[BOAI] The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

[David Solomon]

(Apologies for cross postings)

The following article was recently accepted in Journal of Informetrics.

The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Abstract: Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails
long delays from submission to publication.  In part this is due to the
length of the peer review process and in part because of the dominating
tradition of publication in issues, earlier a necessity of paper-based
publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting in line. The
delays slow the dissemination of scholarship and can provide a significant
burden on the academic careers of authors.

Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in
2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation
index.  The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical
(STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and
business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice
as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay.  Analysis of the
variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time
between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as
compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal.  For the
time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can
be accounted for by differences between specific journals.

You can access it here.

http://tinyurl.com/ms5dk2u
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