Long publication times (another reason to bioRxive your paper)
It has been a while that I wanted to write about the long publication times. Of course, many people are aware that publication times are long, but what is our exact expectation of publication times? Although the majority of academics have gone through the (probably necessary) pain of endless editorial decisions, peer reviews, and editing rounds of minutia, when it comes to chat with early career researchers such as grad students, we tend to be overoptimistic when estimating manuscript publications
I thought I would keep track of the times of some of my papers and put them here (disclosure: these are not population statistics, so it may vary due to randomness, luck, disciplines, etc.)
In the Fig. in the right you can see the statistics of bioRxiv, submission, rejection, revisions, acceptances and publication days, of 5 of my papers.
My average time from submission day to online publication day is of 207 days, and the maximum was 658 days (this was not because the paper was just in our desk waiting for reviews, we were constantly resubmitting reviews or to new journals, it ended up in the cover of PLOS Genetics ;-) ). Note that these estimates are only to publication date, these projects had been on the works for years until the project was publication ready.
I feel that because I bioRxived all these papers, I was motivated and the long publication times did not affect me that much (see related blog post). I kept going and worked in multiple projects in parallel. So keep it up!
