From Inside Higher Ed:

Many a successful journal article is published not in the publication where the author first submitted, but in another one, following rejection from the first. This trickle-down publication process helps get work reviewed and disseminated, but it also means long waits for authors, who can’t start the process with a second journal until they have been rejected by or withdrawn a submission from the first. The journals of the American Economic Association have started an experiment that acknowledges the reality that papers move from one publication to another and the system could save authors considerable time, and publications money. In the experiment, authors of papers that are rejected from the flagship journal  American Economic Review  can now opt to have referee reports sent directly to one of four other journals published by the association…. Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and editor in chief of American Anthropologist, said he saw too much of a gap in subject matter for such a system to work in anthropology. “The journals are all so different that there would be no automatic way to do it,” he said, noting that in contrast to the journal he edits, many of the others are quite specialized  Visual Anthropology Review, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and others.

 

For the full story, please visit http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/21/econ.