Issues of work–life balance among JASIST authors and editors

Abstract

OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. Many dedicated scientists reject the concept of maintaining a "work-life balance." They argue that work is actually a huge part of life. In the mind-set of these scientists, weekdays and weekends are equally appropriate for working on their research. Although we all have encountered such people, we may wonder how widespread this condition is with other scientists in our field. This brief communication probes work-life balance issues among JASIST authors and editors. We collected and examined the publication histories for 1,533 of the 2,402 articles published in JASIST between 2001 and 2012. Although there is no rush to submit, revise, or accept papers, we found that 11% of these events happened during weekends and that this trend has been increasing since 2005. Our findings suggest that working during the weekend may be one of the ways that scientists cope with the highly demanding era of "publish or perish." We hope that our findings will raise an awareness of the steady increases in work among scientists before it affects our work-life balance even more.

What can new technology tell us about the reviewing process for journal submissions in BJET?

“…Most submissions were made on Monday, and there was strong evidence for authors and editors working on Sundays. These results are in line with those reported by Cabanac and Hartley () and Campos‐Arceiz, Koh and Primack (), but they are possibly different in different cultures (Magnone, ; Wang et al , ).…”

Personal digital archiving: an analysis of URLs in the .edu domain

“…Aspects of RDM and PIM can provide a solid foundation for academics and other academic library users to understand the necessity of PDA and to begin implementing best practices in their own digital creations. Creations might be relevant either personally, professionally, or both, as lines between the purely personal and the purely professional are blurred in the changing work-life balance observed in the academy (Cabanac and Hartley, 2013). Continuous access to e-mail (Waller and Ragsdell, 2012) and to smart phones (Dén-Nagy, 2014) could be said to contribute to the new norm in terms of work-life balance being observed.…”

Editorial Board Membership, Time to Accept, and the Effect on the Citation Counts of Journal Articles

“…As late as in the 1990s, the so-called "publication delays" (the time from submission to Publications 2016, 4, 21 2 of 8 publication) of journal articles were inspected [1,2] and only after 2000, with the widespread online availability of editorial and publication dates, researchers investigated "editorial delays" (time to accept) of papers in selected journals [3,4]. Some analyses have also been concerned with the editorial (submission, revision, acceptance) dates as such, and not with the time periods formed by them [5,6]. Additionally, only very recently, the effect of the time to accept on the citedness of a paper has been found to be weakly negative in Reference [7], as well as in Reference [8], for articles in a few top-tier journals; however, to the best of our knowledge, the influence of editorial board membership on citation counts has never been explored.…”