Keith S. Taber
Dear Alexander
Thank you for your email asking about review times.
You will appreciate that I was a little confused by your message.
You tell me that you are a "Deputy Head of Foreign Economic Legislation at the Financial Legislation Department" somewhere unspecified (apparently in Ukraine, although you use a hotmail account) and that you "have a PhD degree in Law" and you are eager to get your article (unspecified) published in "the" (unspecified) journal. So immediately I am quite confused as I am not associated with any journals in that field at all. I edit a journal in chemistry education, but that would hardly seem relevant.
Then you suggest you are "just a beginner at it". I assume 'it' here is scholarly research, or writing for publication – in which case perhaps you should be co-writing with a mentor or supervisor – and perhaps not targeting top international journals at this stage. This claim is hardly likely to recommend you to high status research journals.
Even if you were referring to the journal I edit, it is not possible to "specify the approximate time it would take to review the article". Usually authors get a first decision within a matter of weeks – but this depends on the availability of suitable reviewers, and whether the reviewers who first comment offer consistent recommendations. Nearly all articles published pass through two or more rounds of review as authors respond to initial reviewer comments, and the reviewers evaluate the revised manuscript(s). Articles certainly can sometimes be published within a month, but it may take much longer.
I am pleased to hear you have "many good ideas and ongoing projects in different fields of science… connected to further development and promotion of my scientific work and that of my colleagues" – that must be quite time consuming in view of your professional responsibilities as a lawyer. I can certainly understand that you "do not have much free time". However, even if "that is why my assistant will respond to the messages", journal editors tend to only deal with article authors, not their staff.
To be honest, it seems obvious that you do not actually have any work to submit to any journal I am involved with, and that no one undertaking serious scholarly work would send such vague undirected emails asking for this kind of information, so please forgive me if I assume some kind of scam or scheme is behind your message. Perhaps your request was innocent enough, but I wonder how many people you sent this message to? And what you hope to do with any responses?
Likely you will only get responses from journals desperate for authors looking to pay for publication regardless of article quality. As Groucho might have advised, you would not want to be published in the kind of journal that would encourage contributions in response to your kind of approach.
Best wishes
Keith
(First published on 2nd October, 2015 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/)
How can you effectively identify the strengths and weaknesses of a research paper?
Take a look at https://science-education-research.com/research-methodology/research-writing/