Its frightful how much time I have spent fretting over journal editors decisions. I submitted an article to a journal last Monday and have been checking my inbox incessantly every three hours for a reply ever since.
I’m sure my apprehension stems from being a novice at this, but I can’t seem to think that my reaction is a little bit schoolboyish waiting for the final examination results. I have tried hard to distract myself – had a couple of reports to write, a project proposal to submit and a presentation to make, but just can’t seem to focus on anything for too long.
Its going to be even worse if I get rejected because it will just mean agonisingly reformatting the paper for another month to send to another journal..and so on.
I often wish there was a central site for all article submissions and people can submit an article with their first and second preference for journals. After that, any journal is allowed to bid for the paper within a span of time and the authors must accept one within that time period. This at least means that authors receive decisions from journal editors about sending the article for peer review quickly without reformatting the paper incessantly. The problem lies in the peer review process which often takes long and allows articles to be rejected at that stage. I haven’t got any ideas for that..any takers?
There is a very long answer to the questions posed in your post. It probably runs to the length of a fair sized book. Suffice it to say that the current system(s) for selecting what manuscripts get published in what journals have evolved over many decades; and like all processes of evolution it hasn’t necessarily found the best of all possible solutions, just the most expedient. It is a deep local minimum which will take some serious mutation to escape.
One initiative that is worth mentioning is the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium which is where a bunch of journals have got together and agreed to share the reports they obtain when reviewing a manuscript. It has some big names involved and is running for an initial trial period of the whole of this year. Could be interesting.
My one piece of advice is to stop wishing for a quick decision. Negative decisions get reached swiftly, positive ones take a little more time.
Saranya,
Like you, I am a novice to submitting articles to Journals. I agree very much with Chris’s comments and was already aware of the initiative he mentions.
If I were you, I would certainly take Chris’s advice given his credentials.
Sorry for the self-promotion, but Nature Neuroscience, who joined the NPRC recently, ran an editorial about the consortium and touched on some of the issues surrounding the points made above. Hopefully more entities such as this will crop up in other disciplines in an effort to streamline the review process for the authors.
Your last paragraph reminded me of a recent Nature correspondence that proposed exactly what you described, but for grants rather than papers. I continued the conversation on this topic here, if you are interested.
Thanks Chris,
I fear my post was more of a rant than any sort of constructive criticism of the issue. I appreciate the Consortium idea and wish that other journals follow suit.The fingers are not yet being uncrossed!
Noah, I can envisage a common process being slightly easier for grants as grant proposals really should not change a lot if funders have common objectives/agendas.
The Nature Publishing Group journals have had a similar “mansucript transfer system” – an automatic process for the author—for about five years now, by the way.