[AISWorld] More on journal cycle times
Shailendra Palvia
Shailendra.Palvia at liu.edu
Wed Apr 1 10:34:45 EDT 2015
Dear all:
Very well said, Murray. There must be a reward system for reviewers.
Good/great reviewers are hard to find. I have been editing JITCAR (Journal of IT Case and Application Research) since 1999 (with a break for 5 years during 2009-2013).
Reward system can be institutionalized through the university or another institution in which the reviewers work or through the publisher where papers are published.
Sincerely
Dr. Shailendra Palvia
Professor of MIS, College of Management
Long Island University Post, Brookville, NY 11801.
http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty/P/Shailendra-Palvia?rn=Faculty+Profiles&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty
Phone #: 732-983-7034
-----Original Message-----
From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of MurphJen at aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 1, 2015 5:57 AM
To: mmora at securenym.net; aisworld at lists.aisnet.org
Cc: tstaffor at memphis.edu
Subject: Re: [AISWorld] More on journal cycle times
There are flaws in the below logic, yes a good review can be done in a few hours but unfortunately we are all limited by time and what we can focus our attention on. I'm an editor in chief of two journals and I can say that we have more people wanting to submit articles than we have people wanting to review articles. It is simple economics of publish or perish with little to no reward for reviewing. I think I see only occasionally an email that mentions the best reviewer but see many emails on best papers or announcing new issues being published. A few hours seems like a little, but how much time do we spend doing our jobs? Many of us have to teach as well as do research, and of course there is always service. The last several years of poor budgets has raised the teaching and service loads. We do give course reductions as rewards. I have never, ever seen a course reduction given
because of reviewing but do see it frequently for publishing articles.
Also, how many do great reviews? I get new reviewers and many submit simple one paragraph reviews, not helpful to me or the authors. So what do we do?
We punish bad reviewers by not asking them to review and reward good reviewers by giving them more and more reviews. Doesn't work, good reviewers get to the point where they refuse further reviews, many are burned out, and who can blame them? I have seen many complaints on this list about long review times and poor reviews but I have yet to see anyone push changing the publishing economics (yes we do respond to the complaints with this suggestion but then we hear how we just need to work harder and we owe it to authors to get their papers processed).
I agree we need to change the review process, but please, lets quit complaining about the editors and reviewers and instead suggest ways to make the
publishing process manageable and rewarding to all those who make it work.
I am getting a break next year because of being a editor in chief, but I've also been told it won't happen again, I need to publish my own research if I want any more reductions. Guess what, I have several papers stacked up waiting for me to write them and analyze the data, but they are on hold as I service other authors in getting their work published. Please remember next time you want to complain about review times all the editors and reviewers who are volunteering their time to try and make this process work.
If you want to address a large part of the problem lets look at conference reviewing. How many conference announcements do we see? (hundreds) and each one of these conferences has to review their papers and of course most universities don't want to send their faculty to present at a conference that accepts all papers, they want a 50% acceptance rate, so to get that how
many papers do we need to fill in all the tracks, minitracks, and sessions?
ICIS boasts a very low acceptance rate an is such is considered the best, so what happens? We get dozens pre and post conferences around ICIS because again, most of our universities won't send us to a conference unless we have a paper accepted. So how much reviewing time is spent on conference papers? And what is the reward for having a conference paper accepted? For most universities it is very little yet we spend amazing amounts of reviewer resources on these papers.
If you want faster review times for journals fix the conference reviewing issue. That is my best suggestion short of making reviewing a part of tenure and promotion.
Thanks and sorry for the rant....murray jennex
In a message dated 3/31/2015 10:15:55 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, mmora at securenym.net writes:
AIS colleagues:
First of all, I appreciate totally comments from senior researchers who know "the real inside situation" lived in top tier journals in our discipline. I agree with Professor Stafford, who has a vast expertise as EiC of top tier journals on this undesired situation, where it seems there is not an easy solution for this messy academic problem in our discipline.
On plausible feasible solutions, awards for reviewers should be also provided, but it is assumed implicitly for belonging to ERB of top journals. In summary, it seems there is not a near and feasible solution in our discipline, which runs the risks to be a closed system (papers published only for gaining a PhD or a tenure track position or being read mandatory by our graduate students) but rarely transferred to main stakeholders (IT customers, IT users, IT community)). Of course, there are exceptions in our discipline like Communications of the ACM, like one of the best examples of top tier journals. Thanks, more comments are welcome!
Manuel Mora
PS. High quality reviewers should be able to qualify a paper in few hours, like medical experts can establish a critical diagnosis on few ones (even in minutes). Are our papers (in our discipline) so difficult to be understood regarding the research papers in Chemistry, Health Sciences or Biological Sciences?
