Thanks for starting a thread on the
Biology and Philosophy special issue on homology, Matt.
My first experience as a guest editor: The whole thing was kicked off by Marc Ereshefsky, who has an ongoing project on homology funded by SSHRC (the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada). In November 2006, Marc initiated a meeting of the Philosophy and Developmental Biology Working Group in Vancouver (on the day after PSA), and later organized the two symposium sessions at ISHPSSB 2007. After the Vancouver meeting Paul Griffiths obtained Kim Sterelny's o.k. for a special issue on homology. We had the option of making it the 2007 special issue, so we went for this year (rather than a later one).
Before ISHPSSB 2007, Paul and I received drafts of all contributions, and we provided comments. Based on these comments and the discussion at ISHPSSB, the authors had to revise and finalize their papers within a few days -- we had to work with a strict early August deadline so as to ensure that the special issue could be published in November. We received the contributions in time (thanks to Alan, Marc, and Mohan!), and did some editorial changes (typos, minor content issues, more cross-referencing between special issue papers). After confirming the changes with the authors we send the manuscripts off to the publisher. Springer was amazingly fast with this one: within 7-10 days we received the page proofs! (Corrections were made by the respective author and me.) As a result, the special issue was already online in October.
The flipside of fast publication: Unfortunately, the special issue contains only contributions from philosophers, as you may have already noticed. We wanted to have two further contributions from biologists; however, we did not find someone who could commit to our hard-and-fast deadline for final manuscripts. That's something to keep in mind: rapid publication is very good, but you may loose potential authors who would be suitable and willing to contribute, but given their other commitments cannot meet a deadline on a few months notice.
Ingo
