Friday, July 27, 2012

Two manuscripts sent

This is a new record for me. I have a paper a colleague and I co-wrote, that I did the final formatting and literature-review on that went off to a journal that is "expecting" it.

And I sent the big manuscript from last summer's work off to Southwestern Naturalist. Yeah, I've been forewarned that they "seem to be looking for reasons to reject stuff" but I'm telling myself I have to get used to gambling on submitting papers and not take rejections so personally.

One statement in their instructions to authors worries me a bit, though: you are told to submit a cover letter stating that your manuscript is submitted for "exclusive consideration" of the journal. I am thinking - I am HOPING - that that means you only must verify that you have not sent it out to other journals at the same time. What I am NOT hoping is that they retain some kind of right after rejection, where you can't submit to another journal if they reject your manuscript...I can't see that being legal but then there are a lot of weird things that happen in intellectual-property law. (And at any rate: it seems wrong that a good-but-not-really-appropriate-for-the-journal manuscript would be required to be ashcanned rather than sent elsewhere).

I don't know. It's been a long time since I tried publishing in a "big" journal and stuff has changed with intellectual property law, so I don't know. I did the cover letter as requested but will be extremely distressed if I'm told I can't resubmit the manuscript elsewhere upon receiving a rejection....

(I'll also be distressed that I spent $50 on a Spanish translation of my abstract....)

1 comment:

Charlotte said...

Let's think positive that both manuscripts are accepted and published. Expect the best.