two cultures, two deadlines.

While many are talking and blogging about the two cultures these days, I want to highlight the gulf between our academic disciplines with an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the attempts to speed up publication in the humanities. While peer reviewers in science are being pushed for one or two week turnarounds from an increasing number of journals, the humanities are trying to move the average time from eliciting a book review to publication from year(s) to months.

The article says one of the reasons for the long turnaround is that "reviewing tends to be a rather thankless task, so it gets pushed to the bottom of a reviewer's agenda." Certainly, it's a similar situation in the sciences... but there seems to be a stronger system of reciprocal altruism in the sciences, where we all need to get our papers published, we all want them published quickly, and we do (largely) comply with the deadlines we're given. The article also highlighted the low number of reviews that can be published in each monthly/quarterly issue of a journal, and it could be that online-only journals will spur faster publication times in the humanities just as they have in the sciences.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison between the fields: the publications being discussed are the peer review themselves.

I appreciate how quickly biology progresses these days, but it can be overwhelming. Having to keep up with online-early publications, the myriad table of contents emails, the automatic search emails, the increasingly short review times for journals... at times the slower publishing pace of other parts of academia could be very appealing.