Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Deep Roots of Delay
- Reviewer Scarcity and Fatigue
- Editorial Bottlenecks and Legacy Processes
- The “Prestige Paradox”
- Fear of Speed Equals Fear of Compromise
- Open Access and Preprints: A Partial Cure?
- How Technology Could Actually Help
- Incentivizing Speed Without Sacrificing Quality
- Cultural Resistance and the Slow Turn of the Wheel
- Conclusion
Introduction
Academic journals are famously sluggish. Submitting a paper can feel like tossing it into a black hole, waiting months—sometimes over a year—for a verdict that ranges from “revise and resubmit” to the dreaded “desk rejection.” This pace can be maddening for authors, especially early-career researchers on the tenure clock or those in fast-moving fields. The issue is so notorious that it’s become the subject of memes, laments in conference hallways, and the occasional viral blog post.
The slowness of academic journals isn’t just an inconvenience—it affects the entire research ecosystem. It delays the spread of new knowledge, slows down responses to urgent issues, and hampers interdisciplinary collaboration. And yet, despite near-universal recognition of the problem, progress toward meaningful reform is glacial.
Why do academic journals move at such a sluggish pace in handling workflows? What are the structural and cultural reasons behind the delays? And how can we fix things? If we want academic publishing to keep pace with the needs of contemporary scholarship, it’s time to get serious about speeding it up, without sacrificing quality.
The Deep Roots of Delay
One fundamental reason academic journals are slow is that they were built for a different era. The traditional journal model, which emerged in the 17th century, was designed around print cycles, slow correspondence, and peer review conducted by mail. Surprisingly, that system still shapes many aspects of today’s digital publishing workflows.
Much of the delay happens in the peer review process. Editors must identify willing and qualified reviewers, a harder task than ever as academics become increasingly overburdened. Once reviewers agree, they often delay submitting their reviews—sometimes for months—due to their own workload. Editors may need to chase reviewers, extend deadlines, or start over entirely when a reviewer drops out.
Moreover, peer review is typically unpaid and largely unrecognized. Most systems do not offer a financial incentive or formal credit, and reviewers are often left in the shadows. In this context, delays are understandable, if not exactly forgivable.
Reviewer Scarcity and Fatigue
The shortage of reviewers is no longer a quiet concern—it’s a crisis. The demand for peer reviewers has skyrocketed with the explosion of new journals, preprints, and interdisciplinary submissions. However, the pool of qualified reviewers hasn’t grown at the same rate. This imbalance strains the system and contributes to publication delays.
Reviewer fatigue also plays a role. Academics receive frequent review requests, and many decline due to time constraints. It’s not uncommon for a paper to be sent to over ten reviewers before two agree to review. These cascading delays compound quickly and unpredictably.
Institutions often place little formal value on peer review contributions. While publishing a paper counts toward promotions or grants, reviewing ten doesn’t. Some platforms now offer incentives like Publons credit or ORCID integration, but these remain peripheral in most academic reward systems.
Editorial Bottlenecks and Legacy Processes
Even when reviews are returned, editors can become another point of delay. Academic editors are often unpaid or underpaid volunteers managing journals on top of their full-time jobs. Decision-making may be slow, communication uneven, and technological systems outdated.
Moreover, many journals still use legacy submission platforms that are clunky, unintuitive, and ill-equipped for automation. Manuscripts must be manually formatted to arcane style guides, metadata must be input by hand, and communication is often siloed. In an age of AI, real-time collaboration, and slick SaaS platforms, many academic journals are still using digital equivalents of fax machines.
This isn’t just inefficient—it’s demoralizing. Authors waste time formatting submissions instead of refining arguments. Editors slog through repetitive tasks that could be automated. Reviewers struggle with inflexible systems that don’t match their workflows.
The “Prestige Paradox”
Ironically, the most prestigious journals are often the slowest. Their selectivity attracts a flood of submissions, increasing the editorial burden. High rejection rates mean many papers are desk-rejected after weeks of internal review. If accepted, papers undergo rounds of revision, professional copyediting, and layout design before publication—steps that add polish but also time.
This prestige paradox feeds into academic culture. Scholars aim for the top-tier journals because they are valued by hiring committees and funding bodies. But these journals’ very selectivity ensures slow turnaround, creating a trade-off between visibility and speed.
What’s worse, many researchers submit their paper to a top-tier journal knowing it will likely be rejected, just to say they tried. This “submission cascade” means the same paper might circulate through multiple journals over several years before finding a home, each time repeating the cycle of review and delay.
