A postdoctoral fellow at a prestigious college lately wrote in to share their story of a number one journal that took three months to desk-reject their submission. The expertise, they wrote, was an instance of “how dysfunctional publishing in philosophy journals could be.”
[Su Blackwell, “Nature in Britain”]
Individuals have had plenty of bad experiences with philosophy journals. And there have been various strategies about what to do about one of many frequent causes of many of those experiences: the excessive ratio of submissions to (fascinating) publication house. But these strategies are sometimes for profession-wide modifications to practices and establishments the adoption of which appear unlikely, or face collective motion issues, or are somewhat oblique. As we sit round ready for such huge modifications, maybe it’s price asking what particular person journals, editors, and publishers can do within the brief time period to enhance the state of affairs.
In asking this, I’m not asking for strategies that simply require extra work from editors. Editors already work lengthy and arduous, and strategies which suggest they need to work 18 hours a day are usually not cheap. Certainly, we’d ask not what our journal editors can do for us, however what could be carried out for our journal editors. Editors, be at liberty to pipe in right here!
Listed here are just a few potential strategies:
- Enhance transparency the place it’s missing, and be specific in order to appropriately handle writer expectations. “Warning: it might be three months earlier than we resolve that your paper isn’t price refereeing” ought to be on the “data for authors” webpage of journals for which it’s true.
- Improve the variety of affiliate editors, exerting strain on publishers to fund this if want be, and delegate extra duties to them.
- For the interval between writer submission of a manuscript and an editor’s (or affiliate editor’s) initiating consideration of whether or not it ought to be refereed, permit the manuscript to be submitted to different journals, explicitly declaring that in this era, the submitted manuscript just isn’t really “into account” on the journal, however merely “on a waitlist to be into account.” When it’s about to be moved from the waitlist to “into account,” the writer will probably be notified and should select whether or not to proceed with that course of (and in that case, withdraw the manuscript from different journals).
A few of these and different strategies could carry solely minor advantages, however that’s okay. Collectively they could add as much as one thing noticeably higher. And apart from, progress doesn’t require that we clear up the entire issues fully. So let’s hear your concepts.
Associated: “Notably Good Experiences with Philosophy Journals”
