Another issue you brought up history maven, which I considered addressing but the post was getting long, is the growth and proliferation of the “special issue.” It feels like the number of articles published by any journal anymore is about half (or less than half) what it used to be. This practice again raises questions in my mind about the difference between publishing an article in a book versus in a journal, when these “special issues” are edited by a guest editor who undoubtedly has in most cases solicited manuscripts from friends and acquaintances, and who probably has a greater degree of liberty than editors who are abiding by the standard review process. (When I was a junior faculty member and first started publishing 11 years ago, senior faculty used to make a big deal over the difference between articles in books and articles in journals, but I think people have settled down and now accept them as equivalent.) Still, special issues seem to take up a lot of space that otherwise went to unsolicited articles.

And Sqadratomagico: you’re entirely right about my utopian author-friendly scheme! But, maybe it would make journals sharper about which articles they sent out to readers, and which they rejected out of hand. I think journals need to develop a new “prejection letter” saying, “thanks for your article, but we’re not really interested in stuff in this field right now.” (I think some journals do this.) That would seem to be more honest than putting an article through the review process when an editor clearly wasn’t interested in publishing an article. (Although, with the existence of e-mail, it would seem odd I suppose for someone to send an article somewhere that was wildly off-base. I’ve had good luck e-mailing editors and asking if they have any interest whatsoever in an article before sending it to them–sometimes you get a politely tepid letter encouraging you to send it on, but other times you get a stronger response, either way!)

Susan–a friend of mine was a student of Judith Bennett, and your “best advice” was her advice, too: she told my friend to have 3 copies of the article in addressed envelopes ready to go, so that if the first journal you sent it to rejected you, you send it on to the next journal unrevised and continue the process uninterrupted! (Was it Judith Bennett who gave you that advice!) I liked the moxie–”screw you if you don’t like my article, someone else surely will!”

On the other hand, when I was in grad school back in the dark ages, I submitted an article to a prestigious journal (on the advice of a prestigious scholar with ties to the people at said journal). I got back a really snotty rejection, which made it pretty clear no one had read the article.

THe other thing about peer review is that it works against unconventional approaches to a subject. Or it does if not managed generously. The best advice I ever got was that when you got a rejection, just send it out: a friend suggested that you wait until you get three rejections before you spend time revising!

http://squadratomagico.blogspot.com/2007/05/story-of-my-nemesis.html

Historiann, your proposal to shift towards multiple submissions of a single manuscript sounds dreamy, in some ways, though I imagine that in the long run it might have unintended consequences. It’s a lot more processing of mss, to begin with, since every journal would then be flooded with many times more submissions, and ever ms, would be processed multiple times. It’s creating a lot more work around the same number of actual scholarly productions. This, in turn, would further slow down the publication timeline, strain journal resources (not high to begin with) and potentially create room for lots of weird abuses on the part of “star” writers whose works were wanted in many places, and who don’t have enough grace to behave well. While I’ll admit that my immediate response to that proposal was to find it very appealing, in the bigger picture I think it might create more problems than it solves.

We rarely rejected a manuscript without sending it, through a double-blind process, to scholars. In the era before email, we used postcards to ask potential reviewers for their permission to send on the manuscript. We received between 250 and 300 manuscripts a year. Members of the editorial board were used as experts but also as third or fourth reviewers if we had conflicting opinions. Sometimes we simply could not find reviewers who were willing to take the work, and that takes time–how long, for example, do you wait for a response from a potential reviewer before you again begin again the process of matching reviewer to manuscript? And we gave reviewers six weeks in which to complete the task–yes, it may take 1-3 hours, but I’ve also had reviewers who took more time to fact-check, to read up again this theorist or that, etc., etc. (As a reviewer, I do this, too.) And taking on a review is, though generally expected, an unplanned addition to one’s schedule. I’ve declined to review books; I won’t decline reviewing manuscripts in my field. It’s a professional obligation of another, important sort.

Back to my journal editing experience: The editor was fantastic and democratic–two great reviews and the editor’s endorsement meant publication. We published a LOT of junior faculty members’ work. That meant, of course, that we had the proper year’s backlog. I still find it amazing that junior colleagues are angered, dismayed, or shocked when they learn that there’s a lag time in publishing. I don’t recall that anyone called our office to ask that question, though many called during the review process because they needed an answer about a nearing tenure application deadline. A quarterly journal has, basically 16-24 slots to fill annually; a special issue may reduce that number.

The journal was eventually transfered to another institution; the new editor instituted another editorial board to oversee decisions (keep count: two editorial boards). I have to say I disagreed with the decision: it adds a layer of decision making that may sully the product, in that board members have votes but no knowledge of the field or approach of a given essay, or may require changes for publication that dilutes the final essay. The year after the journal changed hands I received calls from colleagues asking me why, after two positive readers’ reports, the journal’s editorial board was hesitant to commit to publication or were asking for more changes than necessary. Given increasing scholarly interdisciplinarity, this is a real problem.

Such a structure (and I should add that editorial boards were greatly expanded in the 1980s, at a time when publishers sought income through the acquisition of scholarly journals) is fraught with problems–the primary one is that it weakens scholarship. Given the temperament and/or expertise and/or experience of the editor, the addition of another level of “peer” review (usually 12 board members) has undermined in various ways and to varying degrees the power of editors to make decisions, to guide a discipline or field, and to be an honest scholarly broker. Another colleague received two conflicting reviews; rather than seek a third reviewer or make a decision, the editor asked the colleague what to do. That’s a weak editor.

As for abuse: I admit that we did keep an informal list of scholars who were nasty, inept, careless, or habitually late in their reviews. The journal itself had to maintain its integrity and reputation, and we took seriously that charge.

We also learned to prepare for the onslaught of manuscripts in September, and tried mightily to get readers for any manuscript arriving in April–in the summer months it was pretty impossible to find readers and get reviews. Winter break, too, at times delayed reports.

We always sent the reader’s reports, though we did redact at times nasty comments, such as “this had to be written by a graduate student” when we knew it was senior scholar. Journal editors are stewards as well as brokers; all authors should receive those reports.

But, take someone who has a poorly integrated ego and is already on a power trip–making someone wait 8 months to get their work shredded makes a perverse kind of sense, doesn’t it? (Fortunately, that’s only a minority of reviewers, but those experiences surely stick out in one’s mind.)

As to slow turn around time — this is just sheer poor prior planning. If someone can’t read and review an article within the time frame set by the editor, s/he shouldn’t agree to do it in the first place.

But, article publication is not nearly as high-stakes as jobs, so I wish them luck, as I hope the experiment works as you suggest.

http://wikihost.org/wikis/philjinfo/wiki/start

I don’t know if literature or history people have done the same yet, but it’s a nice way of demystifying a tiny bit of the publishing process by using open wiki technology.

They have listed their experiences with turnaround time and the outcomes of rejection or acceptance, along with any comments or horror stories, and thus, reading across all the journals, one can start learning about these journals’ publishing track records —- who is hopelessly behind, who is run by someone mean or incompetent, who takes a year and a half to respond to anything, who leans on articles with too heavy an editorial hand, etc. It’s a way for the philosophy grads who started it to learn something about both the quality of the journal and of the applicant treatment.

This wouldn’t solve any of the problems you list, of course, but it would solve other problems and give a tiny bit of control back to the applicant, which helps so much.