainable single-person workload across two or more editors who each take primary responsibility for a defined share of incoming submissions.
• Subject-area or methodological coverage. A journal spanning more than one discipline or methodology (for example, a journal covering both clinical and laboratory research) may appoint co-editors-in-chief with complementary expertise, so submissions in each area get final-decision oversight from someone qualified to judge them, rather than routing every decision through one editor-in-chief working outside their specialty.
• Editorial continuity during a transition. Some journals appoint an incoming and outgoing editor-in-chief as co-editors-in-chief for a defined overlap period, so institutional knowledge, standing author/reviewer relationships, and in-progress manuscript decisions transfer without a hard cutover.
• Shared governance across co-publishing institutions. Journals co-published or co-sponsored by more than one society, institution, or regional body sometimes appoint a co-editor-in-chief from each sponsoring organization, reflecting joint governance rather than a single controlling entity.

How it differs from associate and section editors

The distinguishing feature of a genuine co-editor-in-chief model is that each co-editor holds, or can exercise within their assigned share of the work, the same top-level authority a sole editor-in-chief would hold: setting or co-setting editorial policy, having final say on contested decisions within their remit, and serving as an escalation point for ethics cases and appeals. This differs from the associate editor, handling editor, and section editor roles, which carry delegated decision-making over specific submissions but report upward to an editor-in-chief (or co-editors-in-chief) who retains ultimate authority over the journal as a whole. A journal can combine both patterns at once: two co-editors-in-chief sharing top-level authority, each still supported underneath by their own layer of associate and section editors handling individual manuscripts.

What to check on a specific journal

Because the title is applied inconsistently, anyone relying on a co-editor-in-chief designation for a specific purpose — author correspondence, an authorship or conflict-of-interest dispute, an ethics escalation, a CV or promotion-committee verification — should check that journal’s own editorial policy, about page, or masthead rather than assuming the title implies fully co-equal authority by default. A publisher’s documentation of editorial independence and the composition of the editorial board will typically clarify whether co-editors-in-chief have independent sign-off authority split by defined scope, or operate as a joint deputy arrangement under one senior editor-in-chief.

Examples

• A broad-scope journal appoints two co-editors-in-chief, one overseeing basic-science submissions and one overseeing clinical submissions, each with independent final-decision authority within their track and joint authority over cross-cutting editorial policy.
• A journal transitioning leadership appoints its incoming editor-in-chief as co-editor-in-chief alongside the outgoing editor-in-chief for a one-year handover period, after which the outgoing editor steps down and the title reverts to a single editor-in-chief.

Counter-example

A journal masthead listing one editor-in-chief plus several deputy editors or associate editors is not a co-editor-in-chief structure, even if those deputies have substantial delegated authority — the defining feature of the co-editor-in-chief model is that top-level authority is itself shared or split among two or more people, not delegated downward from a single holder.