Time it took my article to appear in print: 3 years.
Time it took this blog post to appear online: 5 seconds.
[P.S. Not trying to pick on JSL; they’re great. This is an issue endemic to most of our print publications in higher education…]
ADDENDUM: Time it took to edit this post four times: 3 minutes. Time it would take to edit a printed journal article post-production: ha ha ha ha!
Hi
Great, succinct point.
As a teacher, the situation is compounded by the whole “academic journal mystique” – lots of great educational research is trapped in institutions because teachers don’t publish.
So, I’m on a mission and have just launched the Journal of Applied Education Research – for articles from practicing teachers, peer reviewed by other practicing teachers.
It’s on Kickstarter – http://kck.st/1wQRDEZ and will be International in scope.
In some small way this might help redress the balance.
Cheers
Glen
Glen, This sounds like a terrific idea. What is your best resource when it comes to guides for applied research. I have wanted to do action research in my classroom, and as you suggest I think your idea offers a good middle road between the blog and the academic journal.
Hi
Thanks Maureen for the feedback.
Having launched the Kickstarter – http://kck.st/1wQRDEZ – after nearly 2 weeks we are at ~ 50% funding.
Strong positive response from teachers – no institutional backers yet…..
As we enter the final two weeks, time to push out to contacts and social media. ANY help in spreading the word greatly received.
Cheers Glen
Part of why blogging doesn’t get as much respect as it should, I think. It’s too easy. People respect writers who make it through the formal publishing process just because so few get there. When anyone can publish, anyone does publish, and the public perception is that none of it means anything worthwhile.
So how do we change that perception and get more people to recognize the immense value of (a) blogging and (b) reading blogs?
You would think that reasons like timeliness, reach, traffic, visibility, and interaction would catch on. But so far, not so much. 🙁 If you think K-12 moves slow…
My longest wait between acceptance and publication was 8 years. By the time the research saw print, both my coauthors had retired and I’d moved on to an entirely different area of research.
The same is increasingly true, incidentally, of fiction publishing. The small press I moonlight at is increasingly attracting big name authors because they are tired of waiting years to hear whether their novel will even be accepted. I once polled a group of SF authors how long they waited for a response on SOLICITED manuscripts, and the longest was again 8 years, and the average around 4 years. Since these were presses that did not accept simultaneous submissions, waiting 4-6 years to hear a ‘no’ and starting over on another 4 year wait, and so on….whose career can survive that? Better the three month (or less) turn around from a small press, than years of waiting.
One of my professors year one doc program: “By the time you see a paper in a journal, the field has moved on.”
As an update – 100% funded and now moving to a call for papers.
The “aim” is for a 3 month publication cycle from submission to publication.
http://jaer.org.uk/
Cheers
Glen