In the Dark

Quite a few people have contacted me to ask about the Peer Review Process at the Open Journal of Astrophysics so I thought I’d do a quick post here to explain a bit about it here.

When a paper is submitted it is up to the Editor-in-Chief – that’s me! – to assign it to a member of the Editorial Board. Who that is depends on the topic of the paper and on the current availability due to workload. I of course take on some papers myself. I also reject some papers without further Peer Review if they clearer don’t meet  the journal’s criteria of scientific quality, originality, relevance and comprehensibility. I usually run such papers past the Editorial Board before doing such a ‘Desk Reject’.

Once the paper has been assigned, the Editor takes control of the process, inviting referees (usually two) to comment and make recommendations. This is the rate-determining step, as potential referees are often busy. It can take as many as ten declined invitations before we get a referee to agree. Once accepted, a referee is asked to provide a report within three weeks. Sometimes they are quicker than that, sometimes they take longer. It depends on many factors, including the length of the manuscript.

Once all the referee reports are in the Editor can make a decision. Some papers are rejected upon refereeing, and some are accepted with only tiny changes. The most frequent decision is “Revise and Resubmit” – authors are requested to make changes in response to the referee comments. Sometimes these are minor, sometimes they are substantial. We never give a deadline for resubmission.

A resubmitted paper is usually sent to the same referee(s) who reviewed the original. The referees may be satisfied and recommend acceptance, or we go around again.

Once a paper is accepted, the authors are instructed to upload the final, accepted, version to arXiv. It normally takes a day or two to be announced. The article is then passed over from the Peer Review process to the Publication process. As Managing Editor, I make the overlay and prepare the metadata for the final version. This is usually done the same day as the final version appears on arXiv, but sometimes it takes a bit longer to put everything in order. It’s never more than a few days though.

Anyway, here are some “analytics” – it’s weird how anything that includes any quantitative information is called analytics these days to make it sound more sophisticated than it actually is – provided by the Scholastica platform:

These numbers need a little explanation.

The “average days to a decision” figure includes desk rejects as well as all submissions and resubmissions. Suppose a paper is submitted and it then takes 4 weeks to get referee reports and for the Editor to make a “Revise and Resubmit” request. That would count as 28 days. It might take the authors three months to make their revisions and resubmit the paper, but that does not count in the calculation of the “average days to decision” as during that period the manuscript is deemed to be inactive. If the revised version is accepted almost immediately, say after 2 days, then the average days to decision would be (28+2)/2 = 15 days. Also, being an average there are some shorter than 14 days and some much longer.

The acceptance rate is the percentage of papers eventually accepted (even after revision). The figure for ‘total submissions’ includes resubmissions, so the hypothetical paper in the preceding paragraph would add 2 to this total. That accounts for why the total number of papers accepted is not 50% of 388, which is 194; the actual figure is lower, at 105.

Finally, the number of manuscripts “in progress” is currently 23. That includes papers currently going through the peer review process. It does not include papers which are back with the authors for revisions (although it would be reasonable to count those as in progress in some sense).

There we are. I hope this clarifies the situation.