Academic publishing: A trickle-down theory and other ways to streamline the process
"Water drop animation" by Gmaxwell (licensed by Creative Commons)
We’ve discussed some of the difficulties with getting publishing before, which was mostly me extrapolating from my personal experiences. An article titled “The Back-Up Plan” from Inside Higher Ed last week proposed an interesting solution to making turnaround in the editorial process quicker, so that you don’t end up in an experience like mine where I had a proposal for a piece going back-and-forth with various editors and project proposers for a year-and-a-half only to end up with nothing.
Enter “The Back-Up Plan”: According to the article, the American Economic Association has set up a process whereby submitters can opt in to a plan where their essays can be automatically submitted to another “back up” journal if it is not accepted by the group’s top publication, American Economic Review. The idea is that readers’ reports would be passed along to the secondary journal, which is supposed to speed up review of the proposed article. Now you might argue, as some in the comment threads do, that resubmitting an essay using unfavorable readers’ reports is a kamikaze mission times two, but the choice of doing so is up to the writer. And apparently, most of the submissions going through this process are borderline cuts that were well-received–just not so much to be included in the assocation’s #1 publication.
More about the “back-up plan”, below the fold…
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