Re: patent paper and bepress
Hi Alex, Congratulations and thanks for a very useful report on your experience with BE. I have never read any articles in BE. I hadn't even gone to their website before this. However, I'm a technological dinosaur who still gets hard copies of journals. My RAs barely know what the inside of a library looks like as the first place they turn for any research need is the web. Thus I suspect that e-journals are the wave of the future. I wonder how many people on this list have read an article in a BE journal and how many people have submitted articles. I also have noted a tendency for print journals to both formally and informally move towards the use of e-mail in the refereeing process. This should speed things up, but a lot of the problem is simply conventions. It is my impression that most other disciplines require much faster turn around. I've been dealing with psychology journals a lot recently (submitting and refereeing) and they typically want 1month turn around on referee reports and they consider it scandalous when a report takes more than three months. It happened to me but I suspect I was taxing the methodological acumen of at least some of my referees - - the editor of the journal sent me a profusely apologetic letter because it took them almost 6 months to turn my paper around. As you can imagine I laughed myself silly given the norm in economics. Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? - - Bill Dickens [The DC area one - - not the one with the expert Nobel picks...] William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/12/02 01:40PM Warning: Some shameless self-promotion as well as promotion of bepress.com My most recent paper, Patent Theory versus Patent Law, has just been published by the B.E. journal, Contributions to Economic Analysis Policy. You can find the article and abstract here (abstract is also below) http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol1/iss1/art9/ Contributions is a BE press electronic journal. Here is a report on my experience publishing with them. Like many people I think it is an outrage that referee reports typically take 6 months or even longer. It also drives me nuts when I have to make revisions to a paper that I haven't worked on for a year and need to waste my time refreshing my memory about where the data and code are kept. So I gave the B.E. journals in Economic Analysis and Policy a try and was very impressed. I submitted this paper to them and had two referee reports within 6 weeks and after my revisions were complete had the paper published within a day. Amazingly, *most* of the time from submission to publication was on my clock not on theirs. I also got excellent editorial comments and was able to use their refereeing technology to good advantage. The way the journals work is that with one submission you get simultaneous consideration at four journals ranging in quality and interest. The referee reports come electronically. A very useful feature is that you can anonymously email the referees to clarify any points. I couldn't understand one of my referee's comments, for example, and with a brief email was able to establish that the referee had not realized that a footnote was continued on the next page (either that or it had not printed correctly). I was thus able to solve the problem and easily reassure the editor that I knew what I was talking about - almost impossible to do otherwise. Submitting to the journal can be expensive (when submitting to the journal you agree to write some referee reports for them - also you pay when submitting a revision) on the order of $150 as I recall but was well worth it in my judgment. Key remaining question is whether the journals will be cited by others. The quality of the articles published to date is high and the editors in my experience are very good. Also, they are working hard to promote the journals. My one nagging doubt is whether people may really want a hardcopy. My hope, however, is that these journals take off as they are offering a superior product. Alex AUTHOR: Alexander Tabarrok TITLE: Patent Theory versus Patent Law SUGGESTED CITATION: Tabarrok, Alexander (2002) Patent Theory versus Patent Law, Contributions to Economic Analysis Policy: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 9.
RE: patent paper and bepress
William Dickens: Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? If it's any consolation, these came to me last week on another list: First message: I've tried to deal with this in my [article] in the 1991 issue of [the political science journal]. Followed shortly by: Excuse me, I misspoke: The [article] that I referred to hasn't yet come out -- it is due out in the next issue of [the journal]. Now, that journal is an annual, but even so . . . . Michael Michael E. Etchison Texas Wholesale Power Report MLE Consulting www.mleconsulting.com 1423 Jackson Road Kerrville, TX 78028 (830) 895-4005
Re: patent paper and bepress
In a message dated 10/13/02 10:43:44 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? - - Bill Dickens I seem to recall that during the 1990s turn around at history journals took anywhere from six months to a year. David
Journal response times
Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. I currently work at the American Journal of Sociology and we usually get papers back to authors in less than 90 days, often 60 days. My experience is that top tier journals do better than second or third tier because they often have prestige and staff, which encourage quick reviewer response. Most sociology journals do much worse than AJS. As far as discipline goes, economics and political science is best because their is consensus on what constitutes decent research and you don't have to master every detail of a paper to assess its quality. The worst is mathematics because you really have to understand every symbol in every equation. Humanities are also bad - you don't have to understand every word, but humanities professors are very unresponsive. On another list-serv, I saw one math professor complain that a 5 page research note had spent *years* at one journal. You can get similar complaints from humanities professors. In the middle are engineering, sociolgy, education and other fields. Most journals get stuff back from 3 months to a year and these fields are in-between fast fields like economics and slow pokes like math. Fabio
RE: Journal response times
