I have a colleague who has had a paper under review at a Philosophically Respectable journal for about 7 months. (UPDATE: Since several people have asked off-thread whether I'm talking about me, I should confirm that I wasn't actually asking on my own behalf— really!) The journal claims to let authors know within 3-4 months about an initial decision on submissions. A couple of months ago (at the 5 month mark), after not having heard anything, he contacted the journal to see if there was any news. The journal sent a boilerplate reply, apparently, about how the article was still being looked at. So, now my friend is asking me for advice about whether and how to pull the article from that journal. My own advice is to pull it now, explain to the journal why, and move on to a peer journal or better. Still, I thought I'd check with you all for thoughts on the matter.
Here's an interesting aspect to the case though: time is of the essence for him. The paper is on an emerging "hot topic" in his field, and he has reason to believe that a number of other people are writing papers on this subject matter. He tells me that he is concerned that he might get scooped, or that acceptance will get harder because the terrain will start to shift as these papers get finished and submitted to more timely journals. So, matters are not as straightforward as they oftentimes are.
Still, this sort of situation pisses me off. If you aren't part of the solution, I hereby declare you part of the problem. ¡¡Viva la revolución!!
A proposal is below.
First, the inevitable anecdote. I once had a paper (rejected, of course) from a Famous Place that took them 12 months to let me know it was rejected. This is ludicrous and there is no good excuse for this to happen, ever. A much worse instance happened to another friend (not the one mentioned above). A journal told him—after he contacted them—that after 12 months they couldn't find a referee for his paper that was on a very central topic on free will. They clearly weren't trying very hard. Trust me: I've seen the paper and I can think of a dozen referees of the top of my head for whom it would be no difficulty at all to referee the paper; and, I'm very confident that many of them refereed many papers over that 12 months span of time; indeed, I have very good reason to think that same journal refereed several papers in that same area over that period of time, with some making it into print). Such treatment is really deplorable, and if it would make any difference I'd love to stop refereeing for that journal and think you should too. I'd announce the name of that journal here, except that it didn't happen to me and I'm not convinced it is my fight to start in this fashion. Back to the core of my rant. I'm convinced that we have a collective action problem. In lots of fields, a 2 week review period is considered insanely long and grounds for complaint. But it is not like biology professors (or what have you) have less work to do than we do. And, the amount of time it takes to review an article is relatively fixed, regardless of whether one does it now or 12 months from now. So, I think what we have is a problem with our disciplinary norms. We put up with huge delays and perpetuate them ourselves only because we know it is common. But this is making life miserable for everyone (author, editor, and reviewer— the latter has to put up with that paper staring him or her in the face, day after miserable day). Our current practices particularly hurt our discipline's most vulnerable: early career folks for whom a publication can make a big difference. Inertia is a real problem here, but so is the sheer callousness of those who sit on referee requests that they volunteered to accept. So embrace what I think of as the Mele principle: IF YOU CAN'T REFEREE A PAPER IN THREE WEEKS, THEN DON'T ACCEPT THE REFEREE REQUEST. If you can't do it in three weeks, you are simply too busy to say yes or you have a problem with procrastination. Either way, you shouldn't be holding hostage people's careers and job possibilities, or for that matter, feedback on their work.
(The Mele Principle is so-named, because I remember my astonishment when Al once told me he accepts a referee request only if he could do it right away. I first thought that must mean he never referees, but then I remembered that he had refereed several of my papers in pretty quick succession. It took me a few weeks to recover from the realization that one can referee without procrastinating, and he remains a hero to me for introducing me to this truth.)
So, I invite people to commit themselves to the Mele Principle. Repeat after me: "decline it if you can't do it in 3 weeks or less." Learn it. Live it. Love it.
I've found that the Mele Principle works really well. I still say yes most of the time, and my average time for refereeing a paper has gone way down (Under a week for my last 6 papers; I expect that this number will eventually go up when my schedule is less flexible, but I vow not to go past 3 weeks). Moreover, I get the pleasure of knowing that I'm not hurting early careers. Now all we need is for you and everyone else to cooperate. Yes, journal editor person, yes, it will make your job harder if you have to pull papers from referees that are sitting on papers for very long. You'd probably have to spend a bit more time getting a big pool of referees. However, you are running the show, so make the tough calls already and start pulling papers from laggardly referees explaining to them that it is unacceptable to treat authors this way. Once this starts to happen, we have some real moral pressure internal to the system.
