Start to finish

Sometime in the year 2000, I walked into the Queen Victoria Market and saw one of the seafood stores had live spanner crabs, which I had been very interested in seeing. I bought some and did some experiments with them.

That project was sort of officially laid to rest this last Wednesday. That was the day I got the actual printed reprints from the journal article I published about them in Crustaceana.

So what happened in between?

I moved across the Pacific and got a new job in September 2001. I worked on the manuscript off and on, and finally submitted it to the first journal #1 in May 2005. It was rejected in June 2005, but comments suggested it might be appropriate for a different journal.

Taking the reviewers' cue, I resubmitted that same month. The reprint I received incidated they got their copy on 5 July 2005. The reprint also notes the final version of the manuscript came in 19 October, so the external review, my revisions and corrections, and editorial decision took about three and a half months.

From there, the paper was actually published in the February issue of Crustaceana, but I didn't see anything in electronic form on the web until May 2006. I'd be interested to know when libraries actually got their copies in the mail. And that makes another three months from online publication to printing and shipping of actual reprints.

Coincidentally, I also finally received a copy of Crustacean Experimental Systems in Neurobiology. I have a chapter in that book, and it was published four years ago now. But it has an average price tag for specialty academic books (triple digits), so it's not the sort of thing you go out and buy on a whim. Buying it was a little reward to myself I got with the money I got for teaching a grad class this summer.