Comments on: Time Out of Joint

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:03:00 +0000

Scientists simply would never submit papers to a journal that took a year to review them. The risk of being scooped would be intolerable.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:48:34 +0000

It was an original Star Trek episode: "Wink of an Eye". And I share Jacob's fetishizing. Well, I mean, the one involving academic monographs, that is.

By: Njorl

Njorl — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:29:10 +0000

In comparisson, our time-to-acceptance/rejection is much faster in physics. I don’t know why that might be, but I can share the steps that we go through before the manuscript ever leaves our lab. Our research is reviewed for technical merits by at least 2 knowledgeble colleagues. It is reviewed by others for technical relevence, and readability. It is reviewed by a technical editor for style. Nothing leaves the lab that will embarrass it. Only then does it go out to a journal for review. From what I understand, this is the norm for large labs and universities. Is that the norm in philosophy? Do you get a lot of criticism and feedback from multiple sources of differeng expertise before you send the thing out?

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:00:12 +0000

First of all: yes, some of us do fetishize the physical artifact of academic monographs. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m filled with fellow-feeling: today marks five months that I’ve been waiting for the first-round reports on a submission. (The journal claims three months; at three months, I was told that one out of three reports was in. Feh.) A real part of me wishes I could send the thing out to another journal right-the-hell-now. But I don’t actually favor multiple submissions. Each of the possible children that the need for more reviews would mother seems unacceptable to me. 1) Many more articles to review, per reviewer—an increased burden on the conscientious, fewer conscientious reports, probably longer turnaround time. [The only possible mitigation would be that the same reviewer would be likely to get sent the same article from multiple journals, and so could just write the report once. Hell, that happens now, but with an inefficient lag time between the two events.] 2) Incorporating many more reviewers—but the pool is surely limited, and in the case of lots of specialized work it’s very limited. (How many people are even minimally qualified to assess some pieces of original research? Lots of people may be able to assess the writing and structure and interest, but only a few may be able to assess the truth or originality or reliability of the results.) And the total number of bodies isn’t increasing, and everyone’s a specialist in something, so you can’t do it just by expanding out of subspecialization. Your intellectual neighbors have their own refereeing gardens to tend. You’d get a one-time increase by a mass incorporation of earlier-stage grad students, but that has costs to the credibility of “peer review.” In general, any expansion of the pool of reviewers seems likely to come at the expense of the seriousness of peer review. 3) Rationing—and a coop of service-provision ain’t the most likely form of rationing. Much more likely is a system run by the for-profit publishers that consists of requiring payment for submissions (as in the hard sciences), followed by some payment to referees. But now you’ve got multiple submissions being more open to those with big grants or research budgets. On publishing positive referee reports: I think I’ve seen this idea before, and it always strikes me as resting on a mistaken claim of asymmetry. Impartiality has the same potential to be compromised whether a referee is fearing disfavor or currying favor, right?

By: M.

M. — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:56:26 +0000

You know, the science journals are much quicker than the social science journals—turnaround under a month, if I remember correctly—and I think this is because in the wake of AIDS research taking forever to get published in the 80s, they cleaned up their act. All you have to do is (1) prescreen, so that things with zero chance of publication aren’t even sent out for review—this frees up reviewer time and then (2) demand reviews in two weeks. It doesn’t really take that long to write a review. Of course, if reviews have a teaching function, it cuts into that a bit. But perhaps journals could take one or the other model: long turnaround with lenghty reviews, or short turnaround with shorter reviews.

By: Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:41:04 +0000

The CV-building function might be part of the reason for slowness in some journals. For my first publication, as a graduate student, I at first submitted to the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which is, you know, pretty prestigious. They actually wrote me back within a couple weeks and said something like, “You won’t know for a year. Want to withdraw your submission so that you can find somewhere that’s not stupidly slow?” I did withdraw, though for some reason I took so long to resubmit it that I might as well have just waited to collect my rejection letter from the JAAR. In any case, the moral of the story isn’t simply my ridiculous hubris: it’s the fact that people don’t just want stuff published and being discussed, they want it in a prestigious place.

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:27:38 +0000

I guess I should actually have, you know, read the entirety of your post before making that comment.

By: Orin Kerr

Orin Kerr — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:25:28 +0000

Student-edited law journals allow multiple submissions, but there’s a catch: they don’t agree to actually read what they receive. Better journals make sure that at least one student gives a quick glance at every one of the hundreds or thousands of submissions, but at some journals the submissions just sit in a box absent special circumstances like a request for an expedited review.

By: Dan Salerno

Dan Salerno — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:23:41 +0000

Academia is for losers. It’s like dungeons and dragons with doctoral degrees. “You know that shit’s not real, right?”

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:19:35 +0000

Why stop there? The point of acceptance into a journal isn’t dissemination of ideas but gaining the imprimatur of a particular peer-review group. Why not have a central place (or a distributed place with some kind of verification, I don’t care) online where one can put up philosophy papers, and also submit them to the editors of however many journals one pleases. Then, when an editorial response is forthcoming, its nihil obstat could appear on, say, the abstract page for the paper—version a accepted by journal x, revise&resubmit from journal y (accepted version b), etc. There’s no need for the journal to actually publish anything; that might have been what they were for once but I’m pretty positive (despite not being an academic) that now they’re primarily a form of accreditation/cv-building. (Which is why I don’t see why people only post draft versions of papers on their personal sites—like I’m going to buy an issue of whatever journal your article appeared in if I want to read the final draft? Where would I do that, anyway, the newsstand? (And are academic journals even available on a single-issue basis?).)

By: hick

hick — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:04:02 +0000

Perhaps there’s a few journal reviewers remaining who realize the implications of positivism and the philosophy of science and thus refuse to publish the longwinded, clerical obscurities of the next academic dupe weaned on “latin quarter heideggerians”. If it’s named Bonnie Steinbock somehow I doubt it’s going to be offering insights into Goedel’s Theorem

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:01:32 +0000

As one of the thirty or maybe ten, I’m sorry to hear that the journal didn’t take it. I thought they would and should have. Philosophy and Literature might be a good forum for it, though I’m not sure about the length. I’m starting to feel that the only way the paper-fetish is going to be resolved is when nanotechnology allows computers to be embedded in sheets of paper, allowing one thin journal to hold all of Alexandria, etc.

By: Ted

Ted — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:27:06 +0000

John – hang in there. I know where you’re coming from. I can tell you that the wait in political science journals, in my experience, can take over a year, and there’s no guarantee that even after all that time the reviewers have offered anything like useful feedback. Personally I think a lot could be accomplished simply by the relevant professional associations tracking how long it takes a journal to turn things around and making that information publicly available. If I would have known I was looking at a fifteen month turnaround, I wouldn’t have bothered. Given the pressure to publish lots of stuff quickly, I bet most other people wouldn’t either. Presumably fewer submissions would mean a faster turnaround, but I think it would also lead the editors to think about doing what they needed to do to get things reviewed faster. Alternately, institutions could place a higher value on reviewing articles, thus increasing the incentive to do reviews and therefore the number of people doing them. I like a lot of your ideas, but it’s hard to imagine my discipline adopting them.