Saturday, February 26, 2011

An Insight into Journal Publishing - Dialectica

An insight into one journal's publishing procedure. This very interesting PDF was sent to someone who recently submitted a paper to their journal.

Several things of note

  1. The journal is Dialectica, Publishing "predominantly in theoretical and systematic philosophy. It is edited in Switzerland and has a focus on analytical philosophy undertaken on the continent."
  2. This journal is not on Lieters quality  philosphy journals list.
  3. It is listed in  European Science Foundation's rankings (out of A,B, or C, it was listed under B quality).

The following appears in the document:

Refereeing process:

The Editorial Committee (see below) makes a first decision concerning the publication of the
article (which has to be justified to the Editorial Board). If an article does not pass this first
check, authors will normally be informed within one month after the acknowledgment of the
receipt of their submission. 
During the second stage, papers are refereed by specialists in the field chosen by the Editorial
Committee. If the referees agree, their comments (in English, French or German) may be
passed to the author. The papers are also discussed by the Editorial Committee, which may
also make comments. Authors are normally informed of the editorial decision concerning their
paper within three months after the receipt of their submission has been acknowledged.
Papers may be accepted with no or minor revisions, rejected, or authors may be invited to
resubmit a revised version of their paper, taking into account the comments, if any, they
received. There is no deadline for the resubmission of such papers. Authors resubmitting their
papers should send them to the managing editor, in a format suitable for blind refereeing.
They should briefly indicate in their e-mail (not a separate file) how they dealt with the
comments they received. The paper may be sent to the same, or to different referees in the
second round. 

Final decision about acceptance will be taken by the editor and communicated by the
managing editor. Publication is guaranteed only once the author has been asked to hand in the
final, non-anonymous version of his article. 
It will be the responsibility of the editors to decide on the order of appearance of accepted
submissions. Priority may be given to discussion notes. In these cases, authors of the
materials being commented on will be given a right of reply (subject to the usual refereeing),
provided that the timely publication of the note will take priority over the desirability of
including both note and reply in the same issue of the journal. 
If a paper is accepted for publication in dialectica, the author will be asked to hand in another,
final version in which the advice to authors is to be respected. 
The final version will be checked for language and style and may be corrected. The author
may, however, undo these changes at the proof stage. 
Authors will receive one set of proofs by email. They should not revise them substantially and
return it as soon as possible to the publisher. 
Authors will be required to sign an Exclusive Licence Form (ELF) for all papers accepted for
publication. Signature of the ELF is a condition of publication and papers will not be passed to
the publisher for production unless a signed form has been received. Please note that
signature of the Exclusive Licence Form does not affect ownership of copyright in the material.
(Government employees need to complete the Author Warranty sections, although copyright in
such cases does not need to be assigned). After submission authors will retain the right to
publish their paper in various medium/circumstances (please see the form for further details).
To assist authors, an appropriate form will be supplied by the editorial office. Alternatively,
authors may like to download a copy of the form here.


There are some very informative graphs and tables on their submission/acceptance rates I suggest checking out.


1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, the graph and acceptance rate information was very interesting!

    ReplyDelete