The SV-POW! journal finder
August 19, 2013
A while back, Elsevier launched its journal finder, tagged “Find the perfect journal for your article”.
Since our priorities in choosing a journal are a bit different from Elsevier, here is the SV-POW! journal finder.
(That’s version 2, by the way. Here’s the old version 1.)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
August 19, 2013 at 8:21 pm
ha ha!
Once PeerJ is ISI-listed and a “top quartile” journal for paleontology, I’ll use it.
*sigh*
August 19, 2013 at 8:22 pm
Oh, sure. We’re just talking about science, not politics.
August 19, 2013 at 8:23 pm
PLOS ONE has waivers for those who don’t have $1350.
August 19, 2013 at 8:27 pm
Fixed it for you.
August 19, 2013 at 8:28 pm
And the waivers are not even hard to get…just ask and they will email it to you!
August 19, 2013 at 8:30 pm
There’s other open access journal options too though. :-( APP, PE, etc.
August 19, 2013 at 8:33 pm
It’s true: APP and PE are both good journals. (I’ve been in APP twice, and Matt five times AFAIK.)
But PLOS ONE and PeerJ have the advantage that they review only on objective quality and not on subjective “importance”. And I am pretty much done with playing the subjective “important” game and risking rejection for spurious reasons.
August 19, 2013 at 8:51 pm
By the way, Palaeontologia Electronica rejected the paper that became Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks for what I felt at the time were spurious reasons. (Come to think of it, with the benefit of hindsight and the objectivity of distance, I still think they were spurious reasons.) So that’s why I’m not currently planning to waste my time there again.
BTW., Palaeontologia Electronica, that paper has so far racked up 5,000 unique visitors over on PeerJ. So I’m not unhappy about how it all turned out.
August 21, 2013 at 10:31 am
I must say that the paper improved quite a bit on the way from PE to PeerJ’s final version, but not more than is normal in any paper going through revisions.
Overall, a pity that PE didn’t take it.
August 21, 2013 at 10:35 am
For what it’s worth, my take is that the improvement from the version submitted to PE to the one published in PeerJ is pretty insubstantial — small enough to be outweighed by the cost of the delay in publication.
But no-one needs to take my word for it: both versions are freely available online: As submitted to PE, and as published in PeerJ.
August 21, 2013 at 10:40 am
To be clear, I am not saying that PeerJ’s round of review had no value: anyone can see for themselves that it did. What I’m saying is that the time that extra round took, and the effort that it cost Matt and me — not to mention you, the anonymous reviewer and John — was probably not worth that much improvement. All of us could have more fruitfully spent that time doing new work.
August 21, 2013 at 11:13 am
I read from your post on the rejection by PE the quote: “The manuscript reads as a long “story” instead of a scientific manuscript. Material and methods, results, and interpretation are unfortunately not clearly separated.”
Bad mistake, indeed.
August 21, 2013 at 11:15 am
Do you mean a bad mistake by the authors or by the reviewers? We wrote it the way we did, by design, because that’s the structure that best conveys the information. Arbitrary adherence to a structure designed to communicate quite different kinds of studies would have been just as worthless as forcing the narrative flow into sonnet structure.
August 21, 2013 at 11:23 am
I fully agree with your point of view: “that’s the structure that best conveys the information”. The best thing in this kind of discussions is to present all evidence, as you did, so the reader can make it’s own opinion. I made mine, for example. That quote says more about the bias of the reviewer than about the contents of the article, because it states that such a mean to deliver knowledge is not a “scientific manuscript”. Why not? As long as the story contains all the scientific evidence, this should be praised instead of being criticized, or so I believe.
August 22, 2013 at 7:27 am
man i was hoping that when i clicked ‘NO’ it would have given me $1350… :{