On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:54:19 +1000, Geoffrey Heard, gheard@SURF.NET.AU, wrote: >The delay in journal publication is overwhelmingly due to the peer reviews, >Ben, not the layout. Most journals I know could be, and are, laid out in a >matter of days in PageMaker or Quark. If complex graphics are involved, it >could take a little longer. > >>Obviously, there will still be a need for high-quality journals >>with staff to do the layout and longer publication times, but in the >>effort to get new ideas out as quickly as possible a 1 month publication >>time would be attractive for alot of people. > >Perhaps, but you'll never get good peer review happening that quickly. The >reviewers need time to mess about in boats, let the ideas swirl around in >the old grey matter a bit. That's the necessary delay. Hey Geoff, I'll go partway in agreeing with you, but only partway. Here's the evidence: I picked up the December 1999 volume of Paleoceanography, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union (not that that matters). At the end of each article it lists the acceptance date, that is the date the manuscript was received in revised form following peer review and officially accepted by the editor. This date may be taken as a de facto beginning of the publication (i.e. page layout, etc.) process. The dates in the Dec. 1999 are: July 20, 1999, June 20, 1999, August 23, 1999, July 20, 1999, August 23, 1999, May 14, 1999, July 1, 1999, July 1, 1999, July 1, 1999, July 20, 1999, July 1, 1999, July 20, 1999, May 9, 1999. Clearly, there's about a five month lag built into the publication process that comes after the text, tables, and graphics are in their final form. As far as peer review delays, those have nothing to do with letting ideas swirl. Most reviewers spend about an hour on a manuscript (as a grad student in training I've gotten down to about 3 hours), but it can easily take a week or two to get to a manuscript. Administrative assistants in editorial offices have assured me that if the review doesn't come back in under a month, that reviewer gets a little X next to their name in the database and never gets another manuscript from that journal again. Ben
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