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

New book 'Inventology' shows how today's inventors can tap big data, 3D printing, crowdfunding, and more

With the internet age and its endless possibilities in the realms of publishing, communication, and collaboration, opportunities have never been so widely accessible for creators. But how has our new digital world affected the pathways to invention? In Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, out today, journalist Pagan Kennedy offers a fresh take on how the digital era has upended the traditional pathways for creation.

When Kennedy began writing about inventors for The New York Times, she soon "would marvel at how few of the people were professional inventors, designers, in corporate innovation labs." It led her to explore what it really takes to invent. Drawing from that experience, Kennedy debunks common misconceptions about how great inventions are born, explores situations that have led to invention, and highlights gender disparity in the world of invention. TechRepublic talked to Kennedy about the big takeaways she learned during the writing process, and the relationship between tech and invention.

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Are Big Book Publishers Going The Way Of Newspapers?

I think we all possess some kind of familiarity with the history of the newspaper industry over the past century or so. Newspapers and magazines used to rule the kingdom of delivering news, editorials, comics, and even short stories. It was a huge industry that offered the main employment for freelance writers and journalists. Then the internet came along. The internet is easier, faster and cheaper than paying someone to print and deliver a bunch of actual papers each day telling yesterday's news.

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Publish an Ebook, Step by Step

With the ebook industry on a tear, now is the time to shine by publishing an ebook of your own. Here's how to make it happen.

Want to publish a book? You can either kill a bunch of trees, or get with the 2010s and publish it as an ebook.

If you haven't noticed already, ebooks are no longer a niche market. As of June 2011, ebook reader adoption had reportedly hit 25 percent in the United States, with the market growing at a phenomenal 169 percent year over year. Today, most new releases are being published in ebook format.

An ebook can provide your small business a real competitive advantage by giving you instant credibility and visibility in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, the ebook sales market is fragmented. Publishing an ebook means working directly with numerous companies, each with its own formats, rules, and quirky systems. While Amazon is the clear leader, both Apple and Barnes & Noble have solid user bases for their respective devices. Industry watchers generally believe that Amazon holds about a 60 percent share of ebook sales, while Barnes & Noble has 30 percent and Apple claims the remaining 10 percent, with a smattering of other services filling in the cracks.

As a budding publisher, you will need to prepare your book for at least those three platforms. I'll walk you through the process here.

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