I suppose many of us know the feeling: You wrote a nice paper, it is accepted and reviewed, but it takes ages to finally come out in print (or online). This happened to me this year with two papers I had finished in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
The first was the result of my involvement with corpus annotations of social advertisements. The second was the outcome of an ESFLC-symposium on Gunther Kress‘ death in 2019. The social advertising paper (in German) now saw the light of day in the Handbook of Advertising Rhetoric (de Gruyter); the paper on G. Kress‘ social semiotics made its way into Text & Talk (finally to be compiled in a special issue on Kress‘ oeuvre and legacy – no one knows yet when this will be ready).
I am of course grateful to the reviewers, editors and production people for making these chapters happen. But I cannot help thinking that such considerable delays, which are not so atypical after all, are symptomatic of an over-worked and exhausted academia. It’s churning out work so fast that the pipelines get ever more clogged.
Of course, such delay is all the more painful if you’re particularly happy about your achievements, instances which, with every passing year in academic publishing, generally get ever rarer. The two papers at issue are such cases of papers I’m inclined to think are particularly felicitous and smooth. But that’s not for me to judge, of course.
Copyright (top): Florian KLAUER (unsplash) / Copyright bottom: Robert ANASCH (unsplash)
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 