The most painful decision in the publication game is the rejection that could easily have gone the other way. These are more heartbreaking that the clear rejections where you know you had no hope of getting in. Part of the pain comes from the fact that you now have to submit to a totally different journal and start all over again with new referees.
Well, now there is an idea whose time has finally come – the simultaneous submission to multiple journals. I must point out that this basic idea is at the heart of the BE Press Journal in Theoretical Economics, of which I am a Co-Editor. I can do this in all modesty as the idea came not from me but from Aaron Edlin and his fellow journal creators. Something like this has been adopted by the American Economic Review (AER), which now has five field journals (Econometrica will soon have two, including one currently Co-Edited by Jeff).
The procedure adopted by the AER is that if you submit to one of their field journals you can transfer your referee reports to the field journal. More importantly, you can ask to have your original referees’ cover letters to the original Editor also transferred. The cover letters presumably have an honest opinion of the paper that is very useful to the new Editor.
If this all works out, you avoid the problem of having to start over again. Plus, you save on total refereeing time as new sets of referees do not have to comment on the paper. (This is the other time-consuming part of academic life!)
But there is a missing market still. Referees may say: This paper is not appropriate for AER but may be appropriate for Econometrica. And they may be right. But you cannot transfer AER reports to Econometrica or vice-versa. This sort of transfer would also be huge in terms of increasing referee and author welfare. Jeff should work on it.
Cheap Talk 
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March 28, 2009 at 3:50 pm
hbi
In principle, there’s nothing to stop people from sending reports from submissions to other journals as part of the typical cover letter. Partly, I think this is just a question of norms (and the associated signalling value with breaking them).
Of course, institutions can try to help affect norms – in the way that these journals are doing. It’s worth noting that The Economic Journal are now explicitly telling authors that they are welcome to do so from any (not necessarily “associated” journals).
They’re also trying something different with referee reports – rather than rewarding referees for completing on time and doing decent reports with nominal payments, they’ve set up (large) annual prizes for the best reports.
It will be interesting to see how both initiatives pan out.
March 28, 2009 at 7:32 pm
sandeep
Thanks, Heski.
Interesting.
To have real transfer though, you need the referees cover letter to Editor too.
March 29, 2009 at 1:35 am
jeff
As Sandeep mentioned, the Econometric Society will soon have two field journals to go with the flagship journal Econometrica. Plans are being worked out now for sharing referee reports and cover letters. The most important thing is to have the identity of the referee made known. This compromises anonymity and I think that is the main impediment to wider sharing of reports.
March 29, 2009 at 9:53 am
hbi
For a decent and comprehensive report, one would thing that there should still be some value to a report without a cover letter and that’s anonymous … at least for the reports I write! and (some of) the ones that I receive.
Of course this is not a full substitute, but can get the editor to then only solicit say one rather than three new reports.
As far as getting over the anonymity for a wide range of journals, the editors know each other pretty well. It’s not that hard to imagine to an editor getting in touch with another and asking “can you send me more?” the trickier thing of course, is compromising the anonymity of the referees but then I’m not sure that the AER now tells me that as a referee for AER may report and letters might get used for another journal. From memory what happened the one time that a report I used got passed to the AEJ I was asked if I would mind if my cover letter got passed on? Though you may know more than me.
For rare occasions (and it’s hard to believe that authors would want to pass on reports cross journals all that often), I think an editor getting in touch with another editorial office, who in turn got in touch with the referees and said “Would you mind if we shared your cover letter?” is plausible, not too burdensome and would speed things up in cases where they should be speeded up.
March 29, 2009 at 6:22 pm
sandeep
If journals use the same centralized software system for paper submissions, then perhaps we can make these transfers of cover letters with less worry about maintaining anonymity. Several seem to use the same software already, though I guess it is not centralized.
Anyway, I want to thank our sole reader, Heski, for his comments (my mother does not know about the blog yet).