Thursday, April 7, 2011

Today's Entry in the Annals of Unresponsive Academic Journals

I received the following sardonic comment on one of the philosophic mailing lists I'm subscribed to which caters to the academic community:

List members,

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of one of my papers being submitted to the Journal of Global Ethics. As I have not received any feedback on the content of my paper as yet, I have been prompted to mark the occasion with a lunchtime discussion of the question:

'What are the responsibilities of editors in relation to peer review?'

Findings will be fed back to the lead editor of the journal in question.

I hope that some of you will be able to join us.


Year-long waits for responses regarding articles submitted for review are, unfortunately, not unheard of, though normally they're from more prestigious journals who perhaps feel more like they could afford to string authors along. What I'm saying is that the Journal of Global Ethics isn't quite the Journal of Philosophy. It's not like JPhil have an excuse, it's more that you wouldn't expect the same thoughtless neglect from a journal without the same air of exclusivity.

Today that post received this reply:

List members,
A propos of the delay in responding to a submitted manuscript as remarked by colleague from Newcastle, on 9th September 2010 I sent a bank draft to the Journal of Global Ethics in response to their prompting for me to renew my subscriptons, and I received no acknowledgement of receipt of the bank draft up through seven months later in April 2011.  Meanwhile I have not received any of the issues of the journal in 2010 for the period of the paid-for renewal, so I couldn't send manuscripts for peer-review on the current topics in the first instance.
Can anyone give me contact numbers or addresses for people currently responsible for JGE's admin and management, to see what can I can do?  In this part of the world 70 dollars plus the cost of the bank draft, 25 dollars, is a great deal of money. Such negligence is ironic given the title of the journal, eh what?

That list member is posting from the University of Ghana. Global Ethics, indeed.


UPDATE: One of the ex-editors of the journal has stepped in and done her best to address the issues named above, which is commendable both because it isn't her job anymore and also because she actually is on vacation. As encouraging as that is, I note that she is the one doing what she can to raise the journal's name out of the mud, and not any of the current editors.

1 comment:

  1. It took a year and a half to get feedback from a paper I sent off- I was told it might take up to 3 months. Apparently something had gone wrong with the system. I guess this kind of thing is pretty common.

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