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EDITORIAL Needed: a speedier time to publication I received my first letter welcoming me as the new editor of ES&T about four weeks before my term began. Perhaps it was fitting that the letter was primarily a complaint over the delay in the publication of a manuscript. No other aspect of author-editor relationships seems to raise more emotions than this one, except perhaps the decision of an editor to reject a manuscript. I expect there will be more letters on this subject in the coming months. My reply to the author was that we will take very seriously his complaint. Having served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for several years, I am aware of the problems that ES&T has had in reducing the publication time of research articles. In fact, the original contact I had with the journal years ago involved this issue. A major goal during my five-year term as editor will be to reduce the review and publication time to a period that is competitive with all major journals in our field. We have not yet set a specific target or timetable for reaching my goal, but we do know that some significant reductions must be achieved. During the past few years former editors have given considerable attention to this problem. For papers published in 1987, the average time from receipt of a manuscript to publication was 49 weeks. Since the production stage on the average required only 14 weeks, the largest portion of that time was spent reviewing and revising the paper. With this in mind we will focus our efforts on reducing the time from receipt to acceptance. In 1978 we began using electronic mail between the editors and the Washington staff, and this resulted in some time savings. We are now evaluating our system to determine other operations that can be streamlined. We are aware of the hurdles ahead, and we know that the desired improvements will not occur overnight. In addition, other unforeseen delays may occur because the ES&T office handles three other American Chemical Society journals and must strike a balance between
0013-936X/88/0922-0115$01.50/0 0 1988 American Chemical Society
each journals’ priorities. However, it is most important that we decrease the time from receipt to publication and strive for the minimum period that is humanly possible given our editorial budget. My colleagues at the journal tell me that authors and reviewers are responsible for some of the delay in the publication of articles. All who publish and review are aware that this is the case. ES&T has established sound procedures, I believe, for expediting the review process, including sending a red bag to facilitate return of reviews. Nonetheless, there are still reviewers who hold a manuscript well past the deadline and, in some cases, return it without a review. There are also several authors who hold a manuscript after review for several weeks or months. These are extreme cases, but they serve to skew the time to publication distribution. In the case of the manuscript that was the subject of my first letter of complaint, it apears that the unacceptably long delay was caused by a combination of factors, including some staff delays. The latter were caused in part by some staffing problems that have now been rectified. The time to publication is one criterion of a good scientificjournal. In the environmental field it is particularly significant because most of our scientific work has a direct impact on public understanding. The associate editors, the Washington, D.C., editorial staff, and I are committed to improving the editorial process and the time to publication. We ask that authors and reviewers cooperate with us in achieving this goal.
Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 22,No. 2, 1988 115