Maybe we also need some shaming here, of naming those journals that have a track record of treating authors poorly. Or, perhaps journals should prominently acknowledge referees who are particularly efficient. Ideally, editors would simply pull and article from a referee if it isn't responded to in some relatively short period of time, and offer it to another referee. There are some signs of progress. A number of places (Nous, Ethics) have recently instituted policies that should, in principle, speed up at least some refereeing. And, some places have always been very fast (Phil Imprint, Analysis). But really people, the overall state of affairs is crazy. So, anyway, when should one pull a paper from a Distinguished Journal? Does one give a journal an ultimatum first, or should one just pull it? Should we start naming names of journals that suck, editorially speaking? And you senior folks: what do you recommend? You've been there. What do you think? I'm looking at you John, Al, Randy, Derk, Carl, Saul, Tim, Fritz, Michael, and any of the rest of you senior folks who are lurking. And yeah, I did just call you out.
Hear, hear! Thanks Manuel for bringing up this issue. I look forward to hearing folks responses, especially the senior folk who have now been "called out."
Posted by: Justin A. Capes | May 11, 2009 at 06:09 PM
I agree; the Mele Principle is quite reasonable. Although I haven't refereed before, I would definitely abide by it!
Posted by: Josh May | May 11, 2009 at 08:07 PM
I would advise your friend to try to get some more information from the journal before pulling it. For all you know, the paper has already been refereed and is on the editor's desk awaiting a decision...
The time a paper sits in the hands of the referees is only part of the problem. Now that it's easy to track things with most journals on their online sites (like manuscript central), one can see exactly where slow downs occur. So I currently have a paper at a Philosophically Respectable journal that sat for 7 weeks before it was even assigned to referees. (Story still in progress now)
Posted by: Anon | May 11, 2009 at 08:45 PM
I meet your Mele principle and raise you a Chalmers principle: writing on Leiter, Dave reported that he never accepts a refereeing request unless he can deliver within a few days. In general, and when you are reviewing in your AOS, you ought to be able to turn around a paper within a few. I aim for 72 hours and always make it unless the paper raises issues that require me to go and read something else. When I have said this before, people respond that it takes much longer to write comments. Well I have published about 75 papers (and submitted rather more) and have got comments that would have taken more than a couple of hours to write only half a dozen times. I think people who say this are largely excusing their procrastination: it takes 6 weeks to referee a paper iff you include 5 weeks "getting around to it" time.
As an editor, I also do what I can to try to help. Matters are simply taken out of my hands: Springer gives reviewers 28 days to review a paper, after which they are sent a reminder: 7 days later they are 'uninvited'.
But none of this addresses your "friend's" question. I wouldn't withdraw the paper. As I said, I have available a fair sample of journal experiences available to me, and 7 months is just not that unusual. I would be reluctant, were I your friend, to restart the refereeing clock. The number of journals that really and reliably take less than four months is very small.
Posted by: Neil | May 11, 2009 at 09:17 PM
This past year I went to the Eastern in the hopes of landing a job with three things that had been under review for at least 12 months. One piece was accepted after about 18 months and two were R&R's just after the 12th month under review. (Somehow they all managed to hold out just long enough to do me no good on the market.) Since then I've had two pieces rejected by places that are supposed to be on the quicker side and they didn't get back to me for 7 months. I feel lucky to get a verdict back by then and if you withdraw a submission you have to find somewhere else to submit.
From past experience, I can count on quick verdicts from Analysis, Nous, PPR. From past experience, I can say that Nous and PPR refs hate my work. I suspect that there's a mole in my organization that tips Michael Clark off to the fact that I'm sending him something because his rejection emails are in my inbox before my submissions hit Nottingham.
