It took me four hours today to write and polish a disposition e-mail to the author(s) of a submission. This was a manuscript that I enjoyed very much but for a variety of reasons could not publish, and I owed the author(s) some good advice, or at least the best advice I could give. When I began this editing gig, I’d frequently spend that much time on a disposition e-mail for almost any manuscript, and I’m still spending lots of time on R&R (revise-and-resubmit) e-mails.<\/p>\n
And while I spend some time on rejection letters, they usually don’t require as much time as an R&R request (would that be an R&R R?), because the key thing about R&R is to provide as focused feedback as I can — that’s both fair to authors and sanity-saving for me. Rejections require an explanation of why a work is either not appropriate for the journal or technically weak, but there is less of the social-contract obligation of an R&R. After all, if the author(s) revise and submit to another journal, they will (quite properly) have an entirely different set of eyes looking at the material.<\/p>\n
The next few e-mails are for R&Rs, and I think they’ll be shoved back to sometime in the weekend, because they may take some time, too!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It took me four hours today to write and polish a disposition e-mail to the author(s) of a submission. This was a manuscript that I enjoyed very much but for a variety of reasons could not publish, and I owed the author(s) some good advice, or at least the best advice I could give. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epaa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-pX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}