It's the End of the Year as We Know It. . .

Get your submissions in within the next week. . . please!

. . . and I feel fine. Well mostly. It’s been a really busy year here at Organization Science. We will release our annual report in a few weeks, once January comes around, but the number of submission, initiatives, and changes have been substantial. It looks like we’ll pass 1800 submissions for the year, up over 20% from last year. It is a beast of an operation to keep moving, and as an organizations journal editor, it’s hard for me to not believe that I should come up with more org design solutions to address this. Like with any organization, the journal is in constant need of improvement, evolution, and innovation. As I finish year two, I am constantly aware of what a great thing it will be for the journal when I step aside in a few years and hand it over to someone new. Journals like this need fresh ideas and changing leadership. . . particularly journals as diverse as this one.

There will be a lot emerging in the first part of 2025, things we’ve had in the works for a long time. I’m excited to share them with you. Winter break will be a time for me to catch up, time to focus without several hours of emails to handle every day (hint hint). And of course it will be time to play piano, basketball, and Elden Ring with my son. And no, I’m not good at video games, but my son say that I am very good at swearing at them when I lose. I hope everyone will get some time to relax this break, but as someone whose winter breaks have not always been happy ones, I mostly hope everyone will find some peace and comfort in their own way.

Like last year, we will be taking a pause on submissions starting December 23 and reopening on January 2nd. Everyone can still access their accounts, and editors and reviewers can work if they choose, since we all have our own holidays and the schedules built around them. But staunching the constant flow of submissions to inboxes for 11 days will be a relief for a lot of us. So if those 11 days are really important for you, try to get your paper in by December 23, or even better, by December 20, because I’ll be the one handling everything those three days, and frankly I’m very excited about our Christmas party on the 23rd. There will be cod croquets and a real Santa, and Chief Feline Editor Butterburger will be hiding under the tree and refusing to help me with navigating the mysteries of the ScholarOne submission system. So get your submissions in by December 23 if you want to impress love interests or your mother-in-law at the New Year’s Party, with tales of heroic last-minute submissions and the glorious first-round acceptances they will no doubt deserve. Or just wait until January. We’ll still be here then.

That’s all for now, a simple prop to occupy my time. I’ll be back in a few days with more relevant content than this, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up about the submission system shutting down.As always, thanks for everything you do, whether as an author, reviewer, editor, or mega-citer of Org Science articles.

-Lamar

Butterburger after running plagiarism checks on 359 December 23rd submissions