Posted by: C | May 11, 2009 at 10:43 PM
The American Economic Review, the highest-ranking journal in economics, charges a fee for submitting a paper, and offers a $100 payment for a timely report. My guess is that the best way to improve the situation in our discipline is for journals to adopt a policy of this kind. Journals might add some structure to the incentive for reviewers, by, for instance, offering some amount for a report within three weeks, and half as much for one within six weeks. Here's the submissions section of the AER website, and check the information for reviewers on the right: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/submissions.php
Posted by: Derk Pereboom | May 12, 2009 at 06:33 AM
Anon-
That sounds reasonable. I don't know if this colleague's paper has been sitting on an editor or referee's desk, but I'll suggest he check.
Neil-
Yeah, I'm not surprised that you'd raise me a Chalmers. I actually aim for the Chalmers standard myself, but I can't always do it. However, 3 weeks feels like a big enough window to allow for reasonable vagaries in my life. But, I suspect, others will think that given the details of their lives, 3 weeks is unreasonably short. And that's interesting how Springer constrains the journal refereeing— I had no idea. Not ideal, but still better than lots.
And Neil- at what point do you think one should pull a paper, even if not at the 7 month mark? 9 months? One year?
C- Yeah, that's exactly the sort of experience (job-market wise) that shouldn't be happening to our newly minted Ph.D.s
Derk-
Economic incentives are tantalizing, especially for those of us who do a fair amount of refereeing and are at a career stage where dropping $100 per submission is feasible. So, I think I'd love this system if it were widely in place.
However, I worry that it only reproduces the basic problem of penalizing our discipline's most vulnerable. Think about graduate students and the young professor at a community college or Podunk State who is interested in publishing his or her way out. In these sorts of cases, a $100 fee might not be a trivial thing. We could imagine a system with a lower buy-in cost to reflect this sort of thing, but I suspect that bounties of under a $100 may not be much motivation for many referees (indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the economists settled on this figure precisely because that is what it takes to be effective). However, paying referees at all might increase the number of willing referees in the system, so that might be a good thing.
Still, I wonder if this is one of these cases where moral incentives (shaming, removing papers with a note of explaining the potential penalty to young careers, etc.) may out-power any accessible economic incentives.
(For a nice example of moral incentives trumping economic incentives, check out an example from Freakonomics. The authors talk about what happened to a daycare when they shifted from a system of moralized disapproval for being late to a fee-based system for being late: rates of being late went way up.)
But maybe I'm underestimating the power of modest economic incentives for referees. And, there certainly is the underlying puzzle of how much our profession depends on unpaid labor, labor that sometimes (not always) brings in non-trivial profits to publishers. Nothing I've said really touches on that issue, and my grousing assumes that given that one has agreed to referee, that one has burdens of discharging that agreement in a timely fashion, given the costs.
Derk, any thoughts on a general rule of thumb for pulling papers from journals?
Posted by: Manuel Vargas | May 12, 2009 at 07:28 AM
Derk,
The AER charges $200 for non-members to submit an article and $100 for members to submit an article. If I was paid anything like my friends in economics are, maybe I could swing something like this. Maybe this isn't true of contingent faculty in general, but our university barely pays its lecturers enough to live on. We all need extra income to get by as is and we need to publish our way out of our positions. If journals charged us for submissions, it would make a near impossible situation just that much nearer to impossible.
I'm all for incentives for reviewers, but not if that involves charging underpaid philosophers submission fees. How about this? People who can't get their reviews in on time won't get their reviews returned in a timely manner.
Posted by: Clayton | May 12, 2009 at 07:36 AM
I think that the biggest problem is a lack of transparency. If potential contributors had all of the relevant information about journals, then they could make more informed decisions as to where to submit their work. And these more informed choices would then result in those journals that offer potential contributors what they want flourishing and those journals that don't floundering. I think that if we had greater transparency, then market forces would help us end up with not only quicker response times but also with other things we want, such as useful comments, quick turnaround to publication, blind or even double-blind review, etc. You seem to assume that quick review time is the most salient factor. For some, it is, but, for others, it isn't. I don't mind waiting 3-4 months if I can expect good, thorough referee reports. I also have a strong preference for blind and double-blind review. For this reason, I would prefer to submit to a journal that relies more on referees and takes longer to reach a decision than a journal that relies mainly on a quick decision by an initial vetting by the editor, as is the case with Analysis.
