David Chalmers (ANU) makes the following proposal in the comments to the earlier thread:
The field should standardize on requesting referee reports within a month (or less). As many have pointed out, it doesn't take more work to referee a paper within a month than to referee it within two or three months. Yes, people are busy, and a few more potential referees might decline this way. But if it became standard practice (as it is in many fields) people would quickly get used to it, and the upside is much larger than the downside.
While we're at it, we could also standardize on something like three days for a response to a refereeing invitation, and something like a week as an extension for delinquent referees (in both cases, after this period the editor moves on). Again, if this were standard practice, people would quickly get used to it. This way, it ought to be possible in principle for most journals to get average response time down to under three months.
This practice would help even if pursued by individual journals, but it would work best if agreed upon by many journal editors collectively. I see that there is a journal editor meeting coming up at the Eastern APA. How about it?
So how about it?
