Sweet Spot

Those of you who are academics will appreciate this one. The other night, I’m out during our conference crying into glasses of beer with colleagues who’ve had their work stalled by the slowness of a journal’s review process. In one case, somebody said ‘I give up–when I get tenure I’m going to send my work only to online journals, because I just got an article published where the data was collected six years ago!’ The implication was that the slowness of publication in academic peer-reviewed journals relates to the publishing companies. But I’ve even had online journals take forever to review a manuscript. Worst case, a journal strings you along for six months, a year, or even longer, and eventually rejects the manuscript.

So, why not do what our students do to us? Ratemyjournals.com, a new portal for academics to use to review journals themselves, on everything from quality of feedback to speed of reviewing to publication delay…