On Mon, March 30, 2015 9:06 pm, Thomas Stafford (tstaffor) wrote:
> Prof Mora raises interesting issues in his response to my response to
> his well-put points on publication queues :-)
>
>>>> judges for accepting a paper are the reviewers, and they are not
>>>> valued.>>>
>
> I agree. As long as reviewing is considered unimportant by department
> chairs, Deans, and tenure and promotion committees, reviewers are
> going to give first priority to the work that gets them promoted and tenured.
> Who would not? Until we find a solution to this, much else that we
> can do is only a bandaid solution. Incented reviewers are critical to
> the process.
>
> There is a pragmatic yet informal quid pro quo at journals: "those
> who wish to enjoy the peer review services should contribute to the
> peer review services as well." It is not actually stated as a
> requirement, but everybody understands. Not everybody honors it, but
> it is known. However, that still leaves reviewing, which the Dean
> does not view with approval at tenure decision time, as a "last in the queue" work activity.
>
>>>> the effective time for review a paper can be estimated on 2-3
>>>> hours in 2-3 iterations, so the problem is the scheduling of the
>>>> paper assigned by the reviewer, so it is very likely that the
>>>> paper is in stand by for months. This is the process review
>>>> problem. None of us can believe that the review process lasted
>>>> several months because reviewers read the paper all of this
>>>> time.>>>
>
> Well, yes and no. For no, see above: reviewing is a last-in-line
> activity owing to how it is (not) incented by the bodies who decide
> rank and tenure. For yes, we have to question the assumption of time
> to initiation. There is the simple Poisson problem of time to point
> of processing in waiting queues, but these problems are always
> analyzed ceteris paribus. Plainly put, we can't easily assume that a
> reviewer attends immediately to an assignment once received, so even
> if we can optimize the queue to assignment, the wait time for
> processing once assigned also depends on myriad factors. Generally,
> we scholars who regularly review teach our classes and attend our
> committee meetings before we turn to our outside service work. There is a wait time.
>
> But, in all, I still agree with the Professor: it only takes a few
> hours to render a quality evaluation of a paper. The slowdown is in
> the intake/assignment process, if one puts aside the notion that
> reviewers should jump immediately to assignments when received.
>
>>>> Biology, Chemistry, Medicine have faster
>>>> review-acceptance/rejection time frames and they have zero fee
>>>> costs for publishing
>
> Stay tuned. This is exactly where I intend to do my own benchmarking.
> Fortunately, quite fortunately, indeed, I have on my Senior Board a
> credentialed MD who also holds the Ph.D. in operations. He is a
> treasure, since we get lots of healthcare papers. He also edits for
> and publishes in the medical community, and he and I just shared a
> time on the phone talking about these things. The defining factor I
> discern in the fast-as-lighting turnaround times at the preeminent
> medical journals is *professional staff* because publications like
> JAMA and NEJM are run by a professionals who don't have to teach
> classes or publish their own research. Nothing gets work done like paying people to do it, I say.
>
> There is another journal in the Sciences legendary for quick turnaround:
> PLOS, the Public Library of Science. However, it is a business,
> unabashedly. Each accepted article carries a $1300 fee for
> acceptance, and the revenue stream from that supports an operational
> staff of 15 who see to it quite effectively that the trains run on
> time. They do have some technological innovations (amazing what you
> can do with money, isn't it?), which are things that have been in my mind lately, as well.
> Searchable database of reviewer expertise and current assignment
> loads, for example, where you can instantly search out just the right
> set of credentials for reviewing a given paper and then check to see
> if that chosen individual is not already over-assigned or not.
>
> I predict we are at the cusp of a paradigm shift in peer review of
> scholarly research. Emerging business models are worth considering,
> and science-as-business is also a notion not to be dismissed. Most of
> what keeps us alive and healthy in the world of medicine resides in
> some point on the profit motive of somebody somewhere in the medical
> food chain. It results in lightning-fast research reviews for
> publication, though, and that gets my attention.
>
> On the side of constituent pressure for quicker queues to acceptance
> for articles, there is the equally important and increasingly popular
> issue of what I will call "publication bounties." When scholars are
> paid interestingly large amounts of money as a bonus for successful
> publication in premier journals -- well, of course they get anxious
> to find out what has happened with a given submission as quickly as
> possible. Big money is riding on that decision. Yet, it remains that
> the folks upon whom they rely and become increasingly impatient with
> for results are not given bounties for reviewing the work that will
> be subsequently rewarded when published. This is a business
> scholarship issue to think about; we appear to be handsomely
> incentivizing the production of scholarly research, but not its
> review. Marx would have field day with that economic equation.
>
> I am so glad folks are noticing this issue. We won't get anywhere on
> the top-level problem, which is incentivizing reviewers, without
> widespread awareness of the issue at a general level, I think.
>
> Humbly submitted for your further consideration,
>
>
> Tom Stafford
> Editor, Decision Sciences Journal
>
>
>
_______________________________________________
AISWorld mailing list
AISWorld at lists.aisnet.org
_______________________________________________
AISWorld mailing list
AISWorld at lists.aisnet.org
More information about the AISWorld
mailing list