The review process of the Sage discourse journals generally
takes place according to the following procedure:
1. Papers are submitted to the general
submission address journals@discourses.org.
2. Authors receive an automatic reply
that invites them to "pre-review" their own paper by evaluating it with
respect to a list of detailed criteria.
3. After checking - and when necessary
adapting - their paper according to these criteria, authors may send
the paper directly to the Editor at his personal address:
teun@discourses.org.
4. The Editor sends an immediate
acknowledgement of receipt of e-mail messages and papers.
5. Generally within a few days the Editor
decides whether a submitted paper satisfies the criteria of the journal
the paper is submitted to, and then either rejects the paper with one
or more arguments (based on the criteria of each journal), or forwards
it to one (sometimes two or even three) reviewer(s) - while informing
the authors that the review process may take a few weeks. In other
words, authors submitting to our journals generally know within a few
days whether their paper is not suitable, and hence may submit
elsewhere.
6. The Editor may decide to recommend the
authors to submit the paper to another of the discourse journals if the
paper is more appropriate for the other journal.
7. Depending on the reviewer(s) and the
time they have available, reviews may take between a few days and two
months. The average review time is one month.
8. After one month, reviewers who have
not yet sent a review will be reminded to send their review as soon as
possible.
9. It sometimes happens that for personal
reasons a reviewer needs more time to write a review. Authors will be
kept informed about such a situation.
10. Reviewers decide whether a paper -
once admitted to the review process by the Editor, and hence satisfying
the general criteria of the journal - is to be rejected, resubmitted or
accepted. If papers are accepted, they usually are accepted under the
condition that recommended revisions are being made. Only in
exceptional cases papers are accepted as-is.
11. The Editor informs the authors about the decision of the reviewer(s), sends them a copy of the
review, and - if the paper is accepted - instructions for the
preparation of the next version.
12. Papers that have to be resubmitted
are being evaluated by the (same) reviewer as if they
were new submissions.
13. Final versions of papers should be
sent to the Editor, together with a filled out, printed, signed and
scanned Publishing Agreement. The Editor immediately acknowledges
receipt of the final version, and whether this version is acceptable.
14. Papers that have been accepted are
entered the publication queue of the journal they are submitted to.
15. Journal issues are generally prepared
between 2 to 4 issues ahead, so that there is a waiting list of several
months before papers/issues are being sent to the publisher.
16. About two-three months after being
sent to the publishers, papers are being type-set and proofs sent to
the authors in the form of PDF files.
17. The papers are generally published
between two to three months after being corrected by the authors.
18. Authors receive free electronic
"reprints" of their papers.
19. Depending on the speed of the review
and of the revision by the authors, as well on the number of papers on
the waiting list, the total time between submission and publication of
the papers may range between 6 and 12 months.