Gary Wiggins wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 1 Dec 1998 19:09:59 +0000 (GMT) From: Paul May <paulmay@tlchm.bris.ac.uk> To: Chemistry Wem-Users list <chemweb@ic.ac.uk> Subject: Virtual Journals, Chime & Jcamp

Hi,

I thought you might be interested to know that a paper I submitted to the new RSC e-Journal PhysChemComm has been published only 20 days after submission! This is certainly a record for me, and probably goes to highlight another advantage that e-Journals have over paper-only Journals - if the paper is written in a web-friendly format and all the correspondance is done via email, then the refereeing time, handling time and admin time can be significantly reduced, and *extremely rapid* publication times can result.

I am glad for Dr. May's sake that his paper was published so quickly. I have nothing against e-publishing (indeed many of my own business interests are in that area) but I would sound a note of caution. In my experience (as an editor of an ACS journal) it is unusual even for a reviewer to reply within 3 weeks. I am not writing this message as a criticism of our reviewers. Ninety-nine percent of them go to a lot of trouble reading papers with great care and writing really incisive reviews, despite the fact that they have a heavy burden of teaching and research (and increasing amounts of admin duties). Moreover, some of our reviewers are in industry and score no points at all for reviewing papers. It is no mean task to review fairly the sort of papers we receive, many of them packed with math and full of abstruse concepts. We also have many authors whose mother tongue is not English, whose work needs extensive editing, and not a few authors who do not have easy access to the sort of facilities US authors enjoy. Wendy -- Dr Wendy A Warr Wendy Warr & Associates, 6 Berwick Court Holmes Chapel, Cheshire CW4 7HZ, England Tel/fax +44 (0)1477 533837 wendy@warr.com http://www.warr.com chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)