Reviewing for Journals with Article Processing Charges

[Kron3007]

Just waving a tiny finger out of the ocean that is humanities scholarship to say that all these tight deadlines and swift review-to-publication standards don't make so much never-mind to my 13th c. documents, which are pretty much going to stay quietly in their libraries and archives and not do much in six weeks.

The trouble is when the science-y protocols for publishing start leaking into humanities publishing, where (as I probably have mentioned a few times before) no-one gets the kind of money or has the kind of time constrictions the sciences have to pay subventions or pressure editors.

I'd like to have as much publication pressure on my work as the physics guys I worked for awhile back did; they turned an R-n-R around in a week so they wouldn't be scooped by that lab on the other coast that they knew was hot on their tails.

And some of the ways of working that I learned from them were helpful when I tried applying them to my own stuff: I started looking for ways to collaborate, sought out more "case-study-like" topics that would stand up to conversational exploration, and tried developing more tightly-formulated bibliographies from the online sources the science folks were starting to use (since I had to do all their .pdf entries I knew how to do my own).

But the scale of financing and level of collegial exchange in the humanities, while more informed by these things in the past couple decades, remains tiny.

Maybe it's because we really aren't intellectuals, after all...(interthreadual allusion)

M.

We generally turn in our revisions within a week, unless it requires substantial work (ie extra experiments).  Humanities is a completely different world from what I know (which isn't much).

[Hibush]

I find editors are not usually very good at making final decisions where there are mixed reviews or disagreements with reviewers. 

No kidding! The best editors exercise editorial judgement boldly and make clear editorial decisions. As author, you may not agree, but at least you know what to do.

One of the best editors I've experienced had a heavy hand. Trained in postwar Germany, at one of the classic universities, in the German hierarchical structure. Your inferences based on that archetype will be valid. An excellent and widely interested scientist, he could tell whether the author or the critical reviewer was right and would tell you straight up what was needed to make the paper rigorous enough for his journal. But not immune from spells of pigheadedness.

The worst editor I experienced refused to make the call when two reviewers made mutually exclusive recommendations, and just said "address their comments in detail."

[Kron3007]

I find editors are not usually very good at making final decisions where there are mixed reviews or disagreements with reviewers. 

No kidding! The best editors exercise editorial judgement boldly and make clear editorial decisions. As author, you may not agree, but at least you know what to do.

One of the best editors I've experienced had a heavy hand. Trained in postwar Germany, at one of the classic universities, in the German hierarchical structure. Your inferences based on that archetype will be valid. An excellent and widely interested scientist, he could tell whether the author or the critical reviewer was right and would tell you straight up what was needed to make the paper rigorous enough for his journal. But not immune from spells of pigheadedness.

The worst editor I experienced refused to make the call when two reviewers made mutually exclusive recommendations, and just said "address their comments in detail."

Yeah, I had to withdraw a paper because of this type of issue.  They would recommend revision, then when we submitted them the reviewers would ask us to change it back.  It seemed like it was the same reviewer, but it is blind so it could have been different people.  We ended up submitting elsewhere and going through a fairly smooth process.

I would much rather have an editor tell me no than let it drag out like that. It was no good for us or the reviewer.