I don't think that your suggestion to always follow the Mele principle is good. Suppose that I follow the Mele principle and decline an invitation to referee a paper because I'm right in the middle of a move and won't have time to referee it until three weeks from now. Assume also that I'll get it done in four weeks. The journal asks referees to do it within 8 weeks. If I decline, I suspect it will slow things down. Many referees are less conscientious than I am and take longer than 4 weeks. Also, it does take time to find a suitable referee. Anyone who edits a journal will tell you that it's difficult to find quality, reliable people who are willing to referee in a timely fashion. So if I turn it down, it may take them an extra week to find a replacement referee. And that referee may take more than four weeks to referee.
Of course, we should all do more to referee as quickly as possible. But more important than that, we need information about journals, which many journals don't provide: how big their backlog is, how long they give referees to submit their reviews, whether they ask referees to submit comments for the author, what they do when a referee hasn't submitted a report in a timely fashion, how long they take on average to review a paper and what's the longest they've taken to review a paper in the last year, etc.
In an effort to effect greater transparency, I started up this wiki: http://www.wikihost.org/w/philjinfo/start. Such anecdotal data is far from ideal, I know. This is why we should support journals who make an effort to be transparent.
Posted by: Doug Portmore | May 12, 2009 at 07:54 AM
I wouldn't recommend AER's rates. For philosophy, a $20 submission fee might work, and payments to reviewers would be effective without matching AER's. Journals might also try to secure endowments to fund such payments. A few years ago the point was made in a similar Leiter thread that negative incentives would increase the number of refusals to review. That would be alright if there were a large pool of untapped willing and able reviewing talent, or of able people willing to review more often, but my sense is that this isn't so. I think that if journals adopted negative incentives, an already fragile reviewing system would become unworkable, and that the best fix would be to add modest positive incentives.
Posted by: Derk Pereboom | May 12, 2009 at 08:46 AM
Excellent post Manuel! I definitely support Portmore's call for journals to be more transparent; instead of a wiki site, editorial staff should provide accurate information about the average time it takes for their referees to review articles and the percentage of manuscripts submitted in comparison to those accepted. This seems like an easy and not too time-consuming fix.
Editorial staff may scoff at the suggestion, but I recommend this as someone who has recently inherited a managing editor position for a philosophy journal. I'm afraid to say that there seems to be an endless backlog of manuscripts, and I'm working my rear-end off to get these manuscripts through the system quickly. (If I'm correct, there's a manuscript that's been lingering for nearly 2 years. UGH!)
Two problems seem to be most apparent: (1) the manuscripts were sent to referees and one or both of the referees has not prepared a report yet and (2) my predecessor didn't send a manuscript out for review because he didn't know a competent referee.
(2) is, of course, unacceptable for reasons already cited by Manuel. In fact I might be a little more harsh than Manuel: if you don't know at least one person working in all of the different areas of philosophy, then don't accept an editorial position. You're not qualified!
(1) is also unacceptable, but I don't want to blame the referees for not doing their work. (What follows is also a point raised by Manuel that I'd like to strengthen a bit.) It's incumbent upon the managing editor to maintain contact with referees to see how things are progressing. If things aren't going well with the referee (or the referee is non-responsive), then the editor should find another person who is capable of reviewing the manuscript. In such a case authors should be informed of the switch in referees and the likely delay.
Posted by: anonymous 5-12 | May 12, 2009 at 11:07 AM
I sent a post on this thread earlier, but it seems not to have been processed. To repeat some of it:
I'd suggest to your colleague that he/she contact the journal editor and ask when a decision can be expected. Since the journal is already beyond its own stated deadline, I don't think such a query is at all out of line.
The Mele Principle seems to me more than what is required. Myself, I pay attention to the deadline given by the journal editor and I meet it. I'd be happy if everyone did the same (though of course I'm pleased that some people do much better).
