I have a friend (no, really) who recently asked me which (respectable) journals are not particularly backlogged right now. I wasn't really sure, but I figured the GFP would know. Any thoughts?
I'm less interested in the time-to-referee's-decision, because that seems to be highly variable (although there are, of course, some journals where the editor keeps things moving— yay to editors thus described, and to referees who are efficient!) and more interested in identifying journals with short time-to-publication-for-papers that have been accepted, where that means something like less than 6 months and/or less than a year.
Help a brother out, won't you?
My information is a little out of date, but until very recently at least the Philosophical Review satisfied this condition.
Some of the Kluwer journals (such as Synthese) appear to meet a version of the condition. It is a very short time between acceptance and being in e-print on the website, quite a long time between acceptance and paper production. Since no one actually subscribes to the paper version of Synthese any more, maybe that's close enough for present purposes.
(Of course, I suspect Philosophers' Imprint does very well by this (and every other) criteria. But you probably knew this!)
Posted by: Brian Weatherson | March 05, 2009 at 08:43 AM
What's publication? Many journals with backlogs-to-print are good about making preprints available. Phil Quarterly is good at that, so is the Australasian Journal, and pretty much all the Springer journals (Springer handles the process centrally, so it should be all of them). J. Phil is surprisingly quick at actual publication. Journals like P&PR, which currently has a to-print backlog of 30 months, would make everyone's life easier if they followed this policy.
Posted by: Neil | March 05, 2009 at 02:38 PM
Hi Manuel,
If you're also considering psychology journals this might help (e.g., time, quality of feedback, rounds of revision, etc.)
http://www.journalsfeedback.org
"This project attempts to make the editorial processes of academic economics and psychology journals more transparent and to build over time a track record for most journals in these disciplines."
Posted by: Edward Cokely | March 07, 2009 at 03:28 AM