Wit's End

Cameron Neylon alerted me to this post yesterday: What happens when you tweet an Open Access Paper. Oddly, this reflects pretty accurately part of the discussion I was having with Chris Willmott yesterday morning. I wrote about my own experience of this recently - By The Numbers - A Note To Journal Editors:

In the 10 days to 30th September, this item received:

534 hits on the landing page
122 PDF downloads

It's difficult to assess how this compares with"conventional" academic publishing, because beyond citations, I don't really have comparable numbers. I also don't know how these figures will decay with time.
What I do know is that on 7th July I submitted a similar manuscript to a "conventional" academic journal. On 7th October, it has still not been reviewed.
Unacceptable.

Update: How to fix academic publishing again already

I'm on the point of giving up on submitting papers to "conventional" academic journals, and going down the route of putting my research online and promoting it via social channels.

Somebody stop me.

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