It allows the journal to do less work and increase their margins. If they can shift as much of the preliminary work as they can to the author, then why wouldn't they? They have plenty of submissions to choose from, so it is no loss if an author does not want to comply. Steve
On Jul 23, 2015, at 9:13 AM, David Duffy <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I have noticed (albeit a small sample size) recently that several on-line journals have rigid, time consuming and picky processes for paper submission. To submit a paper, one is required to format for publication in an idiosyncratic style, one that is not necessarily shared by other journals. This would be fine after acceptance but it is a tremendous waste of time beforehand. Second the submitting formats are rigid. If one can't give the desired responses one can't move forward. One admission process required taxon identification but didn't include the avian order I was concerned with. Another placed Hawaii in Polynesia, not the US. There may be cogent arguments for this but a journal submission should not be an exercise in geopolitical tiddlywinks. Several require email addresses for all authors, not so subtly discriminating against folks in developing countries that might not have easy or stable access to the Internet. Others require one to sign off concerning a wide range of compliance and conflict of interest concerns that may or may not apply. Some submission processes seem to work only with specific browsers but the editors either don't know this or don't see it necessary to tell one that they are still locked into Windows 7. Finally some allow you to save and return but others don't. The last is especially sadistic. How much of this information is truly necessary when deciding whether to send a paper out for review, assuming sending out for reviewing really happens? An ethical approach for electronic journal submission would be to allow submissions in some simplified format: title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, acknowledgments, literature cited. If the paper is accepted, bring on the compliance and conflict of interest assurances, literature (or reference) cited formats, unit abbreviations, use of parentheses and so on. If all these data are truly necessary up front, perhaps a measure of an on-line journal's quality might be whether it actually knows how to handle things on-line. If not, in ten years, one's paper may well vanish into the cloud along with the journal. I would welcome replies from journal editors if they feel I am being unfair. -- David Duffy ??? (D?i D?w?i) Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit Botany University of Hawaii 3190 Maile Way Honolulu Hawaii 96822 USA 1-808-956-8218<tel:1-808-956-8218>
