When I saw that the deadline for APA Central papers was moving my first thought was, “Excellent! Having the deadline a full eight months before the conference is absurd. Shortening the deadline will mean papers dealing with more contemporary issues, or at least with papers published/distributed within those eight months, can be addressed.” Of course, that was before I read the text of the announcement.
Beginning with the 2004-2005 Academic Year, the Central Division deadline for papers will be moving to July 1 prior to the meeting. Thus, the deadline for paper submissions for the Central Division Meeting in April 2005 will be July 1, 2004.
Why so far in advance? Is it that hard to get them all refereed?
Here’s a wild suggestion for the APA Central.
Make it an unrefereed conference, and abolish commentators for colloquium papers. Or at least abolish refereeing for colloquium papers, while keeping refereeing for the longer symposium papers.
Abolishing refereeing could mean moving the deadline back months, shortening the time between writing a paper and presenting it. And since many (most?) commentators are would-be paper presenters who got their papers rejected, abolishing commentators would not disadvantage too many people.
One might think this would lead to a dramatic fall in quality, but the Australasian conference seems to keep the average quality high enough without refereeing.
It might also lead to a need for too many rooms, but I don’t think there would be much harm in (a) adding evening sessions to the Central, which from memory didn’t exist this year, and/or (b) using the abolition of the commentator as an excuse to cut colloquium sessions to 45 minutes. I don’t know how the logistics goes, but I would think/hope (a) would be enough to solve the logistical problems.
UPDATE: In the above I managed to confuse the procedures of various APA Divisions. I thought that the APA Central included submitted 5000 word papers, and I thought they were called Symposium papers. It turns out this is true of the APA Eastern and Pacific, but not the Central. Much thanks to Michael Kremer for clearing up the details on that. So the above proposal would mean abolishing all refereeing for the Central (as Michael pointed out in the comments).