What this series is
The procedural side of publishing is mostly invisible from outside. The official documents — scope statements, EDICS lists, editor guidelines — describe what the institutional process is supposed to do. The actual process delivers something else. The gap between the two is occupied by knowledge that experienced authors absorb implicitly over many submission cycles and rarely write down.
These essays are attempts to write that knowledge down, one episode at a time. Each starts with a single concrete encounter with the system — a submission, a desk reject, a piece of correspondence — and steps back from it to the mechanism behind it. The episode is the occasion; the structural argument is the point. Each one tries to land on something an author can act on next time.
Who this is for
I am an independent researcher without an institutional pipeline of senior colleagues to ask “is this normal?” — and these essays are shaped accordingly. They are written primarily for authors operating outside an institution, for first-time submitters trying to learn the implicit rules of a venue, and for anyone interested in the gap between how the publication process describes itself and how it operates.
The essays are not narratives of injury. They are not complaints. They are attempts to be useful to other authors who will, sooner or later, encounter the same structural problems and have to work them out on their own.
Ground rules
- No naming editors or reviewers. The structural argument is what matters; the individuals doing the work are not the subject.
- No verbatim quotation from editorial correspondence while a paper is still under review at the venue in question.
- The institutional process is treated as neither villain nor victim. The aim is to describe what it produces under the procedures it operates with, not to attribute intent.
How this series is organized
All posts in this series carry the publishing tag — you can filter
the blog index to see only them. New essays
go up when something is worth writing down, not on a schedule.