Here are a few handpicked extracts:
"My experience from JPET and EB is that 20% to 30% of what is submitted is credible and probably should be published. The next 20% or so is more boring in my personal view, but correct, and perhaps interesting to groups of researchers with whom I might be less familiar. The bottom 50% should be rejected with good reason. Picking 10% or 5% puts editors in the position of either attempting
to make Delphic predictions of which of the 20% to 30% of acceptable papers will end up being more important, or simply expressing his or her own biases about topics or people. This seems to me to give editors far too much power. Rather than simply being gatekeepers to prevent false, plagiarized or trivial results from appearing in the scholarly record, editors can both push favored topics and individuals while closing off other topics or limiting debate. Now I firmly believe that editors generally do the best they can and try to be as even-handed as possible, but forcing editors to choose which 7% of submissions to publish places them in a almost impossible position."
"Finally consider the combined effect of the doubling of publication lags documented by Ellison (2001) and the lower acceptance rates discussed in his note on the evaluation of junior faculty. Just from a mathematical standpoint, establishing a tenurable CV in six years with two year editorial lags and 10% acceptance rates is tremendously harder than it was twenty years ago with nine month editorial lags and 20% acceptance rates. Conley, et al. (2011) explore this further and document the phenomenon empirically. We find, for example, that graduates of the top 30 Ph.D. programs from the 1986 cohort were about 65% more productive than those from the 2000 cohort."
"The significant fraction of the editors at the meeting reported that they have started to make heavy
use of bench rejections. The numbers seem to be about 20% to 40% and this is mostly something started in the last two or three years"
"So why would publishers not be willing to increase page budgets when the costs of doing so are so reduced? The answer is that most journals are sold under “big deal” contracts in which publishers in effect give libraries all or nothing offers to subscribe to their whole catalog in a given field rather than allowing librarians or consortia to chose their subscriptions journal by journal. See the work of Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee on this for more details. What the exact incentives of the publishers are here is not entirely clear. They seem to care weakly about the over-all quality of the bundle, but they get little or no extra revenue from increasing page counts. Thus, the decision to starve journals for pages in light of strongly increasing submission rates is driven by the commercial interests of
the publisher and is entirely contrary to the mission of fostering scholarly communication. This is a new, and I think compelling, reason to try to reclaim scholarly communication back from commercial publishers and into the community of scholars, and is the main point I would like to be taken from this letter." (my emphasis)
"Acceptance Rates at Various Journals (Year 2008 or Shortly Before)
American Economic Review* 0.07
Econometrica* 0.09
Journal of Political Economy 0.05
Quarterly Journal of Economics 0.04
BEJ Applied Economics (All 4 Levels)* 0.51
Canadian Journal of Economics 0.18
Economica 0.11
Economics Letters 0.17
European Economic Review 0.09
Industrial and Labor Relations Review 0.18
Journal of Human Resources 0.10
Journal of Labor Economics 0.08
Journal of Monetary Economics 0.20
Journal of Population Economics 0.21
Journal of Public Economics 0.10
Labour Economics* 0.15
RAND Journal of Economics 0.11
Review of Economics and Statistics 0.12
American Political Science Review 0.08
American Sociological Review 0.08"
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