March 13th, 2020 – Friday the thirteenth – is a day that will forever stick in my memory. That day, the city of New Orleans went into lockdown on account of the COVID-19 outbreak and my university sent our students home to finish the semester remotely. Around 10 a.m., our daycare called and informed me that our son had developed a high fever, and that I needed to come get him immediately. (He took a four-hour nap and was basically back to normal within a day or two!) About a week later, I started coughing and proceeded to hack my way through the remainder of the semester, doing my best to balance remote teaching, research and writing, childcare, and sanity; and feeling pretty sick a lot of the time. It goes without saying that things could have been much worse for me and for my family. So many people – including many in the field of archaeology – have lost everything during the pandemic and I wake up every day thankful for what I have. And I think pretty much all of us have struggled with the isolation and anxiety that came with this sudden switch in life ways.
In my role as an editor, I have seen a range of personal responses to the trauma of 2020 on the part of both authors and referees. For our authors, it was evidently a mixed bag: For some, the lockdown provided the opportunity to finally finish that paper that they’d been meaning to write for the last number of years (or decades). That likely explains the modest increase in submissions that we experienced in 2020, which was a bit of a pleasant surprise. In contrast, I also got a lot of emails from authors apologizing for delays in submitting or revising manuscripts, which is much more in line with what I expected. A lot of referees also struggled. As one put it in a response to one of my reminder emails, “That review slipped through the huge cracks in my world these days.” The words struck a chord with me in part because I feel like I could have said the same thing to any number of students, administrators, authors, referees, and even fellow journal editors at some point during the last nine months.
I wanted to start the new year by taking this chance express my profound gratitude to the authors, referees, and editors who have helped the journal endure through these tough times. I also wanted to make a plea for some extra patience with our referees. Some have been sick, others have lost loved ones, and even more have had their work/life balance turned upside down. Some referees have resigned from assignments for relatable reasons and others have persisted in spite of great personal stress. While it is never far from my mind that timely publications – and therefore timely reviews – are crucial to the career success of our authors, the pandemic has created great challenges for our manuscript review process. From my vantage point as an editor, I get to see the both the difficulties faced by our referees and the stress that a slow review process can cause among our authors. As with so much of 2020, it wasn’t very much fun for anyone!
So, I’m sure we were all happy to see the start of 2021 and (presumably) to be near the end of the pandemic. It’s going to take a while for us to get back to “normal,” but we will eventually. That statement is as true of this journal as it is any other aspects of our lives. Until that time comes, our authors, referees, and editors should know how much I appreciate their dedication and hard work.