Posted by: R. Clarke | May 12, 2009 at 12:01 PM
Like Randy, my post has been eaten. Several things briefly. 1.Abiding by the Mele principle (or similar) will prove helpful to referees: it's an anti-procrastination device. 2. Though if Manuel run the world, we would treat 7 months at a respectable journal as sunk costs, Manuel doesn't (is that a bad thing? Not sure). In most circumstances, I would treat the 7 months as an investment and not pull. My record at a respectable journal is 4 years...
I oppose financial incentives. A better system would be along the lines that Manuel (IIRC) suggested at Splintered Mind: punishment for referees who do not submit timely reports. If journals shared information, we could blacklist (for, say, 18 months) anyone who did not review at all, or who was tardy.
Posted by: Neil | May 12, 2009 at 04:47 PM
Actually, my policy is to only agree to review a paper if I've already written the review. That is: upon receiving an invitation to review a paper, then either decline immediately or attempt to write a review immediately (at least, within a few days). If I write the review within a few days, accept the invitation and send the review. If I don't write the review within a few days, decline the invitation.
This has the big advantage that it avoids making commitments that one may end up unable to keep. In my previous experience, the reviews that I couldn't get done right away were precisely the ones that would drag on. A consequence is that I say no to most requests, but those that I do accept get done fast (with the exceptions below).
There are a few bugs in the policy. It works only if the journal sends the paper with the invitation, or makes it available online (though of course one can always reply asking to see the paper before accepting the invitation). In some cases I'll accept an invitation out of a sense of responsibility, even when a review doesn't get done in the first few days -- and then, sometimes, irresponsibility ensues. (There must be some sort of moral for the topics of this blog here.) The biggest problem is the case of resubmissions which one refereed the first time around, and which the author has revised in response. Then it seems wrong to decline, but now there's the potential for irresponsibility again. So it's not a perfect policy. But still, it's one that people might think about adopting.
All this being said, a contrarian thought is that there are certain systematic benefits to having a slow review process, in virtue of increasing barriers to submission and resubmission. If the review process were instant, the number of journal submissions might well multiply by a factor of ten or more. If the review process were twice as fast as it is now, the number of journal submissions would certainly increase significantly. Given that the pool of reviewers already seems to be overstretched, this situation might be untenable, at least without other significant changes to the system. So one (depressing) hypothesis is that the current situation, however bad, is nevertheless a sort of equilibrium point.
Posted by: djc | May 12, 2009 at 06:01 PM
Still . . . I haven't heard many folks say what they think a reasonable pull window is. I'm very confident that 4 years is a completely unreasonable time to wait.
And for the record, because I've had a couple of people ask me which journals I've had a bad experience with, I'm really not asking about my own case. I do, however, think these are issues that we should be talking about, and the kind of thing that will only change if we keep harping on why the current default norms in the discipline are decidedly sub-optimal.
Neil-
On the sunk cost point: I think the situation is in flux right now. With PPR and Nous radically speeding up their referee procedures, these provide high profile alternatives to nearly any laggardly review process anywhere. And, there are a number of respectable journals whose mean times are not so bad, depending on the field and so on. So, if one is looking at pulling a paper and PPR, Nous, PhilImprint, and so on haven't been tried, then I think today's authors have some options that might weigh in favor of a pull somewhere in the 6-9 month window, especially if one is early career and can't wait this out in the same way as us tenured folk. So, it does depend on the particulars of the author's case, I think.
Thanks Doug- that's a great idea I'll pass on. I'd forgotten about your wiki.
Thanks anon5/12. You sound like exactly the sort of editor we need more of.
Randy- Thanks for the reply. You are right, surely, that at most a referee is bound by the rules provided by the journal for timely referee reports. But I was thinking of the Mele Principle as a norm that we would do well to adopt for various reasons, including defeating the corrosive effects of procrastination, as Neil noted.
