Peer review and published academic journals have been under scrutiny for the process and frequent delays that result even in the world of online journals, which one would think would be faster. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet’s capacity for widespread distribution of reading material. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Guest Post — Author-Friendly Journal Websites.”
This particular author is asking that journal webpages routinely provide answers to questions about the process in real time. The relevant information is readily available in manuscript management systems commonly used by journal publishers. Some already provide some of this information on their websites. Reports required by scholarly societies provide pertinent data for selected publications, but these documents are not widely known and not easily accessed.
The impact of this on the editorial process appears to be marginal, if at all. What do you think?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
