cover a whole discipline, especially those run by prestigious
professional associations.
By contrast, most recent start-up journals (in the last thirty
years) have been specialist journals with much more focused
markets and editorial statements of intent. The actual paying
circulation of many new or specialized journals, even those
which have been running for a decade, may be counted in the
tens or at best low hundreds. Commercial publishers have kept
on starting new specialist journals, even since the late 1990s
when the academic market has been shrinking. Some of the cir-
culations for these titles are so low that there is a real risk to the
academics who submit papers – initially that very few people
will ever get sight of the journal. In the longer term there may
be some degree of risk that a small, newish journal may fold
and its materials become even less accessible.
Time lags. Journal publishing is a game of many parts. First
the editors send your paper out to their required number of
referees. These people then sit on it for a certain period before
responding, usually taking six weeks to three months, even for
an efficiently run journal. In many fields responses can drag on
much longer, up to four to six months, because scrupulous
editors have to collect in sufficient comments to make a deci-
sion, which always takes longer than a single reference. Next
the editors have to work though their in-tray of refereed sub-
missions and decide how to respond to your paper in the light
of the comments and scores, which usually takes several weeks,
adding perhaps another month. Once your article is accepted
without further substantive revisions, then it goes into a publi-
cation queue. Time lags from acceptance to publication in jour-
nals are almost always at least 6 months, and probably average
around 12 months. Good journals will also publish their statis-
tics in an annual report, either on their Web site or in the jour-
nal pages itself. Most reputable journals now indicate when
papers were accepted, and some will give details of how long
the editorial process took.
The main trouble is that journal editors and publishers are
often risk-averse people who like to maintain a ‘bank’ of
accepted articles as a safeguard against running out of copy.
Some editors accept many more articles than they can feasibly
publish, and so create a backlog problem. In some pathological
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH◆ 231