Posted by: Manuel Vargas | May 12, 2009 at 06:05 PM
No doubt one factor here is that many traditional print journal response times seem "i-Phony" by comparison with e-journals, blogs, and the like that sometimes provide near-instantaneous feedback to submissions and posts. They seem so 20th century. And they are. We are in a period of transition from those old purely snail mail print methods of peer review to a combination email/physical page-print methodolgy that still contains some of the pacing of the older school with methods of communication of the newer school. The schedule of review from the old days--weeks and some months instead of days--is a hold-over obviously. But are there outliers? Yes--the journal that does not get back to a writer in a year is clearly out of touch. (On the other hand recently Analysis went from submission to publishing a co-authored work of mine in less than five months! Anyone would call that efficient, as you said Manuel.) We do need to get more efficient as a profession. No doubt that would be hella good.
But, from experience I would still urge some slack from top journals in terms of time. Why? Because they are pounded with submissions, and lots of good ones. And do they have a surfeit of great refs? No--they have to depend sometimes on people like me. Am I a genius ref with lots of expendable time to comment on a very good paper? No and no. But I am good ref, and sometimes I need three or four weeks to think about, ponder on, research and criticize what is very good work, but I know I am called on to determine if it is first-rate, closely-argued work, or just a near-miss wanna-be. And making that call in certain cases is time-consuming. I want some time to do that. However, I also balance that with the fact that if I take that time, then I need to show through comments that that was necessary. So I would argue that especially at the top levels of journals, where one can't always depend on just the Al Meles, who are exceptionally good and quick but relatively few, but sometimes just the Al Whites, who are good enough and more plentiful but more tedious to deal with in terms of workload and schedule, that editors have to exercise patience to a reasonable extent.
BTW I love Dave Chalmers' strategy.
Posted by: Alan | May 12, 2009 at 08:21 PM
No slack!
I know people are looking for suggestions for rules as to when to pull a piece. The number has got to be less than 4 years. Why? I don't know, ask Manuel. I agree with him that his proposal was quite reasonable. The number has to be greater than 7 months. Why? Because my experience tells me that I'm lucky to get something back from a good journal in 7 months.
Here's my newly devised rule: pull your article at 20 months unless there's some special reason not to do so.
Here's a rationale for adopting this rule. Experience tells me that the typical response time for an article at a good journal is in the neighborhood of 10 months. If I pull before 10, I'm pulling when for all I know the journal will do better than I should have expected given my past experience. If I pull at 10, I can expect another 10 at the next place so I shouldn't expect that by pulling I'd be doing myself any favors. (I might annoy an editor and a referee who I'm guessing often knows full well whose paper it is that they aren't refereeing.) If I pull between 10-20, I'm shooting myself in the foot because it seems that it is more likely that you'll get a response in the interval between 10-20 months than you would in the interval between 1-10 months at the new journal. (Bonus: it can't hurt your chances that the editor and referee will feel sort of bad for stringing you along.) Why stop at 20? You have to stop somewhere before 48 and 20 is a round number. Better just adopt a good looking rule and stick with it than worry whether there's some rule between the 20 and 48 month rule that is slightly better.
Posted by: Clayton | May 12, 2009 at 08:57 PM
John Perry has also weighed in on the reasons for tardiness of reviewers:
The rest can be read here -- enjoy :P: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/light/perfectionism.php
Posted by: Cihan Baran | May 13, 2009 at 12:39 AM
For every Alan who lets the ideas of a paper percolate for weeks, I'd bet there are at least 50 referees who complete the review in 1-2 days. The only question is when those 1-2 days occur. Deadlines can make them come a lot earlier.
So one obvious step in the right direction is for every philosophy journal to adopt the PPR/Nous policy of asking reviewers to complete the review in one month. Then add Neil's policy of alerting them after the deadline, giving them a week, and then cutting them off. Most philosophers will feel bad about accepting a task and not completing it. It's the knowledge that you'll eventually complete the task that keeps the procrastination going. In reviews, just like life, deadlines are crucial. (If one month is too short in some cases, make it two months like Mind is doing these days. But no matter what, have a deadline.)
