I'd like to share some news and plans regarding AJP.
As of June 1, 2021, we are using a new manuscript system, Peer X-Press (PXP), which is the service provided by our publisher, the American Institute of Physics Publishing. It will facilitate all aspects of manuscript submission, peer review, and manuscript tracking. It offers many improvements over our current editorial software, including a modern and user-friendly interface and the ability to conveniently upload a wide variety of supplementary materials for reviewers to consider.
We'll try to make this transition seamless for our submitters and reviewers, and we hope that you'll forgive us when the stitches occasionally show through. (And please let us know so that we can fix the problems when they occur.) We'll continue handling existing manuscripts through Editorial Express, while new submissions will be accepted on PXP, so your editors will have a lot of windows open on our desktops. You'll access both systems through the Submissions Procedures webpage at ajp.aapt.org.
Besides ease of use for submitters and reviewers, another advantage to PXP is that it will allow us to better track manuscripts and examine statistics in order to improve our processes. At present, even collecting basic data on submission outcomes is a challenge, as I found when I tried to put together the information for this column. The following submission statistics for April 18, 2020 to April 17, 2021 represent much more time than I ever wanted to spend assembling data from multiple spreadsheets. There were 989 submissions during this period, and the current status of the 407 that were sent for review is shown in Fig. 1.
The first thing you'll ask is, “What about the 582 submissions that were not sent for review?” Of these, 39 were accepted without review (columns, editorials, book reviews, letters), while 543 were rejected without review, based on the editorial policy on the journal website. We've actually taken an important step toward bringing down that number of rejections. Those of you who have submitted a paper since September may have noticed that the submission process now asks you to briefly justify your submission in terms of the editorial policy and offers a link to that web page. I apologize for that extra step, but the result has been that the number of summarily rejected manuscripts decreased by more than 30 per month. Without it, we would have received over 1200 manuscript in the past year, and our summary rejection rate would have been about 65%.
What do these data tell us about the acceptance rate? Depending on the outcomes of the papers that are currently under review or returned for revision, the overall acceptance rate is somewhere in the range of 9%–23%. (I'm not including submissions that were accepted without review.) It's probably closer to the higher end, as, typically, decisions to reject are made after the first round of review, after a median time of only 36 days, so many of the papers that have passed through the first round of review and have been returned for revision will ultimately be accepted. (Good news, for those of you working on revisions!) Of course, that acceptance rate should be going up slightly over the next year, since the rate of summarily rejected manuscripts is now lower.
In addition to decreasing inappropriate submissions, we've also been working to decrease the time to decision. The 86 accepted manuscripts were under consideration for an average of 125 days and a median of 102 days. A median time to acceptance of just over 3 months sounds pretty good, but it could be artificially low, since the papers that are still out for review would include the slow ones. As an alternate metric, I went through the back issues to find the average and median times to acceptance for January—May of 2021, 2018, and 2015. These are shown in Fig. 2. A simple linear interpolation allows me to confirm the journal's future: In just a few years, my editorial successor will be able to accept your papers before they are even submitted.
Time to acceptance for articles published in AJP in January–May issues.
Those of you who have been paying attention to the journal length may have noticed that you've been getting more pages for your money since September. I'm not sure how COVID gave anyone more time to write, but apparently that was true for some of you, and we had a surge in submissions starting in spring 2020 that lasted through the fall. Those extra submissions led to a higher than normal number of accepted pages. Typically AJP issues are 80 pages long, but we started creeping up last August and hit a whopping 148 pages in December 2020. All told, we've published an extra 352 pages between August 2020 and June 2021, giving everyone more than four free issues worth of papers! The backlog is now down to a much more manageable two months, meaning that, if your paper is accepted in early June, it might progress through copy editing by July so that it could appear in August, but it will actually appear in October. I know that seems slow to you, but to me, a small backlog feels like insurance against the possibility that COVID will end and no one will feel like coming inside, sitting down, and writing a paper.
Finally, one more update: You may have noticed a new feature that started in May: Randall Munroe has granted permission to include a few of his xkcd comics when we have space at the ends of articles.1–3 (Pro-tip: You have to subscribe to the paper version or download the article pdf to see them.) Tom Greenslade had kindly provided 1000 (!) beautiful photographs of antique apparatus, and we've been burning through them since sometime around 2002. It's time to start bringing in some new material. I hope you'll enjoy the comics, and I also hope you'll consider sending me other material, which could include favorite physics quotations, items from the news (or Twitter!), or even reminiscences of colleagues and times gone by. Send it to [email protected]. Remember that, if it's not your own words, we'll need to get permission to publish it.
It's been great hearing from some of you and getting to know you through email. Please do let me know what you like and don't like about AJP and share your ideas for improvements. I look forward to your messages.