Dear QRC faculty and students:

We three (Derek Booth, Nick Lancaster, and Lewis Owen) are the co-senior editors of Quaternary Research, which most (but perhaps not all) of you know is the 51-year-old international journal established by the QRC, and who holds the copyright. It is also recognized as the official journal for AMQUA . You also may or may not know that the revenue from the journal, shared with Cambridge University Press from library subscriptions and open-access fees, provides the sole financial support for the Center and its programs. So we all have a stake in the journal’s continued success.

We publish articles from around the world, but we also encourage submissions from our own backyard, and we would like to take this opportunity to encourage your personal engagement as well. For those of you who have never considered the journal as a publication outlet, or have considered but declined the opportunity, we offer these points:

• As noted, this is our journal. It’s good to diversify, but it’s also good to work with a known entity with a (very) long-standing record. Any of the journal editors are happy to discuss prospective manuscripts; we’re just an email or phone call away.
• Our review process is rigorous, but also supportive. We have a tremendous set of discipline-specific associate editors that participate substantively on every review, and the three senior editors are committed to helping you achieve the best article, whether we wind up publishing it or not.
• Our publisher, Cambridge University Press, is a fully non-profit academic institution that is well-aligned with the mission and goals of the Center. You may or may not feel this is an important discriminator with your for-profit publishing alternatives, but it is a real distinction.
• Given UW’s read-publish agreement with Cambridge, your articles can be published with full open access at no cost to you or your grant.
• Our review times are a little better than average for comparable, rigorous journals: the average time from submission to first decision is 58 days, with typically about 4 months from submission to final acceptance (in general, the “good” papers go quicker than this, the “troubled” papers take longer). Once accepted, authors are seeing copy-edited but non-formatted proofs within a couple of weeks of acceptance. And with prompt author turnaround, the time from manuscript acceptance to publication of the version-of-record on FirstView can be as short as 7 weeks.
• The current (2020) impact factor for the journal is 2.720. It’s best not to be overly focused on this metric, but it’s a value well into the range of respectability.

Feel free to check out the journal’s home page, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research. And, please be in touch with any of the editors if you have any questions or want to explore the suitability and/or framing of a prospective research manuscript.

Sincerely,

Derek (dbooth@uw.edu), Nick (nlqred@uw.edu), and Lewis (Lewis.Owen@ncsu.edu)