Also, it seems like a good managing editor can make a big difference. I recently had a traumatic experience at Ethics in terms of the final result. But as soon as Catherine Galko took over as ME, my emails were returned promptly with details about the status of the submission and a moderately strung out review process was completed quickly. It's a huge thing psychologically for authors to know that there is someone at the journal on top of our situation, even if in the end (sigh) the verdict isn't what we hoped it would be.
Posted by: Tamler Sommers | May 13, 2009 at 06:16 AM
I think Tamler's suggestion about the PPR/Nous policy is right on. Does anyone know if other journals have similar policies? It seems to me a quite reasonable timetable, both for referees and for authors. It gives referees a reasonable amount of time to complete the task, and it allows authors to hear back within two months or so. Indeed, this seems to me ideal.
Posted by: Justin A. Capes | May 13, 2009 at 07:29 AM
I also think that Tamler's suggestion about setting a deadline for referees, reminding them as soon as the deadline has past, and cutting them off a week after that is exactly what's needed. I also concur with her point about the need for having a good managing editor at the helm. I'm amazed that, at some very prestigious journals, I get a very slow response to an email (in some cases, many weeks later and only after a friendly reminder) or no response at all. I had a journal take six months without so much as acknowledging receipt of the paper. I sent one email a few weeks after submitting it asking for acknowledgment of its receipt but received no reply. I then sent another email after six months. And again I received no reply. Then two months after that, it was accepted. I was told that it would appear quite soon because it was a short discussion piece, but again a year has gone by and I can't get anyone from the journal to acknowledge receipt of the final version or to tell me when I might receive proofs. The problem, then, lies not so much with reviewers (each journal has the same potential pool of reviewers) but with the staff at the journal and their courtesy, efficiency, and competency. Clearly, some journals are better at selecting and managing reviewers. We need to effect change by submitting and refereeing only for those journals that are managed competently.
Posted by: Doug Portmore | May 13, 2009 at 03:48 PM
I'd like to thank Doug for her support.
Posted by: Tamler Sommers | May 13, 2009 at 04:10 PM
Sorry about that Tamler. --Doug
Posted by: Doug Portmore | May 13, 2009 at 05:04 PM
Don't worry Doug; I'm pretty sure Tamler doesn't blame you.
Posted by: Kevin Timpe | May 13, 2009 at 05:11 PM
Journals don't have websites that you can just log into and track the status of a submission?!
Seems rather absurd. Something like that would help them internally keep track of things as well. I'm at a loss to guess why something like that isn't already in place (this is the year 2009 after all).
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | May 13, 2009 at 05:15 PM
Here is my own longest-wait horror story, though it does have a happy ending (or I think it will, sometime soon).
Here's the timeline:
~June 2005, an interesting paper by philosopher 1 comes out in journal A
~July 2005, I write an article largely responding to 1's paper in journal A
~1 August 2005, I send the article to journal A
~1 November 2005, my article is rejected by journal A
~November and December 2005, I revise the article in light of journal A's comments
~31 January 2006, I send the article to journal B
~25 March 2006, a referee for journal B recommends against publishing the article in journal B because the article was part of an "intricate debate" and would only be understood by "a well-briefed audience" (perhaps, say, the readers of a philosophy journal such as B!)
~27 March 2006, I ask the editor for journal B to reconsider the article for publication with another referee
~31 March 2006, the editor for journal B agrees, indicating a new decision date of 5 August 2006
~May 2006, I referee an article for journal B (within 4 weeks)
~5 August 2006, nothing
~8 August 2006, I inquire of journal B about status of paper and is promised information soon
~September 2006, I refere another article for journal B (also within 4 weeks)
~12 October 2006, I again inquire of journal B about status of paper and am promised information soon
~15 October 2006, I am informed by journal B that only 1 referee's report has been received on article in question
~29 June 2007, I again inquire of journal B about status of paper; no response
~13 July 2007, I again inquire of journal B about status of paper, indicating intention to withdrawl submission from journal B if he doesn't hear from B shortly
~24 July 2007, I am informed by journal B that my paper will be published in their journal
~Nov 2008, I complete the page proofs for the article
Granted, I still haven't seen the article in print; but in this case not-pulling the article from journal B (no, not Mind) seemed like the right thing to do. Though perhaps not; at this point, I've almost lost interest in it.
