What do you mean by "fast"? Do you mean a journal that rejects your manuscript quickly? You see - if you send your manuscript to a good journal, you need to be patient, as the journal's editorial board has a system in which a designated editor looks through it in order to learn whether it is complete and fits the journal's scope. The screening is also an attempt to assess the chances of it being publishable, and, given that, there is a decision made in terms of what sub-field it belongs to. That field perhaps has its own area editor, who will screen it, too. Now already two weeks have gone since your submission reached the journal office mail server. And then it is time to find reviewers, which we all know is getting harder every day.
Before I give you some advise on the journal itself, I take the opportunity to tell you that you have. perhaps, the wrong attitude: a high speed in the review process will always render it sub-par - and whether it will be to your advantage or not is uncertain. The worst would be either one of two things. 1. The outcome that the journal quickly finds a small mistake and reject it immediately. 2. A perhaps even worse one would be if they do not even read it, and accept it because you have submitted the paper to a horse-shit journal that only wants your money and do not even read it before it is accepted, and they take your money and run with it.
What do you prefer?
Dear Professor Michael Patriksson
Thank you for your valuable suggestions.
Yous is an older post and I believe you would have found such a journal till now. But still I want to comment for readers. There are plenty of such predatory journals available through google search. These journals ask for a small payment which most authors can afford and they make the article open access. They do not send any print copy because this is economical for them. Otherwise they would charge high. The quality of the article is never checked and you can even write non-sense stuff in the text which would be accepted. If you want to publish FAST, then you can look for a list through google. It will be helpful for you. But one important thing, Such journals are crap and loaded with all sorts of absurd content. These are mainly multi-disciplinary journals so that they can attract authors from all fields that would give them money easily. You can also publish your article in any one of them and add yourself into a list of such crap BS authors. The work by most of these authors is below average quality and they write just any nonsense things in their articles. If you also write like that then my best wishes are with you.
If anyone thinks that it is unacceptable to not learn the verdict from the scrutiny of your manuscript within six Months, then you should skip this business. Why?
1. It may take a few weeks for the manuscript to be allocated to an editor.
2. The editor will ask a few scholars with related scientific knowledge to your own and within the scope of the journal, whether they have an interest in grading ("as in accepting to perform a peer review") the manuscript. It may take a long time to not only find those scholars to invite as referees, and most of them will either not even response, or say "No". So this stage can take a long time, indeed.
3. Suppose that (typically) two, three, or four scholars have now accepted to perform the duty. While they have said "Yes," you cannot expect any of the reviewers to perform the duty within the allotted time, as specified by the journal. They will have all kinds of excuses, when the editor asks why a referee report hasn't been uploaded on the journal's peer review page. Ultimately it is hence the laziest reviewer that determines the time it takes to perform the reviews.
4. The editor now have all the referee reports, and a verdict can be given. But only after a very careful reading of the comments from the reviewers, to learn if the reviewers take opposing positions, and whether some faults are so serious that the manuscript must be rejected.
5. Here it could stop, based on a "Reject" verdict or an "Accept". But typically there are bugs found by the reviewers, that also the editor finds unacceptable, and there will have to be a new round of reviewing, mostly sent to all reviewers, but in some cases (when one reviewer has ticked "accept") a reviewer who is happy already might not be sent the updated manuscript, as it would be a waste of effort. Again, the editor in charge of the manuscript needs to summarise the paper and its merits and shortcomings, writing what is now ok, and, based on a balancing of the referee reports a new letter will be sent to the authors for - hopefully - a minor review.
6. The process shall stop at some point, with either "Reject" or ""Accept".
Guess how long that can take? 2-3 years is not unheard of.
I still maintain that this system is better than any other that have been implemented. It's not always fair, and it relies too much on one reviewer's opinion, but I do not see immediately how we can come up with a better one. The main outcome of any system is that a manuscript either gets thrown into the waste bin, or it is accepted because it has enough merits - and we can argue long after the "Accept" button has been ticked whether it is.
We all know that even even the Nobel prize can be awarded, based on the wrong information, or the wrong attitudes. We are not fool-proof, and we have to accept it. But we should try the best that we can.
Please post this on your office wall - it took a long while to finish it, and my fingers hurt.
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