Editorial Board Responsibilities: What the Role Actually Involves

An editorial board is a journal’s governance body, and being appointed to one carries a specific, recurring set of duties that go well beyond reviewing the occasional manuscript. This guide sets out what editorial board membership actually involves in practice: the scope of the role, the ethical obligations that attach to it (grounded in COPE’s framework), how it intersects with peer review, conflict-of-interest management, contributing to editorial policy, typical term and appointment structures, and how the role relates to the editor-in-chief and the publisher.

What editorial board membership actually covers

Editorial board responsibilities cluster into a few recurring areas across most reputable journals, regardless of discipline or publisher:

• Editorial policy. Board members are typically consulted on, and sometimes vote on, changes to a journal’s scope, aims, and editorial policies — for example, adopting a new data-availability requirement, a registered-reports track, or an authorship-dispute policy.
• Peer-review oversight, not personal execution. A board sets and oversees how the peer-review process works — how many reviewers a submission requires, how reviewer conflicts are managed, how disputes between reviewers are resolved — but individual manuscripts are usually routed to invited subject-matter reviewers, who may or may not be drawn from the board itself.
• Decision authority. Final accept/reject decisions are typically made or ratified by an editor (often the editor-in-chief or an assigned associate/section editor) after weighing reviewer input, with the board providing the governance framework those decisions operate within rather than voting on every individual manuscript.
• Ethics oversight. Handling allegations of misconduct, authorship disputes, and other integrity concerns that arise in submitted or published work.
• Ambassadorial and pipeline functions. Many boards are also expected to help attract strong submissions, identify qualified reviewers, and represent the journal within their research community — a less formal but commonly expected part of the role.

This is a distinct role from reviewing a single manuscript: serving on a board does not, by itself, mean a person has reviewed a given paper, and reviewing a paper does not make someone a board member. See editorial contribution for how editorial work of either kind is credited.

Ethical obligations: COPE’s framework

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), founded in 1997 by a group of UK medical journal editors, is the reference point most journals and publishers use to define what responsible editorial conduct looks like. COPE’s guidance has gone through several iterations: Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (1999), a Code of Conduct for Editors (2004, reorganized 2007, split into separate editor/publisher versions in 2011), and then Core Practices, a simplified ten-category framework that replaced the Code of Conduct in 2017. The ten categories — still the operative organizing framework editors and boards are expected to work within — are:

1. Allegations of misconduct
2. Authorship and contributorship
3. Complaints and appeals
4. Conflicts of interest
5. Data and reproducibility
6. Ethical oversight
7. Intellectual property issues
8. Journal management
9. Peer review processes and training
10. Post-publication discussions and corrections

Transitional note: COPE formally retired the 2017 Core Practices in 2024. A new Code of Conduct for members has a publicly stated target of 2026, though COPE has itself indicated the release has been revised while supporting work is completed, and as of this writing there is no confirmed evidence it has shipped. In practice, the ten Core Practice categories remain the framework COPE’s own flowcharts, case database, and guidance library are still organized around, and are the safest current reference point for what an editorial board is expected to uphold. For the fuller picture of COPE’s guidance library, retraction guidelines, and how COPE differs from ICMJE, see CASRAI’s COPE Guidelines Explained guide and the ICMJE vs COPE comparison.

A related, adjacent framework is the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, a joint document from COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME (most recently updated as v4 in 2022) — not COPE-only guidance, but one that similarly frames editorial board composition and conduct as a marker of a journal’s legitimacy.

Peer-review oversight and manuscript handling

Editorial board members who take on editor roles (associate editor, section editor, handling editor) inherit responsibilities that ICMJE’s Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work spell out directly for anyone handling submissions:

• Reviewer selection is the editor’s responsibility, not the authors’ or a fully automated system’s — including ensuring reviewers can access everything they need to evaluate a manuscript fairly.
• Editors are not bound by reviewer recommendations. ICMJE is explicit that “a peer-reviewed journal is under no obligation to follow reviewer recommendations” — the editor makes the final call and can diverge from reviewer advice in either direction, provided the decision is defensible.
• Confidentiality runs both ways. Editors must not share information about a manuscript under review with anyone beyond its authors and reviewers, and should delete copies of rejected manuscripts unless retention is otherwise required. Reviewers, in turn, must keep manuscript contents confidential and must not use unpublished ideas or data for their own purposes.
• Timeliness and constructive conduct are expected of anyone handling a manuscript at any stage — prompt responses, honest and constructive feedback, and disclosure of any competing interest that could bias the handling of a given submission.

Editorial boards typically set the policies that operationalize these expectations journal-wide — for example, how many reviewers a submission type requires, what the target turnaround time is, and what happens when reviewers disagree — even when individual board members aren’t personally reviewing every paper that passes through the system. For the mechanics of how submissions actually move through a manuscript-tracking platform once these policies are set, see CASRAI’s comparison of Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, and OJS.

Conflict-of-interest management

Conflicts of interest are one of COPE’s ten Core Practice categories, and they apply to editorial board members in several overlapping ways:

• Manuscript-level conflicts. A board or handling-editor member with a personal, financial, institutional, or collaborative connection to a submission’s authors is expected to recuse themselves from handling or influencing the decision on that manuscript — routing it to another editor instead.
• Reviewer-conflict oversight. Per COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers (version 2, September 2017), reviewers themselves are expected to disclose competing interests that could bias their evaluation; part of the editorial board’s oversight function is ensuring this actually happens and is acted on, not just requested.
• Publication and policy-level conflicts. Board members are typically expected to disclose ongoing relationships — consultancies, board memberships elsewhere, funding relationships — that could reasonably be seen as influencing editorial policy decisions, separate from any single manuscript.

