Interactions between journal attributes and authors' willingness to wait for editorial decisions

In this article, we report on a discrete choice experiment to determine the willingness-to-wait (WTW) in the context of journal submissions. Respondents to our survey are mostly active in the information sciences, including librarians. Besides WTW, other attributes included in the study are the quality of the editorial board, the quality of referee reports, the probability of being accepted, the ISI impact factor, and the standing of the journal among peers. Interaction effects originating from scientists' personal characteristics (age, region of origin, motivations to publish) with the WTW are highlighted. A difference was made between submitting a high quality article and a standard article. Among the interesting results obtained from our analysis we mention that for a high-quality article, researchers are willing to wait some 18 months longer for a journal with an ISI impact factor above 2 than for a journal without an impact factor, keeping all other factors constant. For a standard article, the WTW decreases to some 8 months. Gender had no effect on our conclusions.