Here's how it goes down

I promised you a run down of how I expected the process from writing to publishing this manuscript to go.
Loosely, here are the steps:
1) Write Manuscript
2) Submit to co-authors for critique
3) Incorporate critique
4) Submit to co-authors for acceptance
5) Submit to journal for Review
6) Repeat steps 2-6 until step 7.
7) Acceptance from a Journal
8) Party Time!

First thing you should know, is I have 6 other co-authors- 4 PIs and two students, but I am the main author on this work. This means I will prepare the manuscript the way I think is best, and then the other 6 people will weigh in. It is in all of our best interests to send out a polished manuscript that will be accepted at the highest tier journal as possible, but my co-authors are unlikely to have to do anything about the changes they suggest. Right now I am getting this document into a form I think is acceptable to send around, and then they'll take a couple weeks with it, and send it back with all manner of suggestions- from proofreading, to re organizing to nitpicky stuff with my figures that I'll end up learning photoshop to fix. I am not good with the figures. This may take a long time, or a short time. I don't know some of my coauthors well enough to imagine how they will respond, and in fact, some aren't in my building, so if they are slow, I can't very well drop by and bother them. But before you go hating on the coauthors- I've been a coattail coauthors on several manuscripts, so really, it's my turn to do the hard work.

Once everyone agrees that we've written the best damn manuscript possible, we'll submit it to a high tiered journal in my field. I'm pessimistic that they will love the article for several reasons (what I do is anti-viral research, and this virology journal prefers to publish things about viruses, not the compounds that work on them), and if they don't reject it outright, we have to wait Some Time to get comments, which can range from Accepted, Accepted with criticism (just do a couple more experiments), Rejected (with comments that make you think you can do a couple experiments and resubmit), or Rejected (ouch). You can imagine the decision chart here, helping you decide to resubmit to the same journal, or submit to another journal one tier down, or another journal in a different sub field. We may have the opportunity to use this decision chart a lot.

You see, I know I have done solid science, and everything we are describing is true- but there are some pretty obvious critiques, and some lame political plays that may make it hard for this paper to get out in a timely fashion. Again, this is why I've been impatient to get this process started, since this is going to take a long time to deal with. And I have not interest in graduating without a primary publication in hand- it would be nearly impossible for me to get a job without one.

Dr. Boss and I are meeting this afternoon to look over all the figures to decide on a standard formatting style to get everything in to. He is also going to talk to someone who said a year ago they'd like to try and do some experiments (and we haven't heard from since), to see if that panned out. I have my doubts. I am hoping to give him my manuscript to read/ get permission to give it out to Dr. Rockstar and the other co-authors ASAP.