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The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

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Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#11

Post by coliveira »

These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn about the new developments before it appears on archived journals.

The reason why we still have journals is that they work as a recording of past research that has been peer reviewed by a well known group of experts (the editorial board). In fact, with the Internet pretty much any journal will have a list of accepted papers so you can access them before they are formally "published". So you can read these papers as soon as they receive the OK from the editorial board.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#12

Post by chrisseaton »

rcthompson wrote: post #10
OopsCriticality wrote: post #6

Perhaps this problem is worse among biomedical journals? I've routinely had publications in ACS journals that go from submission to acceptance within two months, usually closer to one---I hear the same from colleagues.

Yes, I'm not sure what other fields may be affected, but I can confirm that this is a huge issue in biomedical journals. It's especially a problem for bioinformatics, where the combination of multi-year publication latency and the typical fast pace of software development means that tools are often long obsolete by the time they are published, and this results in researchers relying on publications and choosing algor…

If you write a research result up as a blog article that doesn't stop you publishing it in a journal does it? You could use blogs to communicate and journal articles for more formal write-ups.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#13

Post by coliveira »

chrisseaton wrote: post #7

I'm glad I'm in programming languages, where we usually publish in conferences instead of journals and you can get a paper out in 7 months if you want top-tier, 4 months if you want mid-tier, or as little as 3 months if you just want it published somewhere respectable. And really you can shorten those timelines by a couple of months because people make their papers available as soon as they're publicly accepted.

This is not a privilege of CS. Most fields will have conferences where you can learn about new research before it is published. The difference is that CS people rely on proceedings of the conference, while traditional fields postpone formal publication to established journals.

In my opinion this puts an unnecessary burden on conference organizers, because they have in short notice to make a decision about the correctness of the article as well as other more mundane matters such as the formatting and presentation for the proceedings publication.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#14

Post by rcthompson »

chrisseaton wrote: post #12
rcthompson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not sure what other fields may be affected, but I can confirm that this is a huge issue in biomedical journals. It's especially a problem for bioinformatics, where the combination of multi-year publication latency and the typical fast pace of software development means that tools are often long obsolete by the time they are published, and this results in researchers relying on publications and choosing algor…

If you write a research result up as a blog article that doesn't stop you publishing it in a journal does it? You could use blogs to communicate and journal articles for more formal write-ups.

Most journals require that any research submitted to them must not have been published elsewhere. On the surface, this makes sense, especially in the pre-internet world in which scientific publishing developed. You wouldn't want to allow someone to submit the same paper to multiple journals to inflate their publication count. However, things like preprint servers and blog posts have become a gray area with respect to these rules, and different journals have different policies. I haven't heard of any paper being rejected due to a blog post being considered "prior publication", but I also wouldn't be surprised if I heard of it happening. But rejections due to using preprint servers definitely do happen fairly commonly. The idea of preprint servers is unfortunately still fairly new in the biomedical field and is just starting to gain traction in the past year or two, so many journals still don't even have an explicit policy on preprints, leading to surprise rejections.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#15

Post by rgejman »

coliveira wrote: post #11

These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn…

In the biomedical sciences most publications DO NOT end up on preprint servers before being peer-reviewed and accepted. Therefore most stories are "done" a year or more before they are published anywhere. Sometimes they are presented at conferences, but often only once the paper is in submission.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#16

Post by rgejman »

33a wrote: post #4

Maybe if they paid reviewers they'd get the job done faster.

You probably couldn't pay them enough to get the job done faster. Any amount you could pay them would probably be insulting compared to the # of hours it takes to properly review a paper. Also, we don't really want to increase the cost of submission/publication/journal subscriptions any more than necessary.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#18

Post by et2o »

coliveira wrote: post #11

These complaints are just nonsense propagated by people who don't understand the academic process. As a researcher, I don't need to wait for a paper to be published in a journal to have access to its contents. Most respectable research is already publicized in targeted conferences and stored in websites such as arxiv.org and similar. That's exactly why researchers go to conferences every few months, in order to learn…

Do you really think this reviewer for FASEB, an HHMI Investigator and a tenured professor at Rockefeller University, doesn't "understand the academic process?"

For better or for worse, biology isn't like computer science. Wet lab experiments take orders of magnitude more time, interpretation of results is often pretty complex, and there are a lot more articles published, which together combine to make this situation a little different.

There have been several moves to establish ArXiv-like compendia for biology, but they haven't really caught on yet. I'm not sure exactly why.

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#19

Post by rgejman »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #5

Huge irony in Leslie Vosshall's suggestions. She is a HHMI investigator and has "made it". Telling others not to try for the top 3 journals which is the EXACT path she used to get to her spot is insulting. Basically don't do all this stuff she did to get ahead because you'll make the system worse. It's like Mark Zuckerberg telling young programmers, don't start an internet company because society is suffering from al…

I think this is an unfair characterization of her editorial. She did not get to her position by getting mediocre papers published in good places! She is just asking authors to be honest about whether their findings are of sufficient importance/impact to be published in one of the top journals. I have seen many many colleagues run the journal mill, aiming as high as possible for as long as possible, just like she describes. It indeed wastes time and clogs up the system!

Re: The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing

#20

Post by nonbel »

>"Is this you? Your Ph.D. student has just finished 5 years of spectacular work, the manuscript and figures go through 12 revisions, then your colleagues and friends provide input for the next 10 revisions, you submit the perfect “version 22” manuscript to a carefully targeted scientific journal appropriate for the manuscript, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. Months elapse"

Funny stuff. In the end most of these papers are not reproducible anyway, so what is taking so long?

http://www.nature.com/articles/483531a

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