Editorial

Taking the helm, and a year of growth

Nelesh Dhanpat

Copyright: © 2026. The Author. Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

I take up the role of interim Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Industrial Psychology (SAJIP) at an important juncture for the journal, succeeding Professor Crystal Hoole. Under her editorship, SAJIP grew in rigour and reach, and much of what this editorial reflects builds directly on that foundation. On behalf of the editorial team and our readership, I thank her for her years of dedicated service and am pleased to continue the work she leaves in good order.

This editorial focuses on where SAJIP stands across 2025 and 2026, the period spanning this transition and what the data behind our editorial process tell us about the journal’s trajectory.

Acceptances on the rise

Original Research acceptances held at 31 across the whole of 2025. By the midpoint of 2026, acceptances had already matched that full-year total, with the two most recent months each recording seven accepted manuscripts, the highest monthly figures across the 2-year series we track. This is not a single spike but a sustained upward trend, and it reflects growing confidence among researchers, both local and international, in SAJIP as an outlet for rigorous industrial and organisational psychology scholarship.

This growth is visible in the current pipeline. As things stand this year, 84 manuscripts have been submitted, 24 have already been published and a further 12 have been accepted and are moving through production. That is a substantial body of work in motion at any given time, and it highlights why the discipline of our review process matters now as much as ever.

Publication output keeping pace

Encouragingly, this growth in acceptances has not come at the expense of publication throughput. Article and page output through 2025 and into 2026 show our editorial and production processes keeping pace with the increased flow of accepted work. This matters. A journal that accepts more but publishes no faster simply defers the problem; ours has not.

Turnaround under growth: An honest account

Growth of this kind is not without cost, and we think it is important to report this plainly rather than only celebrate the headline figures. Our average time to first decision was 57 days in 2025; in 2026, it has risen to 105.57 days. Average time in review to an accept decision shows the same reversal, from 110 days in 2025 to 176 days this year. The most plausible explanation is the very increase in submission volume described above, placing real strain on reviewer and section editor capacity. Set against this, one figure moves in the right direction even across this same window: The average time from acceptance to publication has continued to fall, from 80.45 days in 2025 to 68.54 days in 2026, evidence that our production process is becoming more efficient and streamlined even as the earlier review stages come under pressure. I will not pretend the slower first-decision and review times do not concern me; they do, and addressing them honestly is more useful to this journal than glossing over them. It is precisely at this point of need that we call on reviewers in the field to embrace this citizenship and play an active role in helping us restore faster turnaround.

What this means for prospective authors

We remain committed to the same editorial standards that have underpinned this growth. Manuscripts most commonly fall short not because of weak topic selection, but because of insufficiently rigorous research design, or a misalignment between a paper’s contribution and the scope of the journal. Authors who engage closely with our focus on the interaction between individual, organisational and institutional dynamics in the workplace, and who bring methodological rigour to quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods work, continue to fare best in our review process.

Thanks where it is due

None of this is possible without the sustained, largely unremunerated effort of our section editors and peer reviewers, who give their time and expertise to ensure that what we publish meets the standard our readers and our indexing bodies expect. On behalf of the editorial and African Online Scientific Information Systems (AOSIS) team, I extend my sincere thanks to each of them.

Changes to our editorial team

We are pleased to welcome three new section editors to SAJIP: (1) Prof. Nicola Taylor (Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management, University of Johannesburg), (2) Prof. Daphne Pillay-Naidoo (Department of Human Resource Management, University of Pretoria) and (3) Dr Tinashe Harry (Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). Their appointment strengthens our capacity to manage the growing volume of submissions described above without compromising the rigour of review.

At the same time, we bid farewell to Prof. Nasima Carrim (University of Pretoria) and Prof. Marieta du Plessis (Stellenbosch Business School), who each served as section editors for more than a decade. Their sustained contribution shaped the journal’s editorial standards over many years, and we are deeply grateful for their long service.

Looking ahead

In the interim, as I settle into this role, I do so with a clear sense of what I want for SAJIP: (1) editorial capacity that grows in step with rising submissions, (2) review turnaround that returns to our 2025 benchmark and (3) scholarship that keeps pushing our understanding of people and work in African organisational contexts. I look forward to reading what you send us.