Fabio Rojas wrote: I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. The following are data from a recent paper by Glenn Ellison of MIT (JPE, October 2002). The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. (The full paper is available for viewing at http://web.mit.edu/gellison/www/jrnem2.pdf ): American Economic Review21.1 Econometrica26.3 Journal of Political Economy20.3 Quarterly Journal of Economics 13.0 Review of Economic Studies 28.8 Canadian Journal of Economics 16.6 Economic Inquiry13.0 Economic Journal18.2 International Economic Review 16.8 Review of Economics and Statistics 18.8 Journal of Applied Econometrics 21.5 Journal of Comparative Economics10.1 Journal of Development Economics17.3 Journal of Econometrics 25.5 Journal of Economic Theory 16.4 Journal of Environmental Ec. Man. 13.1 Journal of International Economics 16.2 Journal of Law and Economics14.8 Journal of Mathematical Economics8.5 Journal of Monetary Economics 16.0 Journal of Public Economics 9.9 Journal of Urban Economics 8.8 RAND Journal of Economics 20.9 Journal of Accounting and Economics 11.5 Journal of Finance 18.6 Journal of Financial Economics 14.8 Alex Dr Alex Robson School of Economics Faculty of Economics and Commerce Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200. AUSTRALIA Ph +61-2-6125-4909 -Original Message- From: fabio guillermo rojas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, 14 October 2002 8:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Journal response times Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. I currently work at the American Journal of Sociology and we usually get papers back to authors in less than 90 days, often 60 days. My experience is that top tier journals do better than second or third tier because they often have prestige and staff, which encourage quick reviewer response. Most sociology journals do much worse than AJS. As far as discipline goes, economics and political science is best because their is consensus on what constitutes decent research and you don't have to master every detail of a paper to assess its quality. The worst is mathematics because you really have to understand every symbol in every equation. Humanities are also bad - you don't have to understand every word, but humanities professors are very unresponsive. On another list-serv, I saw one math professor complain that a 5 page research note had spent *years* at one journal. You can get similar complaints from humanities professors. In the middle are engineering, sociolgy, education and other fields. Most journals get stuff back from 3 months to a year and these fields are in-between fast fields like economics and slow pokes like math. Fabio
Re: (book review)The Case against Government Science
- Original Message - From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] That the expense of cushy jobs for okay scientists was more than offset by the gains from getting only the best scientists to go to Bell Labs, or MIT, or wherever. Pardon my ignorance, but is MIT a private or public institution? (I thought it was public, but that is merely an assumption on my part.) For that matter, would not even private universities have enough direct or indirect government subsidy to blur the lines between government science and private science? Should only corporate science be considered private science? ~Alypius Skinner The review didn't seem to indicate that that was addressed. -jsh --- Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/apr2000/books/ff_govscience.html The Case against Government Science The Economic Laws of Scientific Research Terence Kealey St. Martin's, New York, 1997 382 pp, paper ISBN 0-312-17306-7 Reviewed by Frank Forman Ayn Rand dramatized the case against government funding of science in Atlas Shrugged, but a dramatization is not evidence. The problem is that, according to standard economic theory, research is almost a perfect example of a pure public good, a good that once produced can be consumed by all without any possibility of exclusion by way of property-rights delimitation. Such goods will be underproduced in the market, since the producers can capture only the benefits of the research that they themselves use. Rational citizens, all of them, might very well empower the state to provide for the provision of research and other public goods. Not every citizen would actually benefit from each good so provided, but under a well-designed constitution, each citizen would presumably be better off as a result of constitutionally limited state provision of public goods than without it. This would mean unanimity of agreement-a social contract-and hence no initiation of force. But what about government funding of science? Nearly every scientific paper, it is true, seems to conclude with an appeal for funds for further research, but even so the case for public funding is accepted by nearly everyone except a few ideological extremists. Along comes a bombshell of a book by Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, that argues that government funding of science at best displaces private funding and in fact diverts research into less productive channels. I am surprised that this book has not gotten much more attention from the free-market community. The book is essentially a history of science and its funding, with the number of pages per century increasing up to the present. The author argues that technology drives science, even basic science, just as much as the reverse, which is awfully reminiscent of John Galt and his motor. Kealey describes the work of several engineers and other practical men turned scientists, such as Carnot, Torricelli, Joule, Pasteur, and Mendel. He argues that most new technology comes from old technology. The book is highly instructive on matters of history and greatly entertaining to read. To wit: Laissez-faire works. The historical (and contemporary) evidence is compelling: the freer the markets and the lower the taxes, the richer the country grows. But laissez-faire fails to satisfy certain human needs. It fails the politician, who craves for power; it fails the socialist, who craves to impose equality on others; it fails the businessman, who craves for security; and it fails the anally fixated, who craves for order. It also fails the idle, the greedy, and the sluttish, who crave for a political system that allows them to acquire others' wealth under the due process of law. This dreadful collection of inadequates, therefore, will coalesce on dirigisme, high taxes and a strong state (p. 260). Here are the three Laws of Funding for Civil RD, based upon comparing different countries and across time: 1.. The percentage of national GDP spent increases with national GDP per capita. 2.. Public and private funding displace each other. 3.. Public and private displacements are not equal: public funds displace more than they do themselves provide (p. 245). But it is not just the funds that are displaced; so is their effectiveness, as a rule, from projects that have a promise to become useful to those that only keep scientists busy. Furthermore, many wealthy men generously fund science and are free to choose genuine innovators and not those merely expert in filling out grant applications. Kealey describes many gentleman amateurs, the greatest being Darwin. And he compares the quality of private and public medical research in England during this century in detail, with the advantage going to the former. Kealey also
Re: (book review)The Case against Government Science
In a message dated 10/13/02 11:00:44 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Should only corporate science be considered private science? ~Alypius Skinner For that matter, not all corporate science would be purely private either, since some of it probably gets directly subsidized and some of it indirectly so. I'm sure, for instance, that Archer Daniel Midland (which bills itself as Supermarket to the World but which I think of as Airline to Bob Dole since it used to fly him around the country to campaign for the GOP nomination in 1995 and 1996) does scientific agricultural research, but it also, as I understand it, collects millions of dollars in ethanol subsidies. With the widespread intrusion of the federal government into the lives and business of everyone, it might be fruitful to consider a spectrum of research spanning the gamut from purely private to purely governmental rather than considering just the two extremes. David Levenstam GMU
