Hi Alex, Congratulations and thanks for a very useful report on your experience with BE. I have never read any articles in BE. I hadn't even gone to their website before this. However, I'm a technological dinosaur who still gets hard copies of journals. My RAs barely know what the inside of a library looks like as the first place they turn for any research need is the web. Thus I suspect that e-journals are the wave of the future. I wonder how many people on this list have read an article in a BE journal and how many people have submitted articles. I also have noted a tendency for print journals to both formally and informally move towards the use of e-mail in the refereeing process. This should speed things up, but a lot of the problem is simply conventions. It is my impression that most other disciplines require much faster turn around. I've been dealing with psychology journals a lot recently (submitting and refereeing) and they typically want 1month turn around on referee reports and they consider it scandalous when a report takes more than three months. It happened to me but I suspect I was taxing the methodological acumen of at least some of my referees - - the editor of the journal sent me a profusely apologetic letter because it took them almost 6 months to turn my paper around. As you can imagine I laughed myself silly given the norm in economics. Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those "soft" vs. "hard" field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? - - Bill Dickens [The DC area one - - not the one with the expert Nobel picks...]
William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/12/02 01:40PM >>> Warning: Some shameless self-promotion as well as promotion of bepress.com My most recent paper, Patent Theory versus Patent Law, has just been published by the B.E. journal, Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy. You can find the article and abstract here (abstract is also below) http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol1/iss1/art9/ Contributions is a BE press electronic journal. Here is a report on my experience publishing with them. Like many people I think it is an outrage that referee reports typically take 6 months or even longer. It also drives me nuts when I have to make revisions to a paper that I haven't worked on for a year and need to waste my time refreshing my memory about where the data and code are kept. So I gave the B.E. journals in Economic Analysis and Policy a try and was very impressed. I submitted this paper to them and had two referee reports within 6 weeks and after my revisions were complete had the paper published within a day. Amazingly, *most* of the time from submission to publication was on my clock not on theirs. I also got excellent editorial comments and was able to use their refereeing technology to good advantage. The way the journals work is that with one submission you get simultaneous consideration at four journals ranging in quality and interest. The referee reports come electronically. A very useful feature is that you can anonymously email the referees to clarify any points. I couldn't understand one of my referee's comments, for example, and with a brief email was able to establish that the referee had not realized that a footnote was continued on the next page (either that or it had not printed correctly). I was thus able to solve the problem and easily reassure the editor that I knew what I was talking about - almost impossible to do otherwise. Submitting to the journal can be expensive (when submitting to the journal you agree to write some referee reports for them - also you pay when submitting a revision) on the order of $150 as I recall but was well worth it in my judgment. Key remaining question is whether the journals will be cited by others. The quality of the articles published to date is high and the editors in my experience are very good. Also, they are working hard to promote the journals. My one nagging doubt is whether people may really want a hardcopy. My hope, however, is that these journals take off as they are offering a superior product. Alex ---- AUTHOR: Alexander Tabarrok TITLE: Patent Theory versus Patent Law SUGGESTED CITATION: Tabarrok, Alexander (2002) "Patent Theory versus Patent Law", Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 9. http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol1/iss1/art9 ABSTRACT: According to the economic theory of patents, patents are needed so that pioneer firm have time to recoup their sunk costs of research and development. The key element in the economic theory is that pioneer firms have large, hard to recoup, sunk costs. Yet patents are not awarded on the basis of a firm's sunk costs. Patent law, in fact, ignores costs. The disconnect between patent law and patent theory suggests either that modifying patent law so that it better fits with patent theory would reduce the costs and inefficiencies associated with current patent practice or that the standard economic theory of patents is wrong. -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366