Here’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard so far, within the academic publishing business: deliberately slowing things down by sitting a whole month on each submission
before doing anything with it.
Via Andrew Gelman. Something like this might well be practiced by more journals and in many fields ( and surely I am thinking mostly about my own field here…) than currently known: could explain a substantial part of (complementing the fact that referees are not easy to find and they might be slow themselves, see also
here) the often exaggerated times before one gets back referee reports etc. I think it just shows the incapacity of those editors to function as editors, if that is the case. And obviously excessive crowding/queueing can be solved in this context, similar to many other contexts involving congestion, by raising submission fees (despite the apparent objection of some people, which Gelman also mentions, that people don’t have the money for it– give me a break, I’d say: if you are indeed such an underpaid academic, probably you can’t produce the quality required for that top journal anyway; and for universities in places that really run low on budgets and remuneration in general, like Africa, Eastern Europe etc., some reduction or waiver could be in place).
