David Wood, a professor of accounting at BYU, recently gave a thoughtful talk at our home institution (UCF*) comparing and contrasting academic publishing across various fields, including accounting, economics, finance, psychology, and the natural sciences. (For its part, The Economist recently wrote up this review essay about new developments in academic publishing.) Without getting into all the details of The Economist’s report or Professor Wood’s talk, suffice it to say that many academics are not satisfied with the publishing process in their fields for a wide variety of reasons, but foremost among these reasons is the high rejection rate by the top journals across all fields. This begs the question, however, of what, if anything, should we do to fix this “problem” (assuming, of course, that this state of affairs represents a real problem worth solving), short of increasing the number of academic papers accepted for publication? On the one hand, we could continue to tweak the existing system, or we could adopt a revolutionary approach by creating a specialized journal willing to publish academic papers on an anonymous basis. Such a journal could thus focus on publishing short papers with highly original or innovative ideas, independently of who wrote such papers. What do you think?

*Go Knights!