Publishing as process

Academics everywhere seem to have a hate-love relationship with publishing. Each discipline seems to have its own standards and norms, ranging from the "publish or perish" model that emphasizes quantity (prevalent across much of the natural and biomedical sciences) to the heavy emphasis on allegedly "top" journals in philosophy. And academics are often struggling hard to square discipline-specific expectations with institutional demands (variously enforced by Annual Reviews, University Tenure and Promotion Committees, or nation-wide programmes such as Britain's RAE/REF which have caused many academics a sleepless night or two...). Typically, however, we think of publishing in terms of its output -- individual publications, whether they be articles, monographs, edited volumes, special issues etc. An increasingly competitive grant culture encourages such thinking and has coined the rather awful expression 'research deliverable' to refer equally to publications, patents, prototypes etc.

What's missing from the narrow emphasis on publications as 'output', however, is the day-to-day experience of publishing: how to get one's work published (or, as the case may be, how not to get published), how to revise accepted papers for final publication, how to handle proofs (and deadlines), etc. In philosophy, given the often enormous time delays between first submitting a paper and finally seeing it in print (whether in the journal one first submitted to or, more likely, another one) -- and given further that almost all the work is outsourced to authors -- the mechanics of the publishing process can add up to a lot of work and can take up quite a bit of time.

Having published a monograph last year (with a second one in the works right now...), and having been involved in a number of special issues (several of which with an interdisciplinary bent), I've recently started thinking a fair amount about the *process* of publishing -- not just about 'getting published' (as in getting papers accepted), but also about how to handle the mechanics of the publication process in a satisfactory and responsible way. So, over the next few weeks, I hope to contribute a series of posts dealing with some of the perhaps less 'glamorous' aspects of academic writing and publishing.

In order to get a better sense of what people are interested in, are there any aspects that readers would be especially keen to hear about?

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Axel: Great post, and I have an immediate question! :) I have a monograph newly under contract, and I'm wondering what the revision/feedback process on your monograph was like. How many outside readers did you have? Etc.

[Axel Gelfert]

Thanks, Marcus! For my last book ('A Critical Introduction to Testimony', 2014), published by Bloomsbury a year ago, I received two readers' reports, approximately two and a half months after submitting the manuscript. One was quite short, essentially pointing out only a few minor typos and omissions, the other was more detailed, with substantive (though entirely straightforward) comments/suggestions concerning 5 out of the total of 11 chapters. The publisher also obtained short reviews (endorsements for their website) from two senior colleagues, but these were not the same as the peer reviewers (I assume it's standard practice to keep the two groups separate) -- as I found out when I emailed one of them later on. I'll write a longer post on my experiences with book publishing soon...

[Jerry Green]

Great idea! Here's a few off the top of my head thoughts of varying importance and interest:

I'd like to see people's thoughts on picking a venue to submit to, especially in specific areas (e.g. Should I submit to general journal X of quality B+, or more obscure area journal Y of quality A-).

I'm also interested in the norms & etiquette of contacting editors. I've heard about people appealing a decision, or leveraging a long paper into two publications, but I have no idea how I would even go about beginning such a discussion without ticking off the editor.

Also, the R&R process, though there's an older Cocoon post on the topic here: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2013/09/how-to-respond-to-a-revise-resubmit-verdict.html

And there was a post not too long ago about conferences vs. journals. So maybe something about converting a conference paper into a journal article.

And this might be too nuts-and-bolts, but I've always been stumped about citation styles. I usually just use whatever is used by one of the main sources for the present paper, but who knows. I know philosophy as a discipline doesn't use a single style, but is one format more common than others? Should we just not care, given that it'll be addressed in the copy-editing stage anyway?

[Axel Gelfert]

Thanks, JG, for these questions/suggestions -- I hope to address some of them in future posts; I think the process of turning conference papers into publications is especially significant. In particular, I think it works both ways: thinking of a conference paper as (at least potentially) a publication usually gives it more focus and makes for a better conference presentation! -- Regarding citation styles, I don't think this ever matters at the point of submitting an article -- though, of course, changing the citation style to conform with the journal's stylesheet can create considerable work once the paper has been accepted...