After a 10 months long battle (where practically little was happening, except my manuscript being incubated by a certain busy man) my paper got an acceptance. I really needed this paper to be out soon and ah! the sweet taste of victory :)
However, I was so close to giving up and I realised in these 10 months how helpless we can be in academia. How much lethargy there can be (reminds me of a book review I was asked to do really long back and I gave myself so many excuses for the delay I have caused, but to be honest, no excuse is good enough!). It was not as if the manuscript was going back and forth for review or corrections. In fact in these ten months the manuscript was reviewed just once and after we submitted the revised versions we got no further comments from the reviewers. Which basically means that the rest of the time the manuscript was just gathering dust and the final decision given now could have been delivered several months earlier.
Sure enough it is hard to be on the other side of this peer review process as well. For one, no one pays the editors or the reviewers for investing their time. In fact it is the University that employs them that indirectly bears the cost of the review process (raises the question, who should, therefore, bear the cost of publication? But more on this some other day) . Moreover, there is an enormous increase in the number of papers being sent out for review and the journals (especially the older ones) are under greater pressure of sieving through this massive influx, now more than ever (So how do we solve this problem? Someone I know suggested that there should be an upper limit to the number of papers one is allowed to publish in a lifetime, which forces people to publish only the really good stuff... interesting as this idea might be, is it a solution? I hardly think so...).
In any case, for now, All's well that ends well and this one ended well for sure . Yay! for me and everyone else in similar situations, for holding on and not letting it go(it is funny how the Fevicol ads pop up in my mind now! :-p).
However, I was so close to giving up and I realised in these 10 months how helpless we can be in academia. How much lethargy there can be (reminds me of a book review I was asked to do really long back and I gave myself so many excuses for the delay I have caused, but to be honest, no excuse is good enough!). It was not as if the manuscript was going back and forth for review or corrections. In fact in these ten months the manuscript was reviewed just once and after we submitted the revised versions we got no further comments from the reviewers. Which basically means that the rest of the time the manuscript was just gathering dust and the final decision given now could have been delivered several months earlier.
Sure enough it is hard to be on the other side of this peer review process as well. For one, no one pays the editors or the reviewers for investing their time. In fact it is the University that employs them that indirectly bears the cost of the review process (raises the question, who should, therefore, bear the cost of publication? But more on this some other day) . Moreover, there is an enormous increase in the number of papers being sent out for review and the journals (especially the older ones) are under greater pressure of sieving through this massive influx, now more than ever (So how do we solve this problem? Someone I know suggested that there should be an upper limit to the number of papers one is allowed to publish in a lifetime, which forces people to publish only the really good stuff... interesting as this idea might be, is it a solution? I hardly think so...).
In any case, for now, All's well that ends well and this one ended well for sure . Yay! for me and everyone else in similar situations, for holding on and not letting it go(it is funny how the Fevicol ads pop up in my mind now! :-p).
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