Dan Ispas
Assistant Editor – Europe’s Journal of Psychology
Doctoral Associate – Industrial/Organizational Psychology
University of South Florida
E-mail: dispas@mail.usf.edu
So, you’ve completed your research, you’ve written up your article and now you’re ready to submit it to a peer review journal. You send your manuscript to the editor of the journal, the editor forwards your manuscript for review to other scientists in your field, and, based on the feedback from reviewers, he/she decides whether your work will be published or not.
This was a reminder of the peer review process, in case you forgot how it goes. Here comes the problem (just one of many): because of limited journal space, most manuscripts are rejected. And here comes the solution: electronic publishing!
Although the Internet has been around for a while, electronic publishing in the so-called “soft sciences” is still in its infancy. Authors are still reluctant to publish their research in on-line journals. Glass (2000) cites a study by Brand (1999) that found that hard scientists use as their primary source of information the pre-prints archive available at xxx.lanl.gov while the soft scientist still rely on traditional paper journals. Although we are now seven years after Brand’s study, I don’t think the situation has changed much. In psychology, it seems that old habits die hard (see the case of the null hypothesis testing).
There are numerous advantages of electronic publishing (see Glass, 1994), some of these are: for the author it means shorter publication time (in the case of traditional journals it usually takes more than one year to see your article in print), it also means more readers (which could lead to more citations) and more feedback; for the readers it mainly means free access to research (Glass, 1999). And free access means a lot when you try to do research in a less developed country.
Europe’s Journal of Psychology is encouraging readers and researchers to submit their manuscripts to electronic journals, and why not start with us? It’s time to take advantage of the Internet and use it for more than just data collection.
References:
Glass, G. (1994). Papyrophiles vs Cybernauts: The Future of Scholarly Publication. Retrieved May 10, 2006, from http://glass.ed.asu.edu/gene/papers/papvcyb.html
Glass, G. (1999). Not For Sale: Scholarly Communications in Modern Society. Retrieved May 10, 2006, from http://glass.ed.asu.edu/gene/papers/epub.html
Glass, G. (2000). Anonymous FTP: Can we risk it? Dare we publish pre-prints? Retrieved May 10, 2006, from http://glass.ed.asu.edu/gene/papers/aera2000/
May 2006