Multiple submissions OK if intent OK

[Douglas Fitts]

mroussel at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) writes:
>In article <94010.171721FORSDYKE at QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <FORSDYKE at QUCDN.QueensU.CA>
>writes:
>>      The purpose of the rapid publication was to make sure that one's work
>>      was published/accepted prior to some critical grant or tenure-decision
>>      deadline. In these days of rising cut-off points one paper more might
>>      make all the difference between success or failure. One laggardly
>>      reviewer could disasterously influence an author's career. .....

>.......There
>is no doubt that many tenure and promotion decisions are made on the
>basis of simple publication counts.  We won't fix that by letting people
>jump publication queues when the work itself does not warrant it.

The solution to the problem of grant and promotion deadlines is to publish
enough articles in the intervening years so that the last six months before
our deadline does not come down to a fight about a laggardly reviewer or 
whether a journal will object to our submitting multiple copies of the 
same manuscript.

The answer to this is:  don't submit the same manuscript to lots of 
journals, submit *different* manuscripts to lots of journals!!!

If we can't manage this, what are we whining about?

Doug Fitts
University of Washington
dfitts at u.washington.edu