The longest I've waiting between submitting a piece and publication is about 8 years. It can just take a lot of time, for all sorts of reasons (including ill-health or real-life problems for the people working at the journal). I've worked with Taylor & Francis and you would be surprised how many journals are often dependent on the essentially voluntary effort of just a handful of people.

The question is purely about how much timely publication matters to you because you have two options:

If the timing doesn't really matter you can wait (possibly chase it every month or two), but simply be patient.

If there is another journal that would likely accept the paper then you can write to the current journal, explain that you cannot wait further and if they are unable to give you an immediate response you will be submitting elsewhere (always tell a journal you are withdrawing before submitting elsewhere, you don't owe the journal you are withdrawing from anything but it can annoy the journal you subsequently submit to).

Robert Bracey I can relate to your experience. I once had an article accepted by a journal that apparently soon thereafter faced financial and hosting issues. It took over three years for them to resume publishing. It was pre-internet days so I really had no other options, since my article was just suited to that particular niche in the landscape of hardcopy-only journals.

I just remembered another paper I submitted in my student days (so again, pre-internet) to a nonmainstream journal published at a small university. After a couple of months without word I wrote a letter of inquiry. Then after a while, another. Finally, after nine months, I managed to find a phone number for a unit that the editor had been affiliated with. I learned that the fellow had died and that the journal had basically been a one-man operation, so it had died with him.

Why not send a preprint? Journals need to be reviewed, and if the reviewer is confused or biased, your paper cannot be published. In the future, journals will be eliminated and adopt the practice of publication before peer review, that is, preprints, to avoid being unable to publish papers due to the subjective bias of reviewers.

Papers were meant for communication, but now papers are like exams, and reviewers and editors are like examiners. And this examiner is your peer, in China, there is a saying called "peer is enemies", so, because of the competition, they will be so easy to make you "pass"?

This is also the reason why scientific thinking is becoming more and more conservative. The larger the journal, the more conservative its paper. Reading the paper in the journal is not better than the preprint, and the latter is bolder and more instructive.

That suggestion wouldn't help the poster of the question and for all we know, he might already have archived a preprint somewhere. A lot has to change before preprints can become an alternative that's recognized by a university's bean-counters in their administering of grants or salary increases for merit.

Thank you everyone for your valuable remarks and suggestions. I still have no response from the Journal, and I don't have a pre-print as well. Still waiting and hopeful.

I have a paper that was accepted in a known anthropology journal. They have sent me several emails saying it was accepted. But now i cannot reach them to see if it was finally printed. Its been almost two years

Hello Dr Aruditya Jasrotia

My advice is:

(1) persist with that journal because withdrawal is only going to mean you have to "start again" after you have already waited so long

(2) submit to another journal next time

(3) start on another paper/project so at least you can make more use of this time