The Price of Fame

Here is an outline of how the academic peer-reviewed publication process works (at least in my experience):

1. Spend a couple of years collecting data, developing models, reading literature, talking with co-authors, procrastinating, complaining you are busy, writing, re-writing, questioning, doubting, and eventually producing a working paper.
2. Spend another year honing, revising, questioning, doubting, rewriting, downplaying significance, motivating co-authors*, complaining, wondering, forgetting to meet deadlines, procrastinating and eventually deciding the working paper is submission worthy.
3. Submit the paper to a journal. 
4. Spend 6 months waiting, wondering, forgetting, working, teaching, writing (another paper), doubting, anticipating mediocre reviews from uninterested, distracted, unmotivated, unincentivized** reviewers.
5. Receive mediocre reviews from uninterested, distracted, unmotivated, unincentivized reviewers along with a polite, unsubtle rejection letter from a slightly more interested, slightly less distracted, slightly more motivated, slightly more incentivized editor.
6. Kick the dog***.
7. Repeat steps 3 and 4.
8. Receive optimistic reviews from different but still uninterested, distracted, unmotivated, unincentivized reviewers.
9. Discard any modicum of integrity, compromise your beliefs, your standards, your norms and spend 3 months revising the paper to address any and all comments from the different but still uninterested, distracted, unmotivated, unincentivized reviewers.
10. Resubmit the paper to the journal is step 7 and spend another 6 months waiting, wondering, forgetting, working, teaching, writing (another paper), doubting, anticipating rubber-stamp positive reviews from the different but still uninterested, distracted, unmotivated, unincentivized reviewers.
11. Receive an acceptance letter from the editor with instructions on how to follow a nonstandard set of guidelines for formatting your paper for final publication.
12. Spend 10 minutes revising your curriculum vitae to list the paper as forthcoming,
13. Spend 3 months procrastinating, revising, adding periods (and commas, parentheses, volume numbers, etc) to your bibliographic citations.
14. Resubmit the final version of the paper.
15. Spend 2 months awaiting receipt of the copyright agreements, signing over most (all?) rights to your intellectual property to the journal.
16. Spend another 2 months waiting for galley proofs of your article.
17. Receive the galley proofs along with notification that the publisher is on a tight publication schedule and all galley proofs must be  checked thoroughly, completely and dramatically within 12 hours of receipt of the galleys (OK, that's an exaggeration.  They usually give you 2 days).
18. Submit the galley proofs on time three weeks late.
19. Wait another 3 months for final notification of a publication date which is 1 year hence.
20. Open your inbox on a Monday morning to the following notification that you are in the final stages of the rewarding academic publication process:

To: Timothy Haab ([email protected])

The Ohio State University

From: <redacted journal name>

Please remit US$373.75, which is 25% of the page charges incurred for your article with <three redacted co-authors names> entitled <redacted title> which appears in <redacted journal name>.

Ah, the glory.

*I am not the motivator.  I am usually the one who needs to be motivated.

**Is that a word?

***That's a metaphor people, sheesh.