Posted by: Kevin Timpe | May 13, 2009 at 05:30 PM
Kevin's right, Doug. And even if I did believe in blaming people, the I'm long past taking offense at any confusion about my name.
Posted by: Tamler Sommers | May 13, 2009 at 06:08 PM
Mark-
Journals vary about the degree to which they are online. Many are (Springer journals are pretty good about this), but others aren't, or the extent to which they are electronic doesn't include information about where in the editorial process things are.
For journals not owned by a big corporation, I suspect there are some cost and know-how issues that have precluded being fully online about the status of submissions. But that means a lot of good journals aren't yet fully electronic (e.g., JPhil, Phil Review, PPQ (I think?), Ethics, PPA, etc.).
Re: David's point about us perhaps being at an equilibrium stage. I don't see how improving the speed of refereeing would create that many more submissions. At least in my case, I can't imagine that referee speed would make a difference for how much I produce and submit, except that I could submit a previously rejected article to another journal in less time. For better or for worse, then amount I produce is fixed by factors that have virtually nothing to do with referee speed, and I can't imagine why reviewing time would make a difference. But maybe I'm missing something.
Posted by: Manuel Vargas | May 13, 2009 at 06:29 PM
Very interesting...
My thought is that it is better for everyone if the processes are transparent. Moreover, it is better for everyone if the cutting edge work gets published quickly.
Who knows. If my work life ever settles down I think it might be fun to create a low-cost solution for the peer-review journals to help administrate the backend process and provide transparency to the authors.
Posted by: Mark Smeltzer | May 14, 2009 at 06:10 PM
I just now found out that I was "called out." I was away helping my father during his recovery from surgery. I'm happy to see that you got along just fine without me. Now back to that article that I recently agreed to referee.
Posted by: Al Mele | May 15, 2009 at 10:11 AM
This thread may go unread now, but I just wanted to report an experience I just had with submitting a paper to a relatively prestigious science journal. I emailed the paper on Sunday; it is now Tuesday and I have a detailed set of helpful comments in front of me. Obviously, philosophers are too dumb to do this kind of thing, but still...
Posted by: Neil | June 01, 2009 at 05:29 PM
I would like to second Mark Schroeder, who says “I will never in my life submit a paper to JPhil again” (on Leiter Reports, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/nous-ppr-not-accepting-submissions-until-october-1-2009.html#comments ) The day after tomorrow will be a whole month since I submitted a “comments and criticism” piece to the Journal of Philosophy, without the journal even acknowledging receipt. They also do not reply to my emails (one sent to the managing editor, one sent to one of my acquaintances from the editorial board). Why they behave like this I have no idea, but I find it part of the minimal courtesy required by the notion of a civilized, international, and professional journal to acknowledge receipt. And it does not require any effort at all, except an automated message, of the form “dear author, we acknowledge the receipt of your manuscript, bla bla…”. That’s why if they send me an acknowledgment email now, it does not change anything in what any reasonable person’s opinion is about this case. They should have done it in 3 days, or 7, or 14 at most! If they send it now, it’s ridiculous.
As I was born and raised in a Communist country, Romania, this kind of bad manners don’t surprise me, in general, because they were, and still are, unfortunately, part of the authoritarian mentality, where the public servant, for instance, is neither public (you need someone who knows him/her if you want anything that is your right to receive), nor a servant (unaccountable, with a superiority complex, etc.). But why does such behavior occur in a journal like this? And what am I supposed to do? Send the paper to some other journal? It looks as though the general rule is that paper should not be under consideration elsewhere. Tell J. Phil first that I pull the paper out? There is complete silence at their end. Just wait? It’s outrageous and humiliating!
It is the journals who should serve the authors and the readers, and not the other way round (if the journal is unable to serve its public and its authors, it should go out of existence, just like any other company, for-profit or not), but it looks as though this is very hard to for both journals and authors (who keep silent about such things, and do not make them public) to admit and act on it.
Posted by: István Aranyosi | June 11, 2009 at 08:20 AM