The general governance pattern that shows up across editorial boards and other nonprofit-style governance bodies alike is a written disclosure obligation (often refreshed annually, or whenever a new conflict arises), followed by recusal from deliberation on the specific matter where the conflict exists, rather than remaining present and simply abstaining from a vote.

Term, appointment, and rotation

Practice varies by journal and publisher, but a few patterns recur widely enough to be worth setting expectations around:

• Appointment is usually by invitation from the editor-in-chief or the current board, sometimes with publisher input, rather than an open application process — though some societies and journals do run nomination or election processes for board seats, particularly society-owned journals with member governance.
• Fixed terms with renewal are common — commonly cited ranges run from roughly two to four years, renewable, though exact terms are set journal-by-journal and are not standardized across publishing.
• Rotation exists to keep the board active and current: journals and directories treat an editorial board as a meaningful quality signal only if it reflects genuinely active governance, not a static list of names retained indefinitely. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), for example, sets a minimum of five identifiable, verifiably-affiliated editorial board members as part of its journal-inclusion criteria — a board that can’t be verified, or appears inactive, is treated as a red flag by indexers, librarians, and researchers assessing a journal’s legitimacy.
• Board membership is typically unpaid or honorary in academic and society publishing, distinct from salaried editorial staff roles, though practice varies by publisher and journal type.

Relationship to the editor-in-chief and the publisher

A typical structure places the editor-in-chief (or co-editors-in-chief) at the operational center, with overall responsibility for the journal’s direction and final editorial authority; a layer of associate, section, or deputy editors, each usually responsible for a subject area, manuscript type, or workflow stage; and a broader roster of editorial board members, often listed on the journal’s masthead, who contribute to policy, ethics oversight, and reviewer/author outreach without personally running day-to-day operations. Some journals add a separate, more consultative advisory board layer above or alongside this structure. Titles and reporting lines differ by publisher, but this general division — a small operational leadership group plus a broader oversight roster — recurs across most established journals.

The publisher, meanwhile, typically owns the platform, production, business model, and often the ultimate authority to appoint or remove an editor-in-chief, while editorial decisions on individual manuscripts are expected to remain editorially independent of commercial or publisher pressure — a distinction most publishers explicitly commit to in their own editorial-independence policies, and one COPE’s guidance treats as foundational to editorial legitimacy. See CASRAI’s editorial independence entry for how that boundary is typically defined and protected.

Resignation and removal

Because board membership functions as a governance and quality signal, journals generally need a defined way to handle a member who becomes inactive, develops an unmanageable conflict of interest, or is found to have acted against the journal’s ethical expectations. In practice this is usually handled through the same editorial-policy channel that governs other board decisions: the editor-in-chief (sometimes with publisher involvement) initiates a removal or non-renewal, and a member can typically resign at any point, most commonly at a term boundary. COPE’s guidance treats a board’s own composition and governance integrity as itself falling under its “journal management” Core Practice category — meaning inactive or compromised board membership is not treated as a purely administrative housekeeping matter, but as something that can affect the journal’s credibility.

Frequently asked questions

Is an editorial board member the same as a peer reviewer?

No. A peer reviewer is typically invited to evaluate one specific manuscript within their expertise, sometimes on a one-off basis with no ongoing relationship to the journal. An editorial board member holds a standing governance role — contributing to policy, ethics oversight, and process decisions — that may or may not include personally reviewing manuscripts. Some board members do double as frequent reviewers; the two roles are related but not equivalent.

Do editorial board members get paid?

In most academic and society journal publishing, editorial board membership is an unpaid or honorary role, distinct from salaried editorial-office staff positions. Practice varies by publisher, journal type, and region, so this should not be assumed universal.

How are editorial board members selected?

Most commonly by invitation from the editor-in-chief or existing board, sometimes with publisher input; some society-owned journals instead run a nomination or election process tied to the society’s own membership governance.

Can an editorial board member handle a submission from their own institution or collaborators?

This is treated as a conflict of interest under COPE’s framework, and the expected practice is recusal — routing the manuscript to a different editor rather than the conflicted board member handling or influencing its decision.

What happens if an editorial board becomes inactive or unverifiable?

Directories and indexers treat this as a red flag. DOAJ, for instance, requires a minimum of five identifiable, verifiably-affiliated board members as part of its inclusion criteria, and an unverifiable or clearly inactive board is one of the signals used to distinguish reputable journals from predatory or low-quality ones.

Related CASRAI resources

• Editorial board — the core definition and composition overview this guide builds on.
• COPE Guidelines Explained — COPE’s full guidance library, retraction guidelines, and recent updates.
• ICMJE vs COPE — how the two standards bodies’ roles differ.
• Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters — the process editorial boards oversee.
• Editorial contribution — how editorial work is recognized and credited.
• Editorial independence — the boundary between editorial decisions and publisher/commercial influence.
• DOAJ — the directory whose inclusion criteria reference editorial board composition.