Back to [Archive] Other discussions

1
Time spent in peer review
Admin
There are now 12 papers published in OpenPsych journals. This permits a little analysis. I have collected a dataset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x0rdMMjGIvY0iL4qJv3_KhyYiRWZXSWYaUbQWNmJ5co/edit#gid=0

The average time from submission to publication is 15 days for the journals. The highest is 28 and the lowest 4.

How does that compare with a competitor? Well, one competitor of ODP (which has 9 of the 12 publications) is Intelligence, an Elsevier journal. We can compare the review times with their most recent issue.

The dataset for issue 44 in Intelligence is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15KP3sPKDDkvPgSqMswZaRM19zR6RvWm0gp0WVo8SJzM/edit#gid=0

The average days before publication is 213 days. The highest is 605 and the lowest 58.

Thus, even the highest time in review in Open Psych is about half of that of the lowest in Intelligence.

Furthermore, the lowest for both ODP and Intelligence is a good case study. Both are simple papers by Lynn et al. Yet in ODP the review took 4 days, in Intelligence it took 58.

It should be noted that while papers are in review in OP journals, they are visible to anyone. While they are in review at Intelligence, they are only visible to authors, reviewers and editors. Intelligence thus very effectively slows down the scientific communication by about 213 days, while OP journals do no such thing.

To be fair, the short review times so far in OP journals may increase in the future. It seems far fetched, however, to think that they will approach those of Intelligence.
1