Tag Archives: academic publishing

Keeping journals honest about response times

Academic journals in economics commonly take 3-6 months after manuscript submission to send the first response (reject, accept or revise) to the author. The variance of this response time is large both within and across journals. Authors prefer to receive quick responses, even if these are rejections, because then the article can be submitted to the next journal sooner. The quicker an article gets published, the sooner the author can use it to get a raise, a grant or tenure. This creates an incentive for authors to preferentially submit to journals with short response times.
If more articles are submitted to a journal, then the journal has a larger pool of research to select from. If the selection is positively correlated with article quality, then a journal with a larger pool to select from publishes on average higher quality articles. Higher quality raises the prestige of a journal’s editors. So there is an incentive for a journal to claim to have short response times to attract authors. On the other hand, procrastination of the referees and the editors tends to lengthen the actual response times. Many journals publish statistics about their response times on their website, but currently nothing guarantees the journals’ honesty. There are well-known tricks (other than outright lying) to shorten the reported response time, for example considering an article submitted only when it is assigned to an editor, and counting the response time from that point. Assigning to an editor can take over two weeks in my experience.
To keep journals honest, authors who have submitted to a journal should be able to check whether their papers have been correctly included in the statistics. Some authors may be reluctant to have their name and paper title associated with a rejection from a journal. A rejection may be inferred from a paper being included in the submission statistics, but not being published after a few years. A way around this is to report the response time for each manuscript number. Each submission to a journal is already assigned a unique identifier (manuscript number), which does not contain any identifying details of the author. The submitter of a paper is informed of its manuscript number, so can check whether the response time publicly reported for that manuscript number is correct.
Currently, authors can make public claims about the response time they encountered (e.g. on https://www.econjobrumors.com/journals.php), but these claims are hard to check. An author wanting to harm a journal may claim a very long response time. If the authors’ reported response times are mostly truthful, then these provide information about a journal’s actual response time. Symmetrically, if the journals’ reported response times are accurate, then an author’s truthfulness can be statistically tested, with the power of the test depending on the number of articles for which the author reports the response time.

Eliminating for-profit academic publishing

Much has been written about the high profits academic publishers get from the volunteer labour of their referees and editors, and how high subscription costs reduce funds available for actual research. The opinion pieces and blog posts I have seen do not suggest a concrete way to change the system. They only express hope that with more researchers putting their work on the web, the for-profit publishing industry will eventually disappear. I think this disappearance can and should be hastened. The obvious way is to boycott for-profit journals as an author, referee, editor and librarian.
The obvious objection is that one’s career depends on publishing in certain journals that often happen to be for-profit, and that “service to the profession” (refereeing and editing) is one’s duty and also helps the career a bit. A moral counterargument is that while boycotting may impose some personal costs, it benefits other researchers and the increase in research benefits everyone, so as a favour to the rest of humanity, boycott is the right thing. After all, why do people become academic researchers when the private sector pays more?
Game theoretically, the academic system (including publishing) is a coordination game, like many social norms. As long as everyone else conforms to the system, it is costly to depart from it. Thus self-interested people choose to conform to the system. This keeps the system stable. Individual deviations are costly, but a collective (coalitional) deviation may be costless or at least cheaper. An example is the whole editorial board of a for-profit journal deciding to resign and start a nonprofit copy of this journal. They announce publicly that all articles that researchers were planning to submit to the for-profit journal should now be submitted to the nonprofit copy. The refereeing and editing process goes on as before, only the library subscriptions to the new journal are cheaper. There should be no loss of prestige for the editors or loss of publishing opportunity for the authors.
A journal is not complicated – it only requires an online system to let authors upload relatively small text files, let the editors forward these files (with author identity removed) to referees, referees to upload their text files and the editors to forward these (deidentified) files to authors. Such programs surely exist, free and open-source as well.
Perhaps a proofreader could be hired for the journal and paid out of subscription fees. But the total cost of running a journal (with volunteer labour like now) is very low.