Dear Fellow Netters,
I am working with a publisher and was watching your arguments
on multiple simultaneous submissions of manuscripts to journals
with some interest. I am particularly glad to read that there
are several authors out there who do not favor such behavior.
Yes, it is also our concern that authors receive information on
the state of their submitted manuscripts immediately. We do
encourage our editors to use the Acknowledge_Receipt cards, to
stump lazy reviewers, and to inform authors of acception or
rejection.
I do not think that multiple simultaneous submission will solve
the problem. After all, the peer review process was introduced
to make sure only valuable scientific information gets
published. Think of the overload (readers, librarians, etc), if
the contributions would be submitted (and perhaps published)
twice: The volume of articles would double!
We have occasionally observed by chance that indeed there are
authors, who submit the same contribution twice. A recent case
was only detected when the editor of one of our journals
received a manuscript from the author and within that week a
review request from the editor of another publisher's journal
for the same paper. The author got very strong letters from
both editors and both journals rejected publication.
I think, authors and publishers should work together to
identify weak points in the information chain; and they should
from both sides make it clear what is a matter of curtsey. I
hope to see more comments on this issue.
With the compliments of the season.
Yours Sincerely
Dr. Rainer Stumpe
Chemistry Editorial
Springer-Verlag
Tiergartenstr. 17
D-69121 Heidelberg
Phone: +49-(0)6221-48 73 10
Fax: +49-(0)6221-41 39 82
INTERNET:stumpe at spint.compuserve.com
