What is it about?
This is a farewell editorial marking the end of a ten-year journey with the Organization Management Journal (OMJ), the last six as Co-Editor-in-Chief. Rather than a simple thank-you note, it's a candid look back at how academic publishing has changed over the past decade, and what that means going forward. The author traces the journal's move to fully open access (free for both readers and authors), its climb in academic rankings, and the very real strain the "publish or perish" pressure still places on researchers worldwide. A major focus is artificial intelligence: how it can help scholars, especially those writing in a second language or without research support, while also creating new risks like fabricated citations and AI-written peer reviews. The editorial lays out clear ground rules for using AI honestly in scholarly work. It closes by introducing nine new studies on topics ranging from how CEOs think, to political leadership, workplace forgiveness, and using movies to teach management, before looking ahead to the author's next chapter as a university dean rethinking how professional schools are organized. It's part farewell letter, part practical guide for anyone publishing or reviewing research today.
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Why is it important?
Farewell editorials are usually brief and sentimental. This one is unusually substantive, written by someone who spent a decade inside the editorial process during a period of extraordinary change: a pandemic, a full publisher transition, and the sudden arrival of generative AI into every stage of how research gets written, reviewed, and published. That vantage point is rare and timely. Most guidance on AI and academic integrity comes from policy committees; this comes from someone who has actually had to make the calls, including how to handle reviewers tempted to let AI do their work for them. The piece also pushes back on the idea that AI is purely a threat, showing how it can level the playing field for scholars without institutional resources. Beyond publishing ethics, it makes a genuinely fresh argument about the future shape of higher education itself, questioning whether professional schools should be organized by discipline or by the interconnected needs of the professions they serve. For anyone who publishes, reviews, edits, or leads in higher education, it offers hard-won, principled guidance rather than platitudes.
Perspectives
Writing this editorial forced me to name what a decade of editorial service actually taught me: that trust, not metrics or platforms, is the real product of scholarly publishing. That lesson now shapes how I lead as a dean. Whether stewarding a journal or a school, the job is the same: protect the values that make the institution worth trusting, even as the tools around it keep changing.
Prof. Robert M Yawson, PhD
Truman State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Editorial: Passing the baton in a changing landscape: a farewell reflection on ten years with the OMJ, Organization Management Journal, September 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/omj-09-2026-984.
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