Academic researchers, naturally, are keen to contribute productively to the biomedical as well as social challenges caused by the current outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. Some of us do this by talking to the overwhelmed editors of newsoutlets' opinion pages, who are currently drowning in COVID19 pitches. Others are sufficiently well-known to government bureaucracies that they receive invitations to contribute their competence in the development of any number of policies and guidance documents.
Most of us, though, given that we cannot quite escape COVID19 at the moment anyway, have begun producing COVID19 research outputs. Journal editors across disciplines face an unprecedented onslaught of article submissions, many of which written very recently, and typically they consist of results of biomedical or survey research, economic modelling, analyses of the experiences made in countries like China and Italy. In my own field people are concerned about normative aspects of triage policies, privacy aspects of prevention strategies, challenge trials, equity, and so on and so forth.
What many of these article submissions have in common is that the authors hope to contribute to working through the current outbreak. I wonder whether academic journals, and the peer review and production processes we currently have in place for them, make them suitable outlets for those sorts of activities.
Most global publishers have developed technological means that permit the digital, on-line first publication of accepted content. These publications precede print publication, oftentimes by months. Many smaller academic publishers, especially many smaller university presses do not possess that capability. Anything submitted to them will not be published until, realistically, the end of this year. By most accounts that would be too late to have any impact on the current outbreak.
Let's have a closer look at a typical submission-to-decision-to-publication situation with a global publisher. Say you submit on April 01 (I know, the joke is on me). If the editor of the journal moves quickly, they will decided within a day or two whether they will have the paper reviewed. So, they'd send out reviewer requests. Normally those invited would have a week or so to reply and decide on whether they're ok with doing the review. Takes us to April 10. Say, given the urgency, the first invitee agrees to review the content. They've anywhere between 2-4 weeks to submit their review. Some, with prodding, might be prepared to move faster on COVID19 papers, but given the deluge of papers submitted, their willingness might sooner rather than later wear thin.
We are now around the end of April. The reviews require that some changes are made before the paper is publishable. Let's assume that you're an efficient author, so you send the revised manuscript back to the editor. We're around May 10-15. The editor takes until May 20 to review the changes and accepts your manuscript. The paper is exported to the publisher's production people. After about 10 days you will see your proofs. You correct the proofs and return them to the publisher. Realistically, we're looking at the end of May. The publisher takes another week or so to make the necessary corrections and uploads your manuscript. So, in an ideal world, from submission to publication of your paper about 6 weeks would have passed. The odds are that you'd be looking at 8-12 weeks.
The pandemic you have been responding to will have moved on to a very different stage to what your paper aimed to respond to.
Some publisher offer to upload accepted manuscripts prior to copy editing and proof production, and replace them with the final version when it's ready. While this is faster, it also means that mistakes that would be caught during the copy editing process would be published and can even be cited, only to find that, in the actual published version, the mistake has been fixed.
The upshot of this is the following: With the exception of very few topflight biomedical journals the academic publishing process is too slow to respond meaningfully to ongoing infectious disease outbreaks. The fault for this lies not only in still fairly slow and cumbersome production processes of academic publishers, but also, and arguably more so, on the time it takes to maintain sound peer review.
What this suggests to me is this: If you plan on submitting content that is designed as an intervention in the currently ongoing outbreak, reconsider that. The pandemic will long have moved on from what was urgent at the time when you submitted your paper. Academic journals are not a sound target for your output. There might be alternative outlets, like, for instance the Journal of medical ethics blogs. I suspect in your field you might also have outlets for non-reviewed content, like SSRN, where you can upload your content while you wait for your paper to run through the peer review and production processes.
Focus on lessons that we can learn for future outbreaks.
