Does it take too long to publish research?

Scientists are becoming increasingly frustrated by the time it takes to publish a paper. Something has to change, they say.

When Danielle Fraser first submitted her paper for publication, she had little idea of the painful saga that lay ahead.

She had spent some 18 months studying thousands of fossil species spread across North America from the past 36 million years, and now she had an intriguing result: animal populations were spread widest across latitudes in warm, wet climates. Her work, crucial to earning her PhD at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, might be used to make predictions about the response of mammals to climate change — a key question in ecology today. So, with her PhD adviser's encouragement, she sent it to Science in October 2012.

Ten days later, the paper was rejected with a form letter. She sent it to another prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rejected. Next, she tried Ecology Letters. Bounced. “At this point, I definitely was frustrated. I hadn't even been reviewed and I would've loved to know how to improve the paper,” recalls Fraser. “I thought, 'Let's just get it out and go to a journal that will assess the paper'.”

In May 2013, she submitted the paper to Proceedings of the Royal Society B, considered a high-impact journal in her field. The journal sent it out for review — seven months after her initial submission to Science. “Finally!” Fraser thought. What she didn't know was that she had taken only the first steps down the long, bumpy road to publication: it would take another three submissions, two rejections, two rounds of major revisions and numerous drafts before the paper would finally appear. By that point, she could hardly bear to look at it.Ten days later, the paper was rejected with a form letter. She sent it to another prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rejected. Next, she tried Ecology Letters. Bounced. “At this point, I definitely was frustrated. I hadn't even been reviewed and I would've loved to know how to improve the paper,” recalls Fraser. “I thought, 'Let's just get it out and go to a journal that will assess the paper'.”

Fraser's frustration is widely shared: researchers are increasingly questioning the time it takes to publish their work. Many say that they feel trapped in a cycle of submission, rejection, review, re-review and re-re-review that seems to eat up months of their lives, interfere with job, grant and tenure applications and slow down the dissemination of results. In 2012, Leslie Vosshall, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, wrote a commentary that lamented the “glacial pace” of scientific publishing1. “In the past three years, if anything, it's gotten substantially worse,” she says now. “It takes forever to get the work out, regardless of the journal. It just takes far too long.”

Read the news feature published in Nature