What can a person who hasn't enough time do about the unpredictable nature of the publication process? [closed]

Question

I'm talking about a narrow sub-field of Computer Science - algorithm execution high-level simulations. However, I guess, this applies to many fields to some extent.

When you are submitting an article to a journal (peer-reviewed, indexed, with a track, not from a ranking bottom), you can't send the same article to other publishers. After submitting, editors often do not update anything in Elsevier's or Springer's systems about the status of your submission. The first move from the editorial board usually takes 2-8 weeks. 2-8 at best, if you sending them emails to track this, at worst they can just lose your paper and/or ignore emails. Usually, the next stop is a desk rejection (the shortest and the way causing least headache, just isn't leading to the goal) or sending it to the reviewers. The reviewing process in this narrow research area takes 3-12 months. A reviewer may say something not really relevant and short (or something you can use to improve your text, but this doesn't matter in this case) after a year and the article gets rejected. This can take longer if you aren't keeping an eye on it.

Then you have to repeat the process. This is not a short story process either, reformatting the article, pictures, editing (for the next journal's unique rules while you still remember that they can just ignore it or responding once a month to emails) etc. You can't speed this up, you can't even predict the time it will take. Seems like a kind of strangely convoluted hell just for presenting your results in some peer-reviewed (not high tier) journal if you're outside academia.

Disclaimer: the author is outside academia currently, but he has publications, teaching and research experience. 3-month tool development and output analysis results sometimes need 1-2 years to be published (just accepted, to be more specific). Maybe, the situation isn't as rough inside academia, but for one has no proper business relations, and paying all fees as an author and without an ability to focus on this process because it isn't one's main activity - it is.

Any advice?

Answer 1

Since you are in CS, the solution is easy: Submit your results to a conference first (at least as an extended abstract, if the full paper is too long for the conference). For conferences, there are fixed deadlines for the review process, so you are guaranteed to get a decision within two or three months (even though it need not be the desired decision). After the first version has appeared in some conference proceedings, you can still submit an extended version to some journal. Then: be patient. There is no guaranteed way to speed up the reviewing process. Live with it.

Answer 2

In addition to @Uwe's suggestion about conference publication, most computer science venues allow preprints to be circulated, e g., via arXiv.org.

You can thus publish and distribute a version of your manuscript before submission, then update as you improve it and link to the final version upon publication.

This pattern is particularly common in the more theoretical portions of the field, which it sounds like you are in, and where review times are often particularly long, as you note.