It was Ever Thus… On the Pace (or Lack of It) in Scholarly Publishing

From 1973, Charles Bachman in his acceptance lecture for that year’s Turing Award (The Programmer as Navigator) commenting on challenges in shifting the world view of the time about database design:

The publication policies of the technical literature are also a problem. The ACM SIGBDP and SIGFIDET publications are the best available, and membership in these groups should grow. The refereeing rules and practices of Communications of the ACM result in delays of one year to 18 months between submittal and publication. Add to that the time for the author to prepare his ideas for publication and you have at least a two-year delay between the detection of significant results and their earliest possible publication.

1973. We’re now in 2014. Do, as they say, the math…