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://ww
