Sometimes ago, one of my friends forwarded a link (http://cacm.acm.org/opinion/articles/34492-viewpoint-time-for-computer-science-to-grow-up/fulltext) for an article titled “Time for computer science to grow up“. The author of this article argues against Computer Science related researchers using Conferences for publishing their findings against the preferred option in other fields, the journals. The author argue that Computer Science is no longer a young field to rely only on conferences and it has to use the journal model for publications. Even though I agree with this author in most counts, I am disagreeing his argument for a simple reason – the time take for a publication in a good Computer Science journal.
I, myself a Computer Science researcher (and academic) have many a times thought about it. The research group I was working during my PhD (this is the first time, I started doing some research 
), at that time was not worried about journal publications. When we have some findings, we go ahead and submit it to a conference, present it and go forward with our work. When I was about to finish my PhD, we decided to write some of my work as journal manuscripts. I in fact have submitted three such papers to journals by the time I completed my PhD.
Even though, the processing time of most of the journals for a manuscript is around 1 year, some famous journals take more than two years to come back to their authors. By that time the work in a field like computer science become outdated. In addition, if a manuscript is rejected, then it takes another round of 2+ painful years for the authors to get it accepted to a good journal.
I still wonder why these so called “good” journals take 2+ years to process a manuscript. I, myself have worked as a reviewer for most of these “good” journals in my area of research and the time given to reviewers by the editors of these journals are a maximum of 6 weeks. Maybe I will only know the reason when (and if) I become an editor of one of these journals. If the delay is in the processing of finding suitable reviewers, I agree that it is a time consuming and painful process. However, if the delay is just for keeping the papers in a queue, then, I think we should do something about it.
I also have listened to researchers complaining about the bias editors have towards manuscripts from certain institutions or from certain countries. I am not talking about their bias to accept or reject papers, but to process them fast. Jokingly, one of my good friends and me used to say that each famous research group runs its own journal. I wish it is not true, however, I am not sure! This friend used to say that we should only start writing journal papers, when we have our “own” journal – one for our group (so, obviously we are not that “famous” yet).
Whatever the cause it is, unless this processing delay is rectified, publishing in so called “good” journals is a waiting game for a common researcher – at least in Computer Sciences. Therefore, in my opinion, we should first grow up to solve this problem before growing up to adapt to the culture of publishing in journals.
