Many journals take months before replying, although some publishers ask a fee before submission. Is the time synonymous with high quality? I think that the ideal candidates for refereeing may be too busy. Why the editors do not recruit more Reviewers?
What is your opinion about it?
Many thanks in advance for your answers.
Hello Fabrizio,
I agree with you. Also, I think that many scholars coul be doing reviews, but are not solicited to do it.
Best regards,
Helena
Dear Fabrizio,
In my opinion, time may be an indicator for quality in the sense that the journal may use well qualified reviewers, which indeed are usually busy, but they finally provide a good referee report. Also, it may be strongly related to the fact that the journal has a lot of submissions to process (thus a high probability to pick only the excellent papers) and, as Helena pointed out, they use the same pool of reviewers.
I believe that most of the reviewing work is done on a voluntary basis (that's why is also a matter of knowing to a certain extent the referees, their willingness to cooperate and do quality work) and the journals practicing submission/publication fees are not necessarily paying the referees.
A good practice that I've noticed is the fact that many journals provide an indicative time period of the review (or you can just ask the editors), as a statistics, and it can be used as a reference value when deciding what journal to choose.
Finally, academic publishing has grown as an independent business, with its own rules and regulations that are hard to captured in some very stable patterns of behavior or objective quality scales.
In a more general tone, this is an interesting piece on the current situation: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
Best,
Rodica
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