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April 12, 2005

Journal Selection

I spent some time today thinking about where I should send a paper that I have nearly finished. This discussion over at the Leiter Reports was helpful, even though it is no simple matter to form sensible beliefs about journals based on it. I think I have learned what people consider to be a reasonable time to wait for a response from a journal (three months is good,) the kinds of problems people have with journals (extended response time, unhelpful reports from referees, disrespectful editors and referees) and I have a better feel for which journals are thought of as "the best" and which count as "second tier."

My tenure clock has only just started to tick, and I like the paper, so my plan is to send it to a top journal. But in checking out the websites of a few journals I was surprised to find that several of them do not accept electronic submissions:

To an outsider this seems strange. I thought the editor simply wanted to email the paper to referees. It is faster and cheaper than posting it and it is what has happened both times I've refereed papers. (Yes, quake in your stylish yet affordable boots, AJP and CJP authors, they let a young punk like me write reports on your work.)

It isn't very likely that the editors are not computer-minded; doesn't publishing a journal involve a lot of messing around with computer files and, well, possibly Quark or InDesign or LaTeX? (Am I being hopelessly naive about what publishing a journal involves?)

Incidentally, I think I'm going with PPR, (at least, it was their address I wrote on the strangely concrete envelope that I bought from the bookstore this afternoon) because, well, (only slightly embarrassed) I kind of want to publish in the same journal as Tarski...

Decisions are funny things.

Posted by logican at April 12, 2005 11:46 PM

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Comments

It's not only philosophy journals that behave oddly in the presence of technology. A few years ago I submitted a paper to a philosophy conference which was accepted. We authors were asked to BRING (not send) our final, revised papers to the conference registration in e-format (ie, on a floppy disk). These e-versions then re-appeared TWO YEARS LATER as the conference CD-ROM.

In Computer Science, two years later would have been another generation of hardware! For us, it is standard for hard-copy and e-copy proceedings to be available at conference registration. Of course, to achieve this, accepted papers have to be finalized sometime before the conference -- perhaps all of 2 or 3 months beforehand. Can't see why this would be a problem for philosophers.

Posted by: Peter McBurney at April 13, 2005 11:56 AM

In my experience (personal and anecdotal), PPR tends to take at least 7-8 months to referee a paper. (That's still not bad comparatively speaking, but being average among a bad lot isn't much of a distinction, is it?). So start pestering them with emails once 3-4 months have gone by. As for software, the Springer journals (formerly Kluwer) are happy with LaTeX (Kluwer even had its own .sty file); most others accept .tex files only grudgingly, or not at all.

Posted by: pekka at April 13, 2005 12:58 PM

I too had good experiences with submitting LaTeX to Kluwer/Springer (and the experience as a referee is just as good). Elsevier, too (SHPS A,B,C) will accept LaTeX, though a little less smoothly. On the other hand, BJPS explicitly says that they will take LaTeX for accepted papers (after requiring 3 (!) paper copies to submit), and that they have their own style files: but 4 months after I requested them I got the reply: 'please submit in Word'. This may have been due to complications with the editorial changeover, but still...

Posted by: ant at April 14, 2005 08:09 AM

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