Acceptance to online publication – Why is everybody I know faster than average? I recently attended an editiorial panel at a conference where editors of several journals in my field advertised their journals and to this purpose listed, amongst others, the time difference between editorial acceptance and online publication. 

While the averages they gave were about one month, I cannot recall any paper of mine or my colleagues in this field for which this took longer than two weeks. We get the proofs within a week, send our corrections within one or two days and the paper is published a few days later. Add two days for the rare case that another round of proofs is required.

I can guess several reasons for this discrepancy myself such as:


authors not returning the proofs in time
bad figures that require reworking
bad English that requires a lot of copy editing
a strongly skewed distribution of acceptance-to-publication times (but then journals would probably use the median and not the average for this statistics)


However, I am interested in something more substantiated than a guess and thus in any statistics or hands-on experiences from a copy editor or similar as to what usually makes up for the time between acceptance and online publication, which in turn could explain these discrepancies.
From personal experience, I can say that while the usual time from acceptance to online publication may be quite short (for a good journal), there are occasionally situations where the process takes a lot longer.  This probably pushes the mean time interval up quite a bit.

Over the last five years, I have published a couple dozen papers, and for most of them, the time lag between their acceptance and their appearance online was just two or three weeks.  However, for three of those papers, the time was quite a bit longer--a matter of months instead.

The reasons for this varied.  In one case, the copy editor raised some questions about my wording, and the paper passed back and forth between me and the journal several times before both sides were satisfied with the way the terminology was used.  For the second paper, the proof contained a serious error in one of the equations, which took three more rounds of proofing to get corrected.  (Every time I explained what needed to be changed, they messed up something else; it was frustrating.)  In each of these cases, it would take a couple weeks for the editorial staff to make the changes, generate a new proof, and send it to me.  When you need to go through four proofs, that can stretch the process to two months.

I don't know why the third paper took three or four times as long as usual; it just did.  Presumably there was some difficulty at the editorial office, but I never pressed them to find out what it was.

I try very hard to submit very carefully composed and edited manuscripts, and I encountered a few slow-moving manuscripts.  I know there are a fair number of people whose manuscripts routinely need quite a bit more editing work than mine.  Mostly, I think this is because the authors are not native English speakers.  However, whatever the reason, there are going to be a nontrivial number of papers that need to be sent back and forth between the authors and the editorial office multiple times.  These give the distribution of time delays a long tail and probably stretch the mean waiting time out significantly.