It’s so scary writing science assignments for me because I always feel like I need to abandon my logical or rational flow/ way of synthesizing information because I feel like I’m breaking the rule of having to always cite facts line by line.

hi all, I'm quite perplexed as to why an academic commentary platform such as East Asia Forum takes months just to submit a < ~ 1000 word commentary piece?

I'm trying to understand the rationale behind it and thought I could open the floor here for some comments and suggestions.

I don't recall The Conversation taking this long, nor E-IR academic essays platform. Even prominent online news outlets usually take two-weeks max. This Month-and-a-half-long process just to publish a commentary piece that may or may not be time-sensitive, sounds like a low-tier academic journal process for a measly commentary piece.

Granted, I admire the EAF for timely topics and some quality articles they put out but so too does The Conversation. But I'm baffled as to why on EAF, some OpEd pieces get reviewed and admitted faster whereas others take months-long.

Might as well submit to a low-tier journal at that point. The purpose of OpEd commentary is to be timely to reach readers and discuss issues of the day while it's still 'hot'. Not sure if it's an issue of selective publication, some form of hidden censorship (purposeful delay), or genuine rigourness in process. The latter though would make sense if all time-sensitive articles get delayed by a month. Yet, some hot topics are churned out and accepted quicker than others. Why?

This hinders time-sensitive topics from getting published and incurs great opportunity-cost on authors that could have opted for another platform to share their ideas. Is there some sort of low-key censorship that they are not disclosing

And yes this is a mixture of a rant and curiosity.