Initial review: ratchet up expectations for peer reviewers. It does not take four weeks to read a manuscript and write a report. Conditional on no desk rejection, economics journals take weeks longer to reach a first decision.

Revise and Resubmit: conversations that should be going on in published literature are instead taking place in private, between authors and reviewers. Ellison (2002) notes that R&Rs were once used sparingly and were in fact a mark of shame. One option: eliminate R&Rs entirely.

Less radical option: limit referees to one shot at the paper. Set expectations that R&R requests will involve if...then statements making the future transparent: e.g., "if the results are robust to adding controls for x, y, z, the revision will be accepted."

Post-acceptance: jettison the anachronisms of the print era. What's the point of having an "online appendix" if ~100% of readers access the article online in the first place? Lag between acceptance and publication should be no more than 2-3 weeks for typesetting/proof review.

Here's a radical one: allow parallel submission. Journals currently demand monopoly power over a manuscript for as many years as it takes to render a decision. Require authors to disclose multiple submission & to withdraw from one journal as soon as another accepts it.

Competition is good, right? Incentives matter, right? Parallel submission is the norm for academic book manuscripts and let's face it, economics articles are looking more like books all the time.

Some journals require authors to disclose conflicts of interest. That's good. I've never been asked to disclose conflicts of interest as a reviewer, or as an editor. Journals should ask, and should inform authors if their MS was reviewed by a conflicted referee. Readers too.

Readers should also be informed when a published manuscript was handled by a non-"arm's length" editor. In an ideal world, this would never happen.

Currently @AEAjournals allow editorial correspondence to be forwarded from one journal to another. Why not automatically forward rejected manuscripts for immediate consideration, based on initial reports? Acceptance need not be binding on the author.

@JakeVigdor Research economists get paid to produce high quality research. Role of journals is to incentivize quality research, to improve quality via peer review, and to filter to make sure quality gets showcased. Overall Econ journals fulfill these roles pretty well, in my view.

@JakeVigdor You may be interested in editorial model at @SociologicalSci , a non-profit #OA journal some of us started in 2013, partly out of frustration w/ soc's publication woes. No R&Rs, up-or-down decision in 30 days, evaluative not developmental reviews, forum for post-pub comments.

@JakeVigdor Rapid clinical reviews saved my career. I got rough 3rd year review. I wrote like crazy that summer+published in JAMA, Pediatrics, J Peds, etc. That would have been mechanically impossible in Econ or sociology. Papers would have sat under someone’s coffee cup while I got bounced.

@JakeVigdor My additional suggestion: shorter papers. Relative to other paper-based disciplines, our papers are long, often needlessly so. Many w/b books in other disciplines. Lengthens time to publication; hard for interdisciplinary university P&T committees to compare.