A young philosopher in Australia writes:
For relatively junior people, the really useful and hard-to-get information is...which journals are well-run. For instance, it's useful to know things like:
1. Will they get back to you in a timely manner (within 3-4 months)? If not, how long will it take? (anecdotal evidence: 7 months at PhilRev, 12 months at Mind.)
2. Will they answer your emails or just ignore them?
3. Do they give reviews?
4. Will the review process be blind?
5. What's the quality of the reviewers?
6. Will revise and resubmit policies be arbitrary? (e.g. sending the paper to new reviewers who raise completely different objections)
7. Are you likely to run into arbitrary editorial decisions after the initial reviews? (Ethics looks like a culprit)
8. How long will it be before an accepted article appears in print ? (PPR: 3 years)
From what I can gather from my own experience and from word of mouth, most top journals perform shockingly on one or more of these questions.
In some cases, it seems to be systematic. It'd be useful to know how widespread these problems are at particular journals. Time to review can be a real problem for junior people, and it would be nice to have a more accurate understanding of the risks of delay and other vagaries you're letting yourself in for with different journals. And some journals are genuinely well run (e.g.. from what I can tell, Nous, PhilStudies, Phil Imprint, AJP, PhilQ seem on the ball).
I will note that my anecdotal evidence is the opposite of what is reported above with respect to Ethics, which I would have put in the "genuinely well run" category (and this prior to John Deigh, the editor, becoming my colleague). In any case, I've opened comments; no anonymous postings, of course.
