deadlines for c4lj

[Emily Lynema]

Jrochkind and I were discussing deadlines over IRC this afternoon. We
were a little surprised to see that article drafts are due on April 25.
At this point, that's less than a month away. The deadline for
submitting proposals was March 14. Ron gave us 2 weeks to vote on the
proposals, which left us at March 28 for making a decision. That
basically only gives the authors 4 weeks to get their act together,
which seems like it's not much time. Here's the current guideline we
have for deadlines on the wiki:

A rough guideline based on first two issues:

* week -18: call for proposals out (when do we want this to happen?
need to make it official)
* week -14: Proposals due
* week -8: First draft due
* week 0: Publication

jrochkind and I wanted to suggest 2 things:

- give 1 week for voting on proposals, rather than 2 (especially for
those that come in right at the deadline and where most of the editors
have voted fairly quickly). That should give authors more like a minimum
of 5 weeks to work on their drafts.

- either move proposals due to week -15 or move first draft due to
week -7 to give another week in there. I'm thinking maybe the former? I
see with issue 2 we had 8 weeks in between first draft due and
publication. Do you all felt like we needed that full amount of time?

I feel like we should definitely go with the first suggestion, am
interested in discussing the second.

-emily
--
Emily Lynema
Systems Librarian for Digital Projects
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
emily_...@ncsu.edu

[Carol Bean]

Well, I'm willing to give suggestion one a try. But there are times
when I need more than one week to get to them. OTOH, there seems to
be enough discussion among enough editors to determine whether to
accept a proposal. I just think if we change it to one week, we may
get some accepted that are later voted down because there wasn't
enough time at the beginning for everyone to read the proposal and vote.

On the second suggestion, I think both alternatives are dicey, but I'd
rather go with moving the first draft due to week 7 than cutting short
the proposal window.

Carol

Carol Bean
bean...@gmail.com

[Edward Corrado]

I could have done my article sooner if I had to. I think the reason why
I finished mine later in the schedule is because I had the time. Never
do something before the deadline! So, I could take a week off of the
editing schedule. Of course, we won't have much lee-way with authors,
but I'm OK with that.

Really, either proposal bellow is OK with me.

Edward

Emily Lynema said the following on 03/26/2008 10:29 PM:

--
Edward M. Corrado
http://www.tcnj.edu/~corrado/
Systems Librarian
The College of New Jersey
403E TCNJ Library
PO Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
Tel: 609.771.3337 Fax: 609.637.5177
Email: cor...@tcnj.edu

[Ron Peterson]

I'm still curious if the short time between the deadline for proposals and the due date of the first draft is really a problem. Have we gotten feedback from the authors that it is a problem?

But if we re going to make changes, here are my thought:

Since people have been very diligent about voting on proposals I do think we can shorten the voting time to a week, or actually make the voting deadline the second friday after the proposal is received.

I don't think we should shorten the time between when we receive the first draft and publication. This is when most of the work of the Editorial Committee happens and the quality of the articles depend on having enough time to work with the authors to shape the article and iron out any problems. So, of the 2 choices I think I would rather move the proposal deadline up.

Ron

-emily
--

[Jodi Schneider]

I would really like to see the proposal deadline a few days AFTER publication of an issue.

I agree in general with shortening the timeline, and agree with Ron that shortening time-to-first-draft makes the most sense for us right now.

-Jodi

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Personally, I don't necessarily expect _every_ editor to look at _every_
proposal. I do hope that every proposal has _most_ editors looking at
it, but any given editor will only look at _most_ proposals, not every
one. That was what I recall from our discussion when we were starting
out, worrying about overburdening people and dealing with people's
different changing amounts of time available.

But I've been gratified to see that indeed every proposal has most
editors looking at it, so I think everything is working.

Jonathan

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu

[Tom Keays]

With only 2 issues under our belt, I don't know that we can generalize
the time table quite yet. For instance, proposals for issue 3 were
constrained by butting up against the conference, so the issue 3 time
table may not fit the pattern for the first 2 issues.

However, I'm quite willing to consider tweaking the time table further
and it may be that option 1 below will work out the best. Let's see
how it goes with this issue.

I do have to say, though, that based on the last issue (which is the
only one I had any articles to edit), having a long time between the
first draft and publication felt just about right. I had time for
plenty of dialog with the authors AND the other editors and was able
to have final versions of the articles ready more than a week before
publication. I'd rather a little slack the last week than a mad
scurry.

Tom