Something I probably should not have read

[ritaxis]

It's clearly a different pubblishing milieu, but this post at the Cranky Editors community is one of the most depressing things I've ever read.

Quote: "Having your paper accepted nearly a year ago does not constitute any sort of emergency on my part nor does it mean I should give a rat's ass."

So, the person writes a paper, submits it to the journal, gets an acceptance letter, and then? A year later, the author's not supposed to care?

I imagine this must be in a non-timely field, but ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Do editors in other fields feel proportionately similarly about their writers?

I must immediately think about something else. Not, however, leftover Halloween candies that happen to also be lucky New Year candies, okay?

on other fronts: I'm not doing Nano, am I, because I started working on Bella and Chain months ago? And also I don't care how long it takes me to finish it, except that I want to be done soon so I can write more stuff.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Argh, indeed.

There is no such thing as a non-timely field. Journal papers are very significant to people's academic careers, and those do tend to be cases where timeliness matters. And, beyond that, academic publications form a conversation, and it's hard to have a conversation with year-long lead times.

I will say that my wife, in her capacity as an online-content editor at an academic journal, doesn't feel similarly about even her really annoying authors. Sure, there's the occasional one who gets upset because they didn't pay attention when they signed the form to let their article be posted as a preprint version prior to their chance to look over the page proofs, but she's also talked about going to lots of effort to make sure that authors get the proper recognition to be able to count the article as "published" on their resume, and (since she deals with these as online content, where she can change it immediately) she does usually treat this stuff as a mild emergency, including staying late if that's what it needs.

Incidentally, in my field, it's traditional for journals to print, in small print under the article title and authors, a received-on date for both the original manuscript and the revised manuscript after peer-review, and the printed-online date. This makes it trivially easy to tell which journals have absurd lead times and which don't.

[ellarien]

As an author of academic papers, I was rather appalled by that one, too -- both by the idea of a journal running that far behind, and by the poster's attitude. Careers and funding do rather depend on getting things published, after all. Fortunately, the journals in my own field are rather better organized.

[(Anonymous)]

Do editors in other fields feel proportionately similarly about their writers?

Well, there is a certain anthology LDV, edited by a certain HE...

- Captain Button

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, there is a certain anthology LDV, edited by a certain HE...


Okay, I hope you're being obscure here because otherwise I'm being stupid.

And lj is no longer notifying me of replies, so I have to go back and see if I have any others.

I've been meaning to ask you for years -0- where did you go to high school?

[(Anonymous)]

Harlan Ellison edited two anthologies "Dangerous Visions" and "Again, Dangerous Visions" in the late 1960s/early 1970s. He started work on a third, "Last Dangerous Visions", but it has never appeared, despite numerous announcements of progress and imminent release. He reportedly was quite unpleasant about the topic when a former submitter Christopher Priest detailed the history of LDV in a book published and posted online.

This became a standard flamewar topic. That is why I was being obscure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Visions

I went to high school at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson, New York, from 1974 to 1977. But I had not acquired the nickname "Captain Button", that happened in 1985.

http://www.portjeff.k12.ny.us/schools/earl.asp

- Captain Button