hat a submission is received by a journal to the date that it finally appears in print. Most of this delay is caused by delays in the postal service. The submission must travel from author to editor, and from editor to reviewers. Once the manuscript has reached the reviewer, some additional delay can be expected because of the low level of priority often given to reviewing for paper based journals. As a result, brown manila envelopes that contain manuscripts for review can often go ignored more weeks. Once reviewed, there are additional postal delays. Reviewer comments must travel back to the editor and be processed before finally reaching their destination in the hands of the expectant author. Unless the paper has been accepted for review as is, (an extremely unlikely eventuality) the process needs to be repeated a second time.(20)Even when the paper finally appears in print, there is still a significant wait before the paper achieves its full impact on the field. Indeed, as Steve Harnad (1991) points out eloquently, because of the long delay, the author may have lost interest in pursuing the original line and thus the work may never achieve its full potential impact....now the author must wait until his peers actually read and respond in some way to his work, incorporating it into their theory, doing further experiments, or otherwise exploring the ramifications of his [sic] contribution....[this] usually takes several years...and by that time the author, more likely than not, is thinking about something else. So a potentially vital spiral of peer interactions, had it taken place in 'real' cognitive time, never materializes, and countless ideas are instead doomed to remain stillborn. The culprit is again the factor of temp: the fact that the written medium is hopelessly out of synch with the thinking mechanism and the organic potential it would have for rapid interaction if only there were a medium that could support the requisite roun...
