From an outside view, this piece was a bit weird, but much more straightforward pieces have gotten similarly frustrating responses from top journals. If I was optimizing for publishability rather than impact, I would do things differently and likely be more successful, but that would avoid the entire goal. (You can always come up with an approach tailored to a journal, and work on finding results that they will like, but that’s part of the problem with the spate of poor science in the past decades.)
However, I definitely don’t think it is particularly anomalous for the submissions process to take months, since academia isn’t meant/set-up for rapid response publications. In general, for academic publications, rejections are slow, acceptances are even slower, and everything is uncertain. But I have learned on several occasions during 2020 that the top-journal publication process is even more dicey and frustrating than I expected, even when co-authoring with people who have done that type of publication repeatedly, and after successfully publishing many things in more niche journals.
Despite all of that, I don’t think that my initial selection of a higher tier journal was a mistake, a priori, since I think that it was the most likely way for it to get actually significant policy attention, and the final publication in F1000 was far less impactful, and not only because of the lateness. (But F1000 has a clearly superior publication model.)
From an outside view, this piece was a bit weird, but much more straightforward pieces have gotten similarly frustrating responses from top journals. If I was optimizing for publishability rather than impact, I would do things differently and likely be more successful, but that would avoid the entire goal. (You can always come up with an approach tailored to a journal, and work on finding results that they will like, but that’s part of the problem with the spate of poor science in the past decades.)
However, I definitely don’t think it is particularly anomalous for the submissions process to take months, since academia isn’t meant/set-up for rapid response publications. In general, for academic publications, rejections are slow, acceptances are even slower, and everything is uncertain. But I have learned on several occasions during 2020 that the top-journal publication process is even more dicey and frustrating than I expected, even when co-authoring with people who have done that type of publication repeatedly, and after successfully publishing many things in more niche journals.
Despite all of that, I don’t think that my initial selection of a higher tier journal was a mistake, a priori, since I think that it was the most likely way for it to get actually significant policy attention, and the final publication in F1000 was far less impactful, and not only because of the lateness. (But F1000 has a clearly superior publication model.)