I have been burning the proverbial solidified lipid light source at the proverbial points of illumination as of late, working on preparing my manuscript of my first Diodogorgia feeding behavior manuscript. I am opting to try to place it in one of the most widely read journals; a journal with a very significant rejection rate. This is a generalized journal and very widely read and it gets a lot of manuscripts submitted to it. Having a finite – and relatively small – size, this means most manuscripts are rejected, but fortunately, they are rejected “without” prejudice, so they can be submitted elsewhere, and most are and probably most get published. So, I have the customary backup plan: “B,” for the almost certain rejection. I have heard the odds of success are about 1 in 20, so… I am trying to convince myself that my work will not get accepted and that I shouldn’t be too upset with that likely outcome.
Oh, yeah… THAT will work.
I want this thing to be published in this journal so badly I can taste it, so the inevitable rejection will hurt. I am old enough, and my research is limited enough, that my odds of ever doing some more work that I would think would be of suffiicent importance to even try to place in such a journal again are so small as to be non-existant. It will be this time, or never. You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the name of the journal, either. Some readers can probalby guess which journal I am shooting for, but I don’t want to jinx the process by naming the journal.
Jinxing… What a funny thing, I am absolutely certain that my mentioning the journal’s name will have no effect on the process whatsoever – still, a primal part of my reptilian soul tells me not to mention what journal it is. Sooner or later, I will let the readers of this blog in on my first choice of journals, probably after I have submitted it to the next choice.
At least, I should be able to turn the work around into a different manuscript for another journal relatively rapidly. And I think my second choice – probably the specialized journal, Invertebrate Biology – will accept my stuff without any qualms.
For the last few days I have been making illustrations. A number of these have been almagamations of images made from sequential video frames to show some of the behavioral processes of food capture or rejection. And all of these have to be within a specific size category and most of them should be grayscale. Even though I knew that such an outcome was likely, it is amazing how much information disappears along with the color. I probably will submit both color and gray-scale versions of the same image. Perhaps the reviewers will opt for one over the other. However, color images cost a lot more, and that money comes from the author.
Argh… the cost issues are awful. My readers – if there are any – in the scientific realm will realize this, but most other folks probalby don’t know that the costs for publication in these peer-reviewed journals are, at least on paper, borne by the authors. Often there are other sources that will help an impoverished author like myself, but unlike the commercial press that I normally write for, not only is the submission and selection process anguishing, you get to pay for the whole thing – or at least part of it, just to make you feel worse, I suppose.
Well, at least most journals will publish accepted papers regardless of the author’s ability to pay. Which is good, ’cause I have NO ability to pay.
I suppose it is time to get back to the process, so I will try to periodically keep you posted here.
Until next time,
Cheers,