Fear of Speed Equals Fear of Compromise
There’s a deep-seated belief in academia that speed is the enemy of rigor. Faster publishing is sometimes viewed with suspicion, as if it inevitably compromises peer review quality. While understandable, this belief is increasingly out of step with how knowledge production works today.
High-quality, fast review is not only possible—it’s happening. Preprint platforms, rapid review models in biomedical research, and post-publication peer review systems show that speed and integrity can coexist. In fact, delays themselves can introduce bias, as novelty fades or urgent findings become outdated before publication.
What’s needed is a redefinition of what constitutes “rigor.” Rigorous peer review doesn’t require endless delays—it requires clear criteria, motivated reviewers, transparent processes, and appropriate editorial oversight. Slowness, in itself, is not a virtue.
Open Access and Preprints: A Partial Cure?
Open access (OA) publishing and preprint servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, and SocArXiv have disrupted the traditional publishing timeline. By allowing authors to share research before formal peer review, preprints accelerate dissemination and reduce the exclusivity of journal gatekeeping.
However, preprints are not peer-reviewed, and for many academic institutions, they don’t “count” toward promotion or funding. This limits their uptake, especially in fields where journal prestige still dominates. Some OA journals also charge high article processing charges (APCs), creating new barriers for researchers without institutional support.
Despite these challenges, the open access ecosystem has demonstrated that faster publishing is feasible. The next step is integrating speed with rigor, allowing preprints to undergo peer review in open, iterative, and transparent formats that retain scholarly credibility.
How Technology Could Actually Help
Ironically, while academia studies technology obsessively, it’s often slow to adopt it internally. Many publishing workflows are still done manually: matching reviewers, formatting citations, sending reminders. These tasks are ripe for automation.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools can assist in reviewer selection, flagging ethical concerns, and checking for statistical robustness. Natural language processing tools can summarize reviewer comments or detect methodological issues. Platforms like ScholarOne and Editorial Manager are slowly integrating these capabilities, but the transition is halting and uneven.
There’s also scope for better UX. Author dashboards, reviewer interfaces, and editorial tools could be vastly improved. Too many journal platforms feel like they were designed in 2004 and haven’t been updated since. If TikTok can deliver real-time analytics to content creators, academic journals can surely manage a halfway decent status tracker for submitted papers.
Incentivizing Speed Without Sacrificing Quality
The culture of academia doesn’t reward speed. If anything, it punishes it. Authors who publish quickly are sometimes seen as cutting corners. Journals that move fast are viewed with suspicion. Reviewers who reply promptly are rarely acknowledged.
To change this, we need new incentive structures. Reviewers should get formal credit—perhaps through DOIs for reviews, ORCID integration, or tokens redeemable for publication fee discounts. Editors should be supported with training, stipends, and modern infrastructure. Authors should be allowed to share preprints, receive early feedback, and build visibility before formal publication.
Some journals are already experimenting with this. The Journal of Open Source Software uses a rapid review process tied to GitHub, with visible discussions and community input. eLife has shifted to a model that de-emphasizes accept/reject decisions and emphasizes open peer commentary. These models aren’t perfect, but they demonstrate that publishing speed can coexist with scholarly standards.
Cultural Resistance and the Slow Turn of the Wheel
Let’s be honest: academia is slow not just because of systems, but because of culture. Tradition looms large. People often equate slowness with seriousness. Journals are wary of reputational risks. Committees cling to metrics that rely on established publication hierarchies.
Change won’t come easily. It will require coordinated pressure from multiple directions: authors demanding better service, institutions rewarding innovative publishing, and funders supporting reform. Universities must stop evaluating researchers solely by where they publish and start looking at what and how they publish.
Still, there is movement. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how urgent and achievable rapid publishing can be. Papers were preprinted, peer-reviewed, and disseminated at unprecedented speed, and it worked. That momentum doesn’t have to be temporary.
Conclusion
The glacial pace of academic journals is not inevitable. It’s a function of outdated systems, cultural inertia, and misaligned incentives. These problems are real but not insurmountable. Across the scholarly world, there are growing efforts to speed up publishing without sacrificing the values of peer review, transparency, and rigor.
Technology can help. Culture must shift. But above all, we need to reimagine academic publishing not as a series of locked gates, but as a living, breathing conversation. Speed is not the enemy of quality. Done right, it can be its ally.
Academia prides itself on generating new knowledge. It’s time for the systems that distribute that knowledge to catch up.