At the Canberra HERDSA conference in 1980 the decision was taken to establish a HERDSA journal. A feasibility study showed that a journal would only be viable if it was integrated into the HERDSA membership, with each member receiving a copy as part of their membership fee. The cost of producing the journal would be a significant draw on HERDSA funds however recruitment of new members remained an issue for the Executive, and it was hoped that the journal would be an incentive to join HERDSA. Existing members were urged to each introduce one new member to HERDSA to ensure the sustainability of the new journal.

In 1981 John Powell was selected as the journal editor and the name of the journal was to be Higher Education Research and Development published twice a year. To get the first issue going most of the papers for the journal were commissioned by John. He made it clear to the Executive that this was not to be the standard practice.

 After two years of intensive planning, the first issue of Higher Education Research and Development was mailed to HERDSA members. John Powell had encountered a few teething issues in production and called on the help of Ian Dunn to get the issue to bed. John Powell advised the Executive that, to avoid lengthy delays in production, the practice of commissioning manuscripts for issues would continue until the number of submitted manuscripts increased.

Once the first two issues of HERD being published and the production problems at Higher Education Research and Development had largely been resolved, John Powell reported that the publication schedule was back on track. To streamline the publishing process, modifications were made to the journal's layout. Many of the articles in an issue continued to be commissioned by the editor, with the result that early articles in HERD tended to be fairly descriptive accounts of practice rather any real systematic building of knowledge about teaching. Part of the problem was the lack of funding for research and development in higher education, and   Ernest Roe as HERDSA President, continued to make representations to the new Commonwealth Minister of Education and Youth Affairs on this subject. An agreement was reached with the Society for Research into Higher Education to set up joint publication of articles of particular interest to both organisations.

After five formative years HERD had reached a position where it was accepting an increasing number of submitted manuscripts and relying less on commissioned work. John Powell planned to retire from TERC and the Executive asked Ingrid Moses if she would become the editor of HERD. Ingrid was seen as having excellent organisational skills and equally good international connections, which would help with building the journal's reputation. She found the job interesting, but also frustrating when academics submitted sub-standard manuscripts. Ingrid tried to be tactful and diplomatic to the authors, but when the referees said something was poor quality, she believed it was her duty to pass that advice on.

In 1991 the Executive had to find a new editor for HERD. Ingrid Moses was finding it difficult to devote her full attention to the editing role while she was also establishing a new Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. Mike Prosser and Keith Trigwell decided to have a go at editing HERD. Mike particularly enjoyed working with Keith who had just come down from Griffith University to work at Ingrid's centre at UTS. Their goal was to improve the quality of the journal by getting a better conceptual basis to the articles in the context of the literature. There was no money for HERD and Mike and Keith had to do all the typesetting themselves, meeting on Sunday mornings to prepare the journal pages. They introduced the idea that the editors would do the first cut of manuscripts, sending back any they did not think were good enough quality to be sent to reviewers.

The changes that Mike and Keith had brought in for HERD ensured it was widely read, highly respected, and attracted manuscripts of high quality. However, they could not continue as editors with such a heavy workload. In 1994 David Warren Piper and Bill Timpson became the new editors of HERD and set about creating a new look for the journal. A year later David Warren Piper became the sole editor of the journal when Bill Timpson resigned from his position at University of Queensland and returned to America.

Editing HERD had by 1997 become too big a job for a single person and Elaine Martin and Peter Ling took over editing from David Warren Piper. The HERD journal continued to grow in reputation. In 1999 Mike Prosser returned as editor of HERD, taking over from Peter Ling. Mike believed that Australia was leading the world in research and development in higher education at that stage, with not much published on teaching and learning in other higher education journals. HERDSA was playing a role in foregrounding some of that research and HERD was the journal that was presenting that world-leading research.

The number of submissions to HERD continued to grow to the point where editing required a team approach. In 2001 Peter G. Taylor, Carol Bowie, John Dearn, Richard James, and Chris Trevitt became the first editorial team for HERD. Margot Pearson and Linda Hort took over the editorship of HERD two years later and were given the job of clearing the backlog of papers that were at varying stages of consideration. Gerlese Åkerlind recalls that Margot had to convince the CEDAM team that editing HERD would have benefits for them as academics as well as enhancing the academic status of the Centre. They met as a group every week to consider incoming manuscripts and determine suitability for review and appropriate reviewers.  For 4 years Gerlese read every manuscript submitted to the journal, which broadened her knowledge of the range of higher education research enormously.

By 2004 Margot Pearson and the CEDAM team managed to get processing HERD submissions back on track. Gerlese Åkerlind believes this is the only time that the HERD editorship was undertaken by all the academic staff in one Centre as a group, which she describes as a team bonding and developmental activity. Margot Pearson announced that from 2004 there would be 4 issues of HERD per year. The editorial team work on a submission to Thomson Scientific to have HERD included in citation analyses so it could develop a journal impact factor. One emerging issue concerned finding a balance between a focus on papers emerging from funded research grants, while keeping the journal inclusive for all HERDSA members.

HERD continued to grow in size and the number of issues needed to be renegotiated with Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the journal. In 2006 a new Editorial Committee came on board in that final phase of the negotiation with Gerlese Åkerlind becoming co-editor with Margot Pearson. This added the responsibility of communicating with authors and reviewers, and determining editorial changes for manuscripts requiring revisions. Margot and Gerlese took a developmental perspective towards submissions from teacher-practitioners, realising that in order to publish their research academic teachers needed to come to grips with the writing expectations of a different discipline. To assist with this they introduced workshops on publishing in HERD which they delivered around the country.

In 2010 the Research Quality Framework in Australia had been operating for 5 years and journal ranking had become an important metric for research quality. HERD Editors Ian Macdonald and Izabel Soliman had to steer the journal through the ranking process and achieved an A level ranking for HERD. Having a journal ranked well was to the advantage of people submitting their manuscripts and to all HERDSA members as it supported HERDSA’s reputation of being associated with international research. To cope with the increased volume of submissions the number of issues increased to 6 per year.

HERDSA President Geoff Crisp undertook a review of the journal's operations and recommended a new set of operating procedures for HERD. After a call for expressions of interest the Executive contracted a new editorial team lead by Barbara Grant. The review of HERD recommended that HERD editorial teams nominate an Executive Editor to be the point of contact for the team at Executive meetings. Barbara was selected by her team be to the first Executive Editor, a role she says changed over time. The Executive Editor coordinated the team meetings, oversaw the Managing Editor who ran the journal's office, and checked that the manuscripts fitted the scope the journal. Barbara valued the interaction with the Executive as a good moment to take stock and to get affirmation to take back to the team, along with challenges that kept the Editorial Team going on with the work.

One innovation introduced by the new HERD editorial team was to have a call for Special Issues rather than a call for papers for a special issue. Iris Vardi says when she was Special Issue Editor she took control of producing the journal which included finding people to write manuscripts, shortlisting proposals, inviting the writers, getting everybody reviewed, and putting together an edition. Iris found that there was a lot of work getting some of the invited papers up to scratch. They had to be sent back for changes then reviewed, advice given on the reviewers’ comments, and overall helped to be suitable for publication.

Standards were always an important consideration for the HERD editorial team. The reputation of HERD as a highly esteemed journal had dramatically increased once it was rated as an A journal. In 2014 HERD was rejecting over 70% of articles received and there was still a large backlog from the previous few years. Extra pages had to be paid for and added to the next few issues of the journal.Taylor and Francis were in discussion with Barbara Grant about increasing the size of the journal without an increased cost to HERDSA as a condition of renewing the publishing agreement.

The HERD editorial team also introduced some of innovations to the manuscript approval process. Manuscripts were refereed using the Taylor and Francis online reviewing system called ScholarOne, a system many of the team had used as editors on different journals. The editorial team wanted to move from a system where anyone who submitted a manuscript to HERD was then able to be approached as a reviewer, to a College of Reviewers who had been vetted as appropriate reviewers for the journal. Barbara Grantt says that reviewing the reviewers was a significant piece of work that involved setting the criteria that reviewers needed to meet before they could be included as reviewers.

The HERD editorial team had put in place a strategy to take the journal to the highest possible level, pushed along by the publish or perish culture that had become pervasive in universities with the introduction of research quality assessments. Part of the HERD editorial team mission at the time was not to consider publishing weak manuscripts. HERD was receiving hundreds of manuscripts a year so reviewing weak manuscripts and giving editorial support was not viable. Instead, Barbara Grant focused on improving the quality of manuscripts before submission by facilitating workshops at the Conference and at Branch meetings, and writing advice on publishing in higher education journals in HERDSA News.

In 2016 Barbara Grant's last act as Executive Editor of HERD was to encourage authors to acknowledge earlier articles in HERD on the same topic and ran the workshop on being a successful academic author before handing over to the new HERD Editorial Team of Wendy Green and Craig Whitsed.