[Ethics] Former Literary Arts Magazine Editor on the Importance of Ethics Policies [x-post reddit] There was a time in my life when I edited a literary arts magazine. We took multiple submissions of every variety of art, poetry, short stories, essays, drawings, paintings, photographs, lots of stuff. I'm not going to name the publication for privacy reasons, but I want to talk a little about our process, and why we did things the way we did, and why those currently editing the magazine still hold to those policies. This is an annual magazine that semi-regularly wins prestigious awards, and I'm not talking something super small or local. Not national-level either, but still pretty big and well-known. The magazine's focus has always been on content creators with a connection to the region in which the magazine is produced, though we did and do accept submissions from people outside said region. The launch of the magazine is a festival event that has several attractions, and usually this means some of the content creators come to talk about their art or do live readings of a piece. This puts us into personal contact, face-to-face, meaning we get to know these people. Sometimes, they submit stuff regularly, year after year. As a result, we get to know an author's "style," and therefore might recognize the author of a piece. Sometimes, we might recognize a piece we've seen before we took the editing job, and therefore know who wrote it, and this is where we might have run into potential problems, if not for our ethics policy. See, we had and have a policy of choosing submissions via "single-blind" selection. We choose one person to check in submissions into a folder, detach the names from all of the submissions, and put numbers next to them. Then, the person checking in the submissions doesn't see those names again for an extended period of time until after the entire team of editors has chosen the pieces. In a nutshell, the editors voted on which works sent in deserved to be in the magazine the most, based on artistic merit, all other factors being minimized as much as possible. This is why we did not look at the names behind the submissions. However, there were some times in which some editors did recognize pieces written by individuals that we knew. Our ethics policy gave us two options in this case; either the editor(s) in question tell the rest of the group that they know the author of the piece and then recuse themselves, or we let the group know we know the person, and think we can limit our bias enough to make a more-or-less objective decision. More than once, we had someone recuse themselves. I recused myself once. Other times, we would tell the group we knew the author, and argue for/against the piece anyway. I've done this before as well. The main purpose of this ethics policy, was to make sure editors weren't passing their own work off as someone else's and trying to submit to the magazine anyway (Editors themselves are ineligible for submitting any work to the magazine, for obvious reasons.) and each year this has contributed to a quality selection of art/writing, and has garnered no small amount of awards. It should be noted, that copies of this magazine are free. You might have already guessed that, given that this isn't a paid position. No one makes any money from this. The magazine serves a vital role in getting quality works of art and literature out to the public that may not otherwise have easy access to that kind of content, and doubles as a way to get aspiring authors into an otherwise extremely difficult industry, though we by no means discriminate against established authors. We took whatever is good, sought quality above all else, and that will be the same for future issues of the magazine as well. Good content was/is our goal, and the ethics policy makes that goal a reality. That ethics policy is a significant reason for why year after year, each team of editors publishes a good magazine with great content. Any publication, no matter their name, their clout, their history, or their budget, is anything without a solid ethics policy. This post was mirrored from http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3baqyu/ethics_former_literary_arts_magazine_editor_on/ and may have been edited at the original location.