hate hate hate

I hate academic publishing. Hate hate hate it. I would never even bother to do it if promotion and "post tenure review" didn't demand it.

It's one of the most soul-sucking, potentially self-confidence destroying SCAMS out there.

If you get an article accepted: you sign away your copyright to it (for most journals, that's still the case). That means, if you want to legally copy your article for a coursepack or for your class to read, you have to pay the publisher - for something YOU wrote. You also have to pay anywhere from $300 to $1000 a year for a journal subscription/society membership. You also may be levied "page charges" (which are generally paid by the university, but still). Oh, and libraries get even more screwed - their subscriptions are often at least twice what an individual's is. I suppose because so many people use the journal.

But that's if you get an article accepted.

If you get one rejected, like I did today, you get a couple terse letters with contradictory information in them, where one tells you that YOU SUCK AND GO AWAY NOW and the other says, well, it's not so bad but you were kind of sloppy on your citations here, oh, and you never referred to Big Famous Guy's work and that could piss off Big Famous Guy (even though Big Famous Guy's work is totally peripheral to what you're doing). And you look at the rejection letters (which now come via E-mail, which is somehow even worse) and you just feel awful.

I literally can hear the sound of a toilet flushing away that eight month's worth of work.

No, I can't resubmit. There are two journals I know of in this field, and this is the "lesser" of them. So I'm screwed. I have an unpublishable article.

And I was really depending on this article to break my string of journal rejections.

I don't know. Maybe I just totally suck. Maybe nothing I do is worth it and I should just hang up the research thing and be grateful that I even got tenure and pray like mad that they never make publishing a requirement to retain tenure, because I'm really afraid I'm never going to publish successfully again.

All around me, my colleagues are getting articles accepted and published, and that just adds to my belief that I suck as a researcher and a writer (and I also think some days that I suck as a teacher). I should just quit and do something else, except I don't know anything else. My skill-set is pitifully small.

I read the rejection letters. I admit, I didn't read them word for word because at this moment it's still too painful (I got the rejection this afternoon).

What's wrong with me? Why can't I write a good article that gets accepted? How the HELL did I manage to get a job and get tenure? How will I manage to hold on to my job and tenure with zero scholarly productivity (I don't think "I tried" counts).

I have no new projects planned - I have one that will be a couple years off, I have one I could revive and redo but I kind of suspect it will get ash-canned too. I have one other article in review and I sincerely hope it gets accepted or I will really lose whatever shaky self-esteem I have.

I love doing research, but I hate the whole publishing game. I hate that there is zero institutional support for this short of them paying page charges once you get an article published - there's no release time, we've been told research is "on our own time," if we need supplies and don't get a grant we either need to buy them ourselves or (hopefully) there's a bit left in the department budget. It just sucks. It's like we're expected to do this thing, but there's nothing under us - like they're poking us to go out onto the high wire, but they haven't bothered to put in a net. (Writing grants is even worse. Most people I know have given up on grant-writing, at least for large external grants, because there's no help and no support).

I'm just really sad and fed-up right now. I wish some days that all I had to do was come in, teach, and go home. I was even all excited to gear back up for that research project I referred to, but now that I look at it through eyes jaded by an article rejection, I feel like it's just sh*t too, like everything I write is sh*t and I don't even know why I bother to try.