I received a notification today with the heading:
“Routledge author update: your article is now in the latest issue of Westminster Studies in Education”
The main text read:
“Dear Keith S. Taber, Congratulations! Your article, How Was It for You?: the dialogue between researcher and colearner, has now been assigned to the latest issue of Westminster Studies in Education, Issue 1.”
The email included an image of the journal cover, as above. The eagle-eyed might spot that the journal title is somewhat different. This was not a matter of the wrong journal, but rather that the journal has changed its name. But surely the journal did not change its name between the publisher publishing my article (“now”) and writing to tell me it was in the “latest issue”?
4×108 s later
Actually the new name applied from 2005. The article (Taber & Student, 2003) was actually published in volume 26, in 2003 when the journal was Westminster Studies in Education. It was not published electronically at that time, though. It was only published on-line in November 2006, by which time the journal was re-branded as the International Journal of Research & Method in Education.
Hm.
Clearly there’s been some kind of error here, or else this must be one of the slowest email notifications in history. Electronic messages are meant to travel at hundreds of millions of metres each second – so this would put Routledge’s office some light years away.
On the negative side, I may now get in trouble because the University’s software for supporting our bibliographic records may get hold of this, notify me and demand I take ownership of a new publication; and then tell me I must upload a manuscript copy to the University's open access repository within six months of the article being accepted for publication. That could prove tricky at this point.
On the other hand, I am hoping that whatever has gone wrong might have spread word of my ‘new’ publication more widely – I always thought it was a piece that deserved more attention.
First published 13th January 2017 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/
Source cited:
- Taber, K. S., & Student, T. A. (2003). How was it for you?: the dialogue between researcher and colearner. Westminster Studies in Education, 26(1), 33-44.
