Highlights from the scientific publishing world in October

2nd Nov 2013

A summary of the key things I have learned this month via Twitter: stings, harrassment and post-publication peer review. You may have noticed that this blog is not updated very often, but that my Twitter feed is updated several (sometimes many) times a day. I have decided to to bring some highlights of this Twitter activity to my blog, so that those of you who (for some strange reason) aren't on Twitter can get the benefit of all the interesting things I learn there every day. Of course, this summary... Read more

(0) comments

How to read journal instructions for authors

10th Jun 2013

Journal editors often complain that few authors seem to read their instructions for authors. But journals don’t make it easy to read these instructions. Every publisher has its own way of displaying the instructions, with differences in the wording for the same thing, in the order in which information is presented and in how the information is split over web pages. I’m going to attempt to bring some order to the chaos by picking out the points that really matter. These are: Subject areas Threshold... Read more

(0) comments

Submission to first decision time

5th Apr 2013

Having written previously about journal acceptance to publication times, it is high time I looked at the other important time that affects publication speed: submission to first decision time. As I explained in the previous post, the time from submission to publication in a peer reviewed journal can be split into three phases, the two discussed previously and here and also the time needed for the authors to revise, which the journal can't control. A survey of submission to first decision times I... Read more

(35) comments