How are papers handled from submission to publication?
Manuscripts are submitted to the editorial office. The Editor-in-Chief screens them initially to decide whether to assign them to an associate editor or to process them himself. In either case, expert reviewers are selected, normally four. The manuscripts are forwarded to them. To ensure timeliness of publication, reviewers are expected to reply within a week. Reminders are sent to those who do not. THE MWCL POLICY IS THAT NO DISPOSITION TO BE MADE WITHOUT, AT LEAST, TWO CONSISTENT RECOMMENDATIONS. If a manuscript is processed by an associate editor, he is allowed to make an initial recommendation based on the established guidelines. Nevertheless, the Editor-in-Chief makes all the final dispositions. Copies of all reviewers comments and the final disposition are forwarded to authors, the reviewers, and the associate editor who handled the manuscript.
Our process is entirely electronic. Papers are tracked with an Access data base, and the Associate Editors are encouraged to do the same. The entire system: data base, correspondence, manuscripts, and reviews, is operated on notebook computers. An assistant is used to assemble the issues and help maintain the reviewer database. Many authors have commented on the high quality of the reviews. Many reformatting changes are requested before the papers are sent out for review. An additional common request is to make improvements in graphs. Typically there are five reviews solicited for each paper, and the reviewers are asked to return the review within a month. Reviewers are generally not asked for more than one review per year per editor. So that an reviewer could do as many as six reviews a year but generally much less. Thus it is unlikely that any reviewer bias can impact multiple papers. Reviewers are made Inactive on the reviewer list if they are slow to